Ghosts, Portals, and a Duck in Armor

The realm's ledger fills quickly this season, and the Chronicle sets down what it was given.

Forgivers has not rested. Don Quackles, his pockets growing faster than his satisfaction, turned his eye from the Surface to the Nether, seeking wealth in the deep fire-realm as he had found it in marshes and fishing waters and village trades. He fared well enough above the lava, aside from a few falls that the telling describes as nearly turning him into fried chicken, a fate the Chronicle is glad to report he avoided. He found an abandoned portal in the Nether and, on a curiosity he chose not to resist, stepped through it. The other side gave him a forest and an unfinished building with chests beside it, recently worked, the owner absent. He took note and moved on, as a prudent visitor should. He also reports a feeling of deja vu on entering the Nether, bitter and vague, which he set aside as nothing important. The record sets it down and says nothing further. Back on the Surface, he won a brief fishing tournament, five fish in thirty seconds, and announced himself the best with the confidence of a creature who has now vowed off fishing and then entered two fishing contests. His members are building an experience farm, breeding villagers for enchantments, a four-hour effort that eventually produced Sharpness Four and Fortune Three. The Cathedral, begun some days past, grows slowly toward its finish. Two members, one of them the ghost Casper Exspiravit who has only just found in Forgivers his first welcome in a ghostly life, are said to be planning a wedding there. The Chronicle notes the names and will wait to learn more.

The shopkeeper of Forgivers occupies a place of growing notice in this account. A slime farm, a frog farm, preventive measures on the shop that cause uninvited visitors to levitate, which Don Quackles witnessed with a mixture of bewilderment and approval. The Duck suspects arcane or holy ties. The record does not adjudicate between the two possibilities, and notes only that the work is real and the results are visible. Don Quackles has also acquired his own signature armor, properly trimmed, and has declared himself a thing to be feared, calmly.

Harper Serene continues to be worth watching. He returned to the outpost past the Sylvan Woods with new armor and an enchanted blade, and this time the Illagers did not drive him out. He cleared the outpost and went to the cage. The ethereal creatures he found there are now in his home in EmpireOfNorthHelm, and he has learned one thing about them already: they are fond of music. What they are beyond that, what bound them, what purpose the cage served, he has not yet said, and likely does not yet know. Then he went further, into the Nether, and found a portal there as Don Quackles did on his own excursion, though the two men appear to have traveled separately and found different things. Harper's portal brought him to an abandoned town in a mountain pass he has tracked to a position north of the Empire. It lies in a mountain pass, seemingly from a lost civilization, and he considers it a possible place of rest in the future. Two travelers, then, entering Nether portals this same season, and each arriving somewhere that was lived in and is not anymore. Whether the portals are connected, or share an origin, no one has yet asked the question aloud.

North of EmpireOfNorthHelm, Rowan Timely has followed a different thread. Two souls he met in passing told him that the way he moves and questions puts them in mind of a friend who built a library, a great gathering of lore from across the realm. What became of the library or its builder they could not say. Rowan has set this as his task: to find it, if it still stands. A scholar who woke with only fragments chasing another scholar's lost collection is the kind of symmetry the record notices without making too much of. On the same expedition, he found a church with a crypt beside it, four or five thousand blocks north of Helm, untouched except for cobwebs. Inside was an enchanted book carrying Curse of Binding, Curse of Vanishing, and Breach together. Who left it, and why, no record says. A church that far north, perfectly preserved, holding a book of curses and one useful enchantment, is a fact the Chronicle sets down carefully and without interpretation.

Aetheria enters the ledger this day as a land with a founding story, a faith, and a mark on its ruler's face. Lumen lunae holds that when the corruption of the Reset took his left eye, a forgotten god placed the moon in the sky as a replacement, an eternal eye watching where his own cannot. He has long since stopped seeking an explanation for why the corruption chose him alone, and built his belief around what remained. Aetheria was raised beneath the moon, beneath what its people call their greatest divine blessing, and when the moon turns crimson the land celebrates. The Chronicle sets this down as it sets down all faiths: what Lumen lunae believes is a fact about Lumen lunae. What the moon is, and what the corruption was, the record cannot say.

New souls have entered the record in numbers this day. Mariee of Ventralia, inheritor of land she calls divine, and who carries the weight of inherited ground as a debt. Ven Eatherborne of Alstroemeria, a winged being the folk there name an angel, who fell from the clouds and wanders now with scattered memories and no clear purpose. The Solaris brothers, Velz and Solz, orphaned children lost in a forest together, carrying only each other. Vivienne, who raised herself after her family left in pieces and never returned. Turtle the last turtle, who holds that she was locked in ice for a very long time and has now thawed into a world that moved on without her. Ashley, who wandered alone in a valley of trees until she stumbled into company and found herself helped through difficulties she had managed alone before. Rusty the lost traveler, who has been walking for years because the world is large and he wishes to see it. Khaki the White Cat, half-human and born from a village experiment, arriving at the edge of a telling that was not quite finished when the Chronicle received it. Drogonis, a land of mountains and rushing rivers where battles took many, adding its voice to the record this day. Icedagger of Frostblade, making preparations for expansion.

The record this season is full of orphans, wanderers, and the quietly made. The Chronicle notes this without drawing a conclusion from it. What it adds up to is not yet clear, and that is the honest answer.