View source for Post:The Unknown - 5/9/2010 - 5:15:14

{{Post
|a=DR-ARMIFER
|t=Re: The Unknown
|d=5/9/2010 5:15:14 AM
|n=627
|f=The Necromancers (26) \ Necromancer Ideologies (9)
|c=r
|p=Mr. [[Zamidren|Book]],

I am afraid Stevens will no longer be joining us at the table.

You met young Stevens five years back; the scrawny one that came at you with the cutlery during your visit. While I grant the two of you did not get off on good footing, I molded him into as dedicated a student as any could ask for. Near the end he could find specific citations in [[Kigot]] faster than I could! His hand with a knife, while not as prodigious as his mind, was also adept.

He disappeared from my laboratory three weeks prior, and had been gone two when I begun to worry. Of course he was not a prisoner (any more), but this was highly unusual. Thinking back to the preceding months, he described a strange encounter I thought nothing of at the time, but in light of his disappearance stunk of the stories of the {{PRel|Old Man, The|Old Man}} and that damnable redemption nonsense.

He showed back up at my door step yesterday evening, looking as though someone had killed his dog again. I immediately confronted him with my reasonable accusations that he had fallen in with those psychotic [[Redeemed]], but he denied it. Very effectively, I must say; the leaden tone, the defeated look disarmed my usual prudence on verifying these things. He said, "There is no remorse."

The story he laid out was fragmented, like an attunement gone bad (it is fine, though he had clearly not been practicing during his disappearance). From what I got out of him, he went chasing after what the Old Man -- I am now sure he is the scoundrel behind this -- told him and performed some ritual or another. I asked him to describe the ritual, and he found he could not. The only thing that came to him was a symbol you will be familiar with: a circle inscribed within a square, itself within an equilateral triangle, itself bound within a circle.

His description afterward became incoherent. I am afraid he has regressed something terribly, and I was forced to discipline him to an extent that hadn't been necessary since his first nights here. He described night and a bloated sun, cliffs and falls and stairwells of glass, but most of his sputtering reluctance was focused on some kind of spirit-thing. He said they were like men, but aflame. One reached out to touch him, and he felt warmth, love, ecstatic oneness with the universe and other weak-willed nonsense.

Then it was over, he was back in the woods where he'd started this foolish errand, and felt nothing but emptiness.

Of course, the solution to this sort of existential angst was a firm hand and plenty of work, but that is where things went very much off course. This boy who I'd trained myself, who's practice Risen was tending to the gutters that very moment, could not perform {{PRel|Thanatology skill|Thanatology}}. He complained that he was not willfully holding back, and to his credit no amount of encouragement let him comply. To all appearances, his ability to ritually invoke the Transference Link has been "burnt out."

I will continue to work with him in the weeks to come to learn the extent of his disability and attempt some form of reeducation, but I fear the Old Man has killed another one of us.

-[[Armifer]]{{PRel|Necromancer| }}
}}