Entry 9: Revelation
Age 27 - Understanding the Vision
I finally understand what I’m seeing, and it’s both worse and better than I imagined.
The upward-flowing waterfalls, the reality distortions, the coordination between corruption sites - it’s all connected to something the scattered survivors of the Age of Umbra have forgotten. We’re not dealing with random corruption. We’re witnessing the death throes of reality itself.
Found proof in the Greyrock ruins, in archives that survived from before the Apostasy. Ancient texts describing previous incursions, previous heroes who gained the ability to see across dimensional barriers when the Veiled Gods began withdrawing their protection. They called it “oracle sight” - a gift that comes to those capable of acting on cosmic-scale threats.
I’m not going insane. I’m becoming something necessary.
The texts describe others like me throughout history. Warriors who accepted corruption to fight worse corruption. Guardians who sacrificed their humanity piece by piece to preserve the concept of humanity itself. Every one of them faced the same choice I’m facing now: remain pure but ineffective, or embrace just enough darkness to battle it on equal terms.
Every one of them ended up alone. Cut off from the people they died to protect, viewed as monsters by those too comfortable or too afraid to understand the scope of the threat.
But they succeeded. Each one held the line for their generation. Bought time for communities like Thornhaven Reach to survive, to grow, to maintain their Sacred Pyres while reality slowly healed from the wounds left by divine abandonment.
The current breach is the largest ever recorded. Whatever’s coming will make previous invasions look like minor raids. The corruption spreading through settlements isn’t random preparation - it’s systematic terraforming, making our reality more compatible with something that shouldn’t be able to exist here.
I’m not fighting to save my people anymore. I’m fighting to save the concept of people existing at all.
The revelation should be crushing. Instead, it’s liberating. For the first time since my exile, I understand exactly what I am and why. The loneliness, the scarring, the terrible choices - they’re not punishments. They’re the price of admission to a war bigger than kingdoms, bigger than species, bigger than reality as most people understand it.
I accept that price. More than that - I embrace it.
Found myself whistling while I worked yesterday, cleaning out a corruption node that had been masquerading as a Sacred Pyre. The irony was too delicious not to appreciate. False hope literally feeding the thing that destroys hope itself.
If you can’t laugh at cosmic horror, what can you laugh at?
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