My precious Duala,

The Gods are dead: no longer do we bring
To grey-eyed Pallas crowns of olive-leaves!
Demeter’s child no more hath tithe of sheaves,
And in the noon the careless shepherds sing,
For Pan is dead, and all the wantoning
By secret glade and devious haunt is o’er:
Young Hylas seeks the water-springs no more;
Great Pan is dead, and Perdition’s son is King.

I am but a shell, a soulless automaton masquerading as a man. I find my daily regimen nothing more than habitual discipline, merely going through the motions of a living creature with but a hollow affect. I shall dress as expected to make the observances for you my sister; black greatcoat, chapeau and cravat. Six months is my due diligence to mourn, though six years would nary be enough.

Joy, love and hope have exited to the Pale. They have no more chance of resurrection than a man a hundred years dead. The fire within my breast is but dying embers, stoked only by a hedonistic desire for vengeance.

And vengeance I shall have. My life is forfeit but for the gains that sweet revenge will proffer.

I pray that fickle fortune grants me revenge for your murder, dear sister, recompense for my grief and rest in the Far Green Country where I may glimpse your fair countenance eternal.

Farewell, my precious Duala.

Your loyal Prince Duada

O’ Death, to the last, I grapple with thee;
From Hell’s heart, I stab at thee;
For hate’s sake, I spit my last breath at thee.
Till you yield the Devil, I storm the gates of Tartarus;
I’ll yet triumph, nary the final trumpet sounds.

An ancient cherry tree grows somewhere on the tenuous borders of the Feywild and the Old Wood outside of Arkham. The morning mist hangs over the ground, blocking what dim sunlight manages to filter through the thick deciduous growth. There under the canopy the sound of a shovel can be heard, held by someone toiling away at removing a goodly portion of earth at the base of the gnarled tree. Black cherries dot the branches, just shy of a month before they ripen.

The sound of the shovel stops. A few heavy grunts and the sliding of a heavy object as it settles into an earthen hole can be heard. Branches part, and a clearing before the bowl of the tree can be seen. A hale eight-foot figure finishes lowering what looks like a casket into a freshly dug grave, nestled amidst the roots, at the base of the ancient cherry tree. The hale figure straightens, brushes the dirt from his hands, and says something in Russian.

Another figure, some two feet shorter and leaner, gracefully nods to the Goliath and says something back in Russian. He looks down upon the casket, with melancholy admiration, taking in the likeness of an Eladrin maiden carved from cherry wood. The features of the maiden closely resemble his.

“I remember our father taking us here.” The Eladrin says. “He told us that it sprouted the day we were born. The day our mother died giving birth to us. He said her spirit made it grow. I find it fitting that you should sleep here, if only as an effigy.” The Eladrin’s voice lowers.

“Father told me to look after you. I failed him. I failed you, doubly so. Firstly in doubting you, secondly in losing you. I am a poor elder sibling.” He closes his eyes as if to see a memory.

“Death lies upon you, sister, like an untimely frost upon the sweetest flower of all the field.” The Eladrin says thoughtfully.

The Eladrin takes out a book, pages yellowing with age. He opens it up to an earmarked page, and starts reading as his voice begins to tremble.

“My words are wholly inadequate at this very moment, so I chose to read something from the Great Muse. You always did love his sonnets.” The Eladrin attempts to clear his throat.

“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to Time thou grow’st.
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”

Tears flow from his cheeks, falling upon the casket like rain, staining the dark cherry wood. His body bowls over, wracked and convulsing with grief as he tumbles forward into the grave, weeping bitterly. The Goliath attempts to catch him, but he pushes the brute away. The howling, wracking sobs go on almost endlessly as he sprawls across the casket, like a child trying to grasp what he cannot hold.

He pours out two and a half centuries of grief and regret and guilt and bile upon the cherry wood effigy, tears flowing relentlessly beyond what would seem physically possible for such a lithe figure. The sun moves well past the canopy as the Eladrin wails and the Goliath stands by silently.

After the sun has crossed the sky and begins it’s decent, the tears begin to subdue and the sobbing lessens. The Eladrin weakly pulls himself from the grave and ambles to his feet. He takes a handful of earth and sprinkles it upon the likeness of the Eladrin Maiden, humming a quiet elven lullaby as he does so. He nods at the Goliath, who picks up the shovel and begins filling the grave with the freshly dug earth.

“I’ll never pause again, never stand still,
Till either death hath closed these eyes of mine or fortune given me some measure of revenge.” The figure says in a hoarse voice.

The Eladrin slowly walks away into the mist of the darkening forest as the sound of the shovel continues its steady meter. As he passes the bowl of the ancient cherry tree, he brushes his hands upon words carved into the trunk, in the hand of exquisite elven script.

The words inscribed read “The candle that burns twice as bright burns only half as long.”

