Patterns & Prophecies
Ghorzath awoke coughing ore dust in the unused corner of the forge, her hand reaching for the stolen tome beneath her head. Her makeshift encampment, littered with scraps of food and stale drink, had gone largely ignored by the others. Even Drogakh, once relentless in his taunts, had stopped tormenting her after she fixed him with a gaze that seemed to pierce through flesh. Her wild eyes, flecked with emerald, unnerved him, and he never returned.
The rhythm of hammers and the glow of the forge fire should have been a comfort, but instead, they barely dulled the fevered obsession which gnawed at her mind. The lore-tome, with its shifting patterns and glowing symbols, was maddening to read. The shapes on the pages suggested meaning, luring her into a false hope of discovery. They danced just out of reach and mocked her prized intelligence. She hadn’t heard the voice again since that first encounter, but her research confirmed its source: Hermaeus Mora. That realization ignited something in her, a hunger she could only describe as a gift from Malacath himself, the Prince of Outcasts. But after weeks of fruitless attempts to crack its code, she feared her mind might shatter like cold iron struck too hard.
One afternoon in a fit of rage, she seized the cursed tome and staggered to the central forge fire. Her breath came in ragged gasps as she held it above the flames. End it. Let it burn. As her fingers began to release the weight of it, she froze. The tentacles embossed on its cover suddenly wriggled to life, slick and cold, snaking around her hand. They tightened with a slimy, implacable grip, refusing to let her drop it. She gasped, her heart pounding against her ribs.
And then, like the first breath after drowning, the voice returned—silky, patient, inescapable.
You needed to be freed from what you thought you knew
So you could receive what you didn’t know you wanted.
Her eyes blurred, and the forge seemed to darken. From the edges of her vision, inky tendrils and lurid, blinking eyes coiled into view.
“Ghorzath.” The guttural voice said her name for the first time. “The loom strains beneath unseen hands, the fabric is in peril. Three threads fray: one binds despair, one rivalry’s bloom, one must wander, torn yet whole, lest chaos rise and claim the soul. You walk upon the warp and woof of fate, Orsimer.”
A nauseating shimmer cut the air in front of her, widening into a jagged tear that pulsed with sickly light. The portal called to her, the voice resonating from its depths.
“Come to me.”
She hesitated. The voice deepened, edged with anger and insistence.
“You possess what is not yours. Service is the price of knowledge; the weave must be mended. Come.”
She closed her eyes and felt the ground tilt. For one fragile moment, she wanted to resist—to turn back and leave the forge, the tome, and the Prince of Knowledge behind. But as the portal swirled she took a tentative step forward. Then another.
With a trembling hand, she reached out and stepped through.
The shift in reality was immediate and jarring. She landed on what felt like cold, slick stone, but when she looked down, the surface rippled like liquid. Apocrypha stretched out before her in all its surreal glory: black seas glowed faintly green, towering stacks of books teetered at impossible angles, and tendrils of inky shadow coiled and uncoiled in the distance. The air smelled damp and ancient, like a tomb that had never been sealed. She felt dizzy and nauseous.
She stood at the end of a stone path. A small arena was in front of her, lined by walls and shelves of books. A hideous creature of dangling tentacles floated around it, occasionally stopping to survey the shelves.
The grotesque creature matched the description of the Herald’s Seeker defeated by the Evermore trader. An upper layer of tentacles wore bracelets as though signifying rank. Four arms sprouted out of its slithering body, surrounded by suckered tentacles. Penetrating green eyes stared out of a furrowed, misshapen head.
Ghorzath faltered. She darted to the right, crouching at the base of a column. Then, Mora's voice came—quick and imperative.
“What are you doing, Orsimer?”
“Waiting for the night,” she snapped.
“There is no night in my realm. I will show you the rune-tome to retrieve. It is beyond the sight of my Prime Cataloger.”
She took deep breaths to steady herself, then slipped inside, pressing against the wall. The Cataloger’s head tilted, its unblinking gaze sweeping across the arena. It didn’t appear to notice her, but the oppressive weight of its presence bore down on her like an anvil. To the left at the top of some stairs was a dais with a circular panel of runes in front of it. In the center of the panel was a book unlike the others. It called to her, beckoned her, enticed her with a promise of forbidden secrets. Strength flowed into her legs and she ascended the stairs to stand on the dais and study the runes which faced her.
“Voskromahl!,” she whispered, the name rising unbidden to her lips after a few moments. She didn’t know how she knew it, but the word felt right, as though the rune had spoken its name into her soul.
Before she could reach for the tome, a low, resonant hum filled the air, and words formed in her mind:
“What kingdom crumbled yet seeded a thousand thrones? Answer, and possess the rune of prophecy.”
Ghorzath frowned, her mind racing, sweat coating her forehead. The riddle churned through her thoughts, dredging up fragments of the histories she had studied. The answer came to her: The Direnni Hegemony. It had collapsed, yet its legacy had shaped Breton society and power.
“The Direnni,” she said aloud.
The pedestal’s light flared, enveloping the rune in a brilliant glow. As the light faded, Ghorzath stepped forward and grasped Voskromahl.
Energy coursed through her body, overwhelming her senses. The chaotic patterns she had studied for so long resolved in her mind into vivid diagrams and inscriptions, flooding her with images: a city, Wayrest, its spires gleaming in the sunlight; a temple surrounded by crypts; and a shadowed figure standing at a tomb, his features obscured.
“Seek where the divine and the mortal meet,” Hermaeus Mora’s voice urged. “No Templar’s hand may wield its might; recover the shard to set fate right.”
Ghorzath was thrust back into the forge as the portal snapped closed, the stillness of Apocrypha giving way to a rush of heat and noise. She hit the ground hard, the rough stone scraping against her back. Her familiar corner now felt distant, surreal, and suffocatingly small, as though she were still bound to the realm of Mora.
Her hands trembled as she opened her lore-tome. Some of the patterns were no longer maddening; they now revealed long-hidden truths. Inscribed within was a new page: Voskromahl. The words on the rune-page were alive, and pulsed as she ran her fingers across them.
Her capacity for learning now felt boundless, her thirst for knowledge insatiable. She thought of the towers of books again, the runes buried in them—power, healing, secrets waiting to be taken. She need only do Mora’s will, and they would be hers. She had only to go to Wayrest and find an odd shard in a stranger’s possession and dispossess him of it—one of her specialties.
She carefully placed the tome in her pack and surrounded it with Orcish dried goat meat, cabbages, ash-roasted tubers and other provisions for the road. She stood, threw the pack over her shoulder, and left the forge and the life she had known behind her forever.