Entry 6: Into the Wild
Age 23 - First Year of Exile
Learning to survive in a world that wants everything dead.
The surface world is nothing like the protected canopy of Thornhaven Reach. Up here, under the vast sky that presses down like a weight on your soul, everything is wrong. The air tastes of ash and corruption. The horizon crawls with shapes that shouldn’t exist. At night, you can see the Umbra drifting between distant mountains like dark fog with malevolent purpose.
The Sacred Pyres of other communities dot the landscape like dying stars, each one a desperate beacon of hope in an ocean of abandonment and despair.
The Underground Council - I mean, the Reachguard Elders - found me twice this month. Both times I had to shadow-step to escape, and both times the visions came stronger afterward. I see their faces twisted with righteous anger, calling me murderer, monster, corrupted thing. Elder Thornwick leads patrols that grow bolder each time, convinced they’re protecting their community from a dangerous exile.
But I also see what’s coming for them. Waves of corruption like nothing they’ve faced before. Organized. Intelligent. Patient. Something vast coordinating the spread from beyond the abandoned realm of the Veiled Gods.
They’re hunting me while something infinitely worse prepares to devour them all, and they’ll never see it coming because they’ve exiled the only person who could warn them.
I tried going back once. Shadow-stepped to our old perimeter just to observe, to make sure they were safe. Three scouts on patrol - young ones, badly trained, missing obvious signs of Umbra intrusion. If corruption came that night, they’d all die screaming.
I almost revealed myself. Almost called out warnings, offered help despite everything. Then I remembered the exile ceremony - how they looked at me like I was already one of the corrupted things I’d died trying to stop.
They made their choice. They want purity over survival, tradition over adaptation.
The loneliness is the worst part. Not the hunger, not the constant vigilance, not even the guilt over Whisper-Steps. It’s waking up every day knowing that no one in the world gives a damn whether I live or die. That I could disappear tomorrow and it wouldn’t matter to anyone.
Except maybe to whatever’s coming. In my visions, it watches me too. Studies me like I study it. I think it knows I can see it clearly, and that makes me either very dangerous or very useful.
I’ve started talking to myself just to hear a friendly voice. Sometimes I even laugh at my own jokes. The sound echoes strangely in the corrupted wastelands, and I wonder if that’s what madness sounds like.
But if madness means seeing the truth while everyone else clings to comfortable lies, then maybe madness is exactly what this world needs.
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Journal Entry 6 of 10 - Learning to survive alone