“Mine eyes shall rest upon you when again we meet in the Far Green Country, my fair sister,” he whispers.

My dearest brother,

If you are reading this I have succeeded. You are safe and I am in some mental rehabilitation. I wanted to say this myself, but seeing as my moments of lucidity are fleeting, I had nary a time to gather my thoughts long enough to be able to tell you what was happening. I have been working behind the scenes to make sure all of you succeeded. I am being chased by someone, I don’t know who. Hell, I have no idea how he could find me. But that is neither here nor there. We will be together again brother. I apologize for all the things I have done to hurt you and the others. I was not in my right mind, and I hope to work for the rest of my life to atone for my crimes. I am turning myself in. I will finally be able to do right by you.

Your loving sister,

Veladiel Quedys Eilyana

My Dearest Claudette,

We had finally found our way into a large and dreadfully deep amazon basin, teaming with life that predated history. As I took refuge behind the trunk of what seemed large as a redwood, breathing in the primordial air, I wondered: What if there really is a Z? What if the jungle had concealed such a place? What of the Lost City that Percy Fawcett raved about actually existed, and these vile serpent people simply eliminated him?

Even today, the Brazilian government estimates that there are more than sixty Indian tribes that have never been contacted by outsiders. “These forests are . . . almost the only place on earth where indigenous people can survive in isolation from the rest of mankind,” John Hemming, the distinguished historian of Brazilian Indians and a former director of the Royal Geographical Society, wrote. Sydney Possuelo, who was in charge of the Brazilian department set up to protect Indian tribes, has said of these groups, “No one knows for sure who they are, where they are, how many they are, and what languages they speak.”

Could this place have persisted well beyond the reach of time, beyond the prescience of history and beyond the prodding eyes of modern explorative science? Could this be where the ancient spawn of Yig have hidden themselves away for nearly the entire epoch of man?

Endearingly yours, Allan Quartermain

My Dearest Claudette,

What I have witnessed should shock and horrify, and certainly bring the rabid attention of some greater regional or tribal authority. Such grotesque sights as what we have witnessed by the hand of my infernal sister and whatever cohorts she may be travelling with are not so aberrant, however.

The Peruvian Amazon Company had committed virtual genocide in attempting to pacify and enslave the native population by the near end of the nineteenth century: it castrated and beheaded Indians, poured kerosene on them and lit them afire, crucified them upside down, beat them, mutilated them, starved them, drowned them, and fed them to dogs. The company’s henchmen also raped women and girls and smashed children’s heads open. “In some sections such an odor of putrefying flesh arises from the numerous bodies of the victims that the places must be temporarily abandoned,” said an engineer who visited the area, which was dubbed the “devil’s paradise.”

I myself, who had always found refuge in the natural world, no longer recognized the wilderness of butchered villagers, trees denuded in blood, and sunbaked skeletons. As the explorer Percy Fawcett once wrote in his diary, “Dante would never have condemned lost souls to wander in so terrible a purgatory.”

Perhaps this is Hell and I have already died and do not recall the moment of my demise. A sobering thought, if not an encouraging one.

Endearingly yours, Allan Quartermain

My dearest Claudette,

Hate and love are both as intense, a passionate feeling that overwhelms and consumes. One swings to adoration and the other to loathing. But they both at the penultimate height of their passion lack clarity and vision and can lead us astray. They have far more in common than we think.

I no longer know clearly whether I hate or love Alice. Perchance both.

This journey I undertake is far, to the very reaches of the known world. But there is no journey upon this earth that a person may not make if he sets his heart to it. There is nothing that he cannot do, there are no mountains he may not climb, there are no deserts he cannot cross; save a mountain and a desert of which he is spared the knowledge, if hate or love leads him and he holds his life in his hand counting it as nothing, ready to keep it or to lose it as Providence may order.

Alice is a lioness gone rogue, a predator that has tasted human blood and taken a liking to it, grown to have a hedonistic lust for it. Now it is a hard thing when one has shot six hundred sixty-five predators or more, as I have in the course of my long life, that the six hundred sixty-sixth should chew your leg like a quid of tobacco. It breaks the routine of the thing, and putting other considerations aside, I am an orderly individual and don’t like that. This is by the way and I shall set it aright.

By all that is sacred, if there be anything that still holds as such, I shall put an end to all this. By my hand, though ignorant I may have been, I started all this horrid evil upon its course. I daresay willfully ignorant towards Alice, which makes my doubly accountable. If by the ending of my own life I put an end to her malevolent purpose I shall do so.

But what is life? It is a feather, it is the seed of the grass, blown hither and thither, sometimes multiplying itself and dying in the act, sometimes carried away into the heavens. But if that seed be good and heavy it may perchance travel a little way on the road it wills. It is well to try and journey one’s road and to fight with the air. But we all must die. At the worst we can but die a little sooner before we have made good our purpose.

