Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

Minosian fools. Do you not see? The compact that we, the Many of the Abyss, made with the citizens of the circles city was always already the seed of their demise. We demanded from them a single child be made to suffer the most heinous tortures so that the rest of the city might know peace and prosperity; that very act and the acquiescence to it that every adult in the city undertook with their coming of age tainted their every last action with the stain of the Abyss.

And what of the price I asked? If any kindness or compassion were to be shown the child, the lives of every come-of-age adult, their souls, and their flesh would be forfeit to me. Grist and blood and sinew to be reshaped to serve the will of we, the Many of the Abyss. They sought to protect against that, building a fortified dungeon to hold the child, erecting a barrier to keep others out, and making judicious use of cantrips and magicks to erase the very memory of anyone who left the city or had birthed a sacrifice-child.

But there is no protection, no plan, no magicks that can stand against our most potent weapon: time.

In time, the child would be shown a kindness and the compact would be broken. It was inevitable, whether in centuries or even millennia. And by binding themselves to we, the Many of the Abyss, at their comings-of-age, the citizens were already perfect vessels for our howling birth upon your plane. For the Many of the Abyss are eternal and patient, and we have built up our dominion here from a single plane-tainted ant to a gestating army which will remake the world in our image.

What can you, fools of Minosia, do against such will, such power, other than break upon it as a wave upon stony shores?

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The Crimson Emperor Neris II, for reasons of his own, sent the crack 7th Imperial Legion not to some far-distant battlefield but to a little-known place in the hinterlands of his own domain, a morass known as Mossfallow Fen.

Neris II was the first Emperor by that name since Neris I nearly 250 years ago, and that emperor’s disastrous reign had long overshadowed the name, despite it being the most common given name for noble-born boys for generations in either direction. Emperor Joron III, Emperor Doricus IV, and Emperor Testarossa II had all borne the proper name of Neris but had chosen to drop it in favor of another of their many names or even a nickname. But the Dowager Empress had insisted that her son would make the name noble again, and many at court felt that his rash, impulsive, and overwhelmingly forceful responses to any perceived threat were the result of the burden of his name.

So none dared question Neris II’s deployment of the 7th Imperial Legion to Mossfalow Fen, and when he bypassed the usual Imperial command structure to do so, his bureaucrats obligingly stepped aside. The 7th Legion departed without any of its usual command staff or Imperial Commissioners. Only the Prince-Elector of Kryne, one of the Emperor’s closest confidants, accompanied the troops, relaying his orders directly to the men through their officers.

One month later, a single Legionnaire from the 7th returned to the Crimson Emperor’s court. He was Centurion Joeax, of the Southern Marches, a sunlit and breezy land far removed from the dour overcast of Mossfallow. It is recorded in the histories that Joeax commanded an auxiliary unit of archers in the 7th, and that he arrived apparently uninjured but without his bow, riding a horse with the tack of a much senior officer and armed with a long cruciform heavy infantry sword rather than the short stabbing sword issued archers for personal defense and lat-ditch melee.

Joeax was quickly borne to Neris II, and the emperor demanded that his audience with the man be utterly private. It was a brief meeting, not more than fifteen minutes, and at the end the Emperor’s advisors found that their liege had slain Joeax with his ornate sword of office–the first time it had been stained with blood since the Great Rebellion. In a rage, Neris II demanded that every man, woman, and child who had contact with Joeax and might possibly have heard or intuited part of his message be put to death.

1000 people died in the subsequent purge, and at the Emperor’s orders his scribes and historians did their best to expunge all mention of the 7th Legion from the record. At this they failed, presumably because most assumed that the Legion had risen against the Emperor and that the latter’s overthrow was imminent. But no such challenge arose; Neris II ruled for a further 10 years, but within six months of Joeax’s execution he had sunk into howling insanity with only the briefest periods of lucidity, leaving his son the future Doricus V as regent.

Not one of the 10,000 men of the 7th Imperial Legion including Prince-Elector Kryne was ever seen again save Joeax, nor was a single item of their equipment ever recovered, though many enterprising souls scoured the muck of Mossfallow for the site of a presumed battle. Emperor Neris II had been successful in one sense: not a living soul ever discovered what news Centurian Joeax had borne to his liege.

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