Year 862 of the Second Age,
Blackshore,
The Cordial LambInn.
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The ink always had a particular smell when it was old, rusty and somewhat faintly sweet, like rot just beginning. I have been staring at seventeen years of it tonight, spread across the narrow table in my rented room. Forty-three journals. Two hundred and eighteen interviews. Thirty stories complete enough to stand on their own.
Thirty lives that have been touched by the weird magic of Eldoria. Thirty warnings no one will heed.
My name is Orin Blackwood, and I am forty-five years old. I have spent nearly half my life chasing after ghosts, not the literal kind, though I have been fortunate to meet plenty of those too. No, I chase the stories that play with the edges of understanding. The ones that make the learned scholars uncomfortable and holiest priests reach for their protective charms. The accounts that the Antiquarian Guild files away in their deepest vaults and pretends don't exist.
I chase them because I must. Because seventeen years ago, something happened to my family in the Blackwood Hills that shouldn't have been possible. Something that left me alive, and the ones I loved… changed. But that story isn't ready to be told. Not yet. Some wounds need time before you can examine them properly. That must sound hypocritical even though I know that.
Downstairs, the laughter of drunken sailors mingles with the hard wind off the harbor. Tonight, I'm reviewing what I've gathered. The woman downstairs thinks I'm a traveling merchant reviewing ledgers. Let her think that. It's easier than explaining that I am cataloguing the cost of magic across the five realms.
The Whispering Woods took a man recently—turned him into a tree like it has done and will continue to do for so ages. People never learn he sighed.
A thief named was hanged last winter. He claimed he found a journal that wrote itself. By the time I reached Blackshore, the Spiral Path monks had sealed the chamber. But I spoke to the collector who found it after Marcus. He had the same haunted look. "It knew what I would do before I did it," he whispered. "Every. Single. Choice."
I pause, rubbing the bridge of my nose. The candle burns low, its flame dimmed by salt haze. Outside, Blackshore settles into its nightly routine—the distant calls of dock workers, the creak of ships, the cry of gulls and the occasional drunk singing off-key.
Seventeen years of this. Seventeen years of arriving too late, of interviewing survivors, of standing in places where reality folded in on itself and left scars. I have walked through the Whispering Woods at dawn and heard the murmurs myself. I've climbed to the Floating Isles and seen where the Decennial Market once stood. I've touched artifacts that made my skin crawl and spoken with people whose eyes held the weight of impossible choices.
And I've learned things. Patterns. Connections.
The pale blue glow that marks deep magic—I've seen it in a dozen tales now. The spiral symbols that are carved into the ancient stones of ancient structures. The purple mushrooms that grow where reality wears thin. The recurring names: Vane, Thrace, Vorn. The consistent truth is that all magic in Eldoria always, always demanded a heavy price.
Some call me obsessed. My younger brother, Aldric, writes from the family estate begging me to come home, to take up my duties as heir to House Blackwood. "Father's journals are more than enough," he writes. "You don't need to add your own life to the collection."
Sometimes, I almost believe him. Then the ink calls again.
He doesn't understand it. None of them do. I'm not collecting stories for history's sake. I'm collecting them because someone needs to see the pattern—to understand what Eldoria truly is: a realm where time is fragile, where the dead won't stay silent, where every wish granted comes with consequences that ripple through generations.
Someone needs to warn people.
Even if no one wants to listens.
I shuffle through my notes and find the account of Elena Ashton. Twelve years old when her father died of rot-lung. Except it wasn't her father—it was a thief named Sylas, trapped in her father's body by a stolen transformation. She spent twenty years developing a treatment for the disease that killed him, never knowing the man she mourned wasn't the man who abandoned her.
I met Elena three years ago. She's a Master Healer now—stern, brilliant, unshakable. When I told her the truth, she was silent for a long time before saying:
"Does it change what I accomplished? Does it unmake the lives I've saved?"
"No," I told her.
"Then perhaps some deceptions serve a purpose," she replied. "Perhaps some truths are simply… expensive."
I think about that often—the cost of truth, the weight of knowledge.
My hand drifts to the leather satchel beside my chair. Inside are letters of introduction, a few silver crowns, and three protective charms I've gathered along the way: an iron spiral, a vial of salt from the Deepmere, and a pressed purple mushroom sealed in wax. I don't know if any of them work. But after seventeen years of this, I've learned that precaution isn't paranoia.
Tomorrow, I leave for the eastern territories. There are rumors of a village called Thornmere, where something called the Festival of Shadows was broken twenty-seven years ago by a child. The child is a woman now, a specialist in dimensional entities. I want to hear her story in her own words
After that, perhaps the Crystal Caves. They say there are immortals there, preserved in perpetual stasis. They say seventeen people have consumed the Midnight Sovereign and lost themselves to eternity. I need to document that. I need to understand what immortality costs when the price is meaning itself.
And after that…
There's always an after that. Always another tale at the edge of the map. Always another survivor with haunted eyes and a story that shouldn't be possible. Always another warning no one will heed.
I close the nearest journal, Volume twenty-three, filled with accounts from the northern territories, and lean back in my chair. The wood creaks. My back aches. I'm not as young as I was when I started this. Gray threads my hair now. My hands shake slightly when I'm tired, a tremor that wasn't there five years ago.
But I'll continue. Because House Blackwood has been recording Eldoria's history for eight generations, and I am merely the latest in a long line of chroniclers. Because somewhere in these patterns, these repeating spirals of magic and consequence, there might be some level of understanding. There might be a way to break the cycles instead of just documenting them.
Or perhaps not.
Perhaps I'm just a man with ink-stained fingers and a compulsion, chasing ghosts across a realm that doesn't want to remember its own strange heart
Perhaps that's enough.
I gather my journals carefully, stacking them in order. Thirty tales so far. How many more before I'm done? How many before this work claims me, as it claimed my kin?
The candle gutters. The flame dances, casting spiral shadows on the wall.
I blow it out and sit in darkness, listening to Blackshore breathe.
Tomorrow, I continue east.
The stories won't collect themselves.
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—Fromthejournals ofOrin Blackwood, Traveling Chronicler*
House Blackwood,EighthGeneration