I have done much in the fullness of the morn and the stretching of the long midsummer day, but twilight is upon me, and night must eventually fall. I have frolicked in the brief spring and toiled in the heat of the lengthy summer, but autumn is here and winter presses in like an ox at the yoke, slowly and steadily moving forward on its unyielding course. I feel the cold settling into my bones, and realize that though I have done much, nary have I done much good. The time has come for me to remedy that.

It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest I go to than I have ever known.

Endearingly yours, Allan Quartermain

My Dearest Evilyn,

I know now the truth.

To think I could shift my rudder and steer my course away from anything other than my fate is vanity, my dear; vanity of vanities.

I shall be dead. So is it with us all. How many millions have lain as I lie, here gazing to the apathetic heavens, and thought these thoughts and been forgotten? — thousands upon thousands of years ago they thought them, those dying men of the dim past; and thousands on thousands of years hence will their descendants think them and be in their turn forgotten. “As the breath of the oxen in winter, as the quick star that runs along the sky, as a little shadow that loses itself at sunset,” as I once heard a Tupi warrior called Itohua put it, such is the order of our life, the order that passeth away.

So, when the heart is stricken, and the head is humbled in the dust, civilization fails us utterly. Back, back, we creep, and lay us like little children on the great breast of Nature, she that perchance may soothe us and make us forget, or at least rid remembrance of its sting. Who has not in his great grief felt a longing to look upon the outward features of the universal Mother; to lie on the mountains and watch the clouds drive across the sky and hear the rollers break in thunder on the shore, to let his poor struggling life mingle for a while in her life; to feel the slow beat of her eternal heart, and to forget his woes, and let his identity be swallowed in the vast imperceptibly moving energy of her of whom we are, from whom we came, and with whom we shall again be mingled, who gave us birth, and will in a day to come give us our burial also.

So shall I find myself at last in your fickle bosom, my empyrean Titania, my Queen, my Mother.

Endearingly yours, Allen Quartermain

My Dearest Evilyn,

I must share with you an epiphany I had whilst on safari.

Throw a stick, and the servile dog wheezes and pants and stumbles to bring it to you. Do the same before a cat, and he will eye you with coolly polite and somewhat bored amusement. And just as inferior people prefer the inferior animal which scampers excitedly because someone else wants something, so do superior people respect the superior animal which lives its own life and knows that the puerile stick-throwings of alien bipeds are none of its business and beneath its notice.

The dog barks and begs and tumbles to amuse you when you crack the whip. That pleases a meekness-loving peasant who relishes a stimulus to his self importance. The cat, on the other hand, charms you into playing for its benefit when it wishes to be amused; making you rush about the room with a paper on a string when it feels like exercise, but refusing all your attempts to make it play when it is not in the humor.

That is personality and individuality and self-respect — the calm mastery of a being whose life is its own and not yours — and the superior person recognizes and appreciates this because he too is a free soul whose position is assured, and whose only law is his own heritage and aesthetic sense.

I see know the truth of this, that they must all be dogs, for I am most assuredly the Cat.

And like the great cats, the weakest of the pride are eliminated lest they become a hindrance to the pride’s survival. I hope the others pray to merciful gods for the fate of their souls, for I will not hesitate to do the same for my pride if anyone proves to be a…liability.

Sincerely, Allan Quartermain

Grandfather it would seem I now have a choice to make, stay here before the jade warlord or return to the world i know. As much as i know i need to i find myself questioning if i’m worthy of this second chance. After leaving home i just went out a found a group of people and started traveling with them. One seems to understand the importance of protecting onnes people. Another seem to be strong but about as intelligent as a cart full of rocks. The first of the short one seems to be vain, greedy, and thinks his weapons solve all his problems. The other short one is still too new from me to judge properly. The strangest one of them seems to have befriended an Oin and suffers from hiding who he his. Yet i can’t seem to call this man dishonorable for i am doing the same. I walk around and do what i believe to be honorable but yet clam to be someone i’m not. If I am continue down this path and become head of my family what will my legacy be. As it is now a legacy of lies and one that won’t last long at all. If I’m to become the next head of our family then should I not stop hiding who I am? Why wouldn’t they take me if I’m a woman? I’ve done more now then anything my uncle could come up with. Ha maybe that Oin wasn’t as bad as he seemed. For now I will keep up this act to those around me if they don’t already know. But when I return home I will have to say the Ichiro Nagia is dead. It’s not who I am but if we are to keep the honorable traditions of our family going then I must not hide that I’m Mizuki Nagia and let my deeds speak for who I am. If no one will accept me as I am then why would I want to lead them. For now I shall turn back a head to this world keep what I just learned in this short time close.