Keeper of Lore

Days of Slowtree 7

March 22, 1915

I’m already tired of the food that we brought. At least we still have hot food. We have trail rations to eat when we run out of the good stuff. I’m not looking forward to that. We have plenty though. We won’t go hungry.

We left this nice house and continued our exploration. We skipped a lot of homes and buildings. Pillarfield is too big for us to search every single structure. We eventually found ourselves in an industrial part of the city. There were large buildings that Wren identified as “factories.” Apparently, the Elder People manufactured things at a much larger scale than we do in our time. I can’t imagine that much stuff being needed for a city. I suppose that they had a lot more people than we do now.

We peeked inside a couple factories. There weren’t any artifacts or loot. Wren just wanted to see what they looked like.

As we left the second building, we noticed several shadows moving down the street. We ran to the street corner and looked around. We didn’t find anybody. We then heard a sound behind us. We turned around and saw a thing.

It was horrible.

The thing was the size and shape of a human. It was translucent. A cold, blue light emanated from its chest, like a lantern suspended from its ribcage. I looked through its body and saw beyond our world. I don’t know how I possessed this knowledge. It just came to me. I was looking past the walls of air and light and darkness and things and people. It looked like a wall made of ocean, swirling and cascading and crashing against the skin of the specter that stood before us.

Later, Wren told us what she knew about these things. They were known as Wraiths. A person can plant their soul in the Confines, which separates the Living World from the other Realms. They can interact with the physical world and not be a part of it. I don’t understand any of this. At the time, Wren did not have any other information about Wraiths. Back to my tale…

The Wraith extended a single finger, roiling with incomprehensible currents and flickering blue light. It caressed Grub’s cheek and he screamed, “My eyes! My eyes! They’re burning!” The Wraith seemed to gasp in surprise. It removed its finger from Grub’s face and looked at it.

Grub moaned, “I can see again, but it hurts.”

Wren shouted, “Run!”

We ran several blocks to a warehouse. I don’t think that we eluded the Wraith. I think that it let us go. We decided to spend the night here, just in case we actually lost our foe. We need to stay out of sight.

We looked around the place. It was very unsettling. There were numerous cages scattered around the open floor of the massive warehouse. Each cage was large enough to hold a single adult person. Blank slate placards dangled from each cage door.

We eventually found a desk with a stack of books on it. Each book contained page after page of lists. There were columns labeled for start date, harvest date, name and age. This is utterly bizarre. What happened in Pillarfield?

#days-of-slowtree