In my studies of the treacherous villains we heroes put to jail, I ran across this diary in one of the many arcane bookshops that dot Paragon. I forewarn you it is blasphemous and tainted with darkness. It is a sad tale.. a dark tale...
I have now forewarned you, take it as you may, just remember... I share this information to hopefully help my fellow heroes out, not in malice or to give those of our fellow less stable friends nightmares but to warn of the darkness that we fight against everyday. So without further preamble, the tale of a once good man gone mad...
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The Mad Diary
And so the day began a new...
At least, that is what they say. What they want you to believe. All tales end with a beginning. The horrors of the night, the depridations of darkness, all will be gone when the light of day burns it from memory. Isn't that how all the stories of horror end?
I know better though. I know the truth of the sun. The truth of the mindless beings who speak to you of hope.
There is no hope. Only endless destruction. The slow entropy of anihilation continuing to its completeness. For what is it, that I speak of? Time.
Time is our true enemy. What is time but only entropy. Time is only but the measurement of how long things will last.
From the time we are concieved, our enemy watches. It waits for us to come out of the slowly decaying womb from which we all felt safe, to begin immediately plotting upon our downfall. For some even the womb is no safe place to be. For the womb is an enemy of time. Do you not see that anything that offers hope, a new beginning, life, or love, is hated by time?
Can you not hear it now? The cries of the damned? The death of blood that screams out in agony as you yourself sit hear listening. A war is being raged upon the very flesh that allows you to be with us right now. Oh yes. You will lose that war. There is no winning against entropy. Everything in the end, has an ending. There is no true tomorrow for us. There is no safety. Yes, the day begins a new... only for the end to get nearer.
Sure, the mindless church and the mad priests speak of life everlasting. A life that only we few who have been subjected to the tales of Gods endeavors will survive. A God who only cares of the those followers who it decided to cultivate long after humanity existed? What of the Pagans whose search for truth never came across this God? Why would not god speak to them? Why would he leave our fellow humans hanging in the wind of time but only those of us who came afterword will enjoy his love? Or is it, the church only lives upon our fear of the end? They pull their own life off of the fears of which all live. They suffer us only to gather money to feed their fat bellies and continue to torture us mentally and physically. For our starving children matter not compared to the tithes they require to upkeep their glass temples and full tables, groaning under the weight our contributions.
No. There is no true tomorrow for us. There is only agony and death for us.
So now you know my reasons. Reasons good enough to turn to the direction that I have. A course that will surely save me or send me to the hells the church guarantees I will suffer after I die. HAH! What do they know of hell? Of torture and pain? I sit here slowly decaying in the hell that we all suffer and they think their miniscule brimstone teachings will dissuade me from searching the truth! I will save myself and humanity! I do not require fat chickens or the money of others to find a better solution to our systematic destruction. A better solution than fables and tales written to only warn of the path I have now chosen but not the truth of where we are going. God may now turn his back upon me but I shall not turn my back upon the truth!
I have turned to the studies of the arcane and paganism. They seemed to have come closer to the truth than any of the basic teachings that Rome spews out.
I studied the mysticism of the East. Of gods dark and forgotten, beings of malevolence and hate. The eater of worlds and demons of many arms. These were not things that offered solace but even more fear. Some of their mystics speak of balance and reincarnation, these are things that would not work for my studies either because I was attempting to escape the horrors of entropy and decay, not accept it or suffer through it for eternity, born only to suffer again and again. No. I wanted something of hope, not perfect torture.
I studied the old gods of the Romans and Greeks, so close to human they are... sad specimens of gods if you ask me. Obviously they were only the beginning of the maturation of humanity. A realization that bigger things were going on beyond humanity but they were only tales that the poor humans of that time could come up with that shows they never truly understood anything but humanity.
It was only when I began to study the tales of our own european pagans that I came closer to what I sought. Bhaal and his fellow gods, the druids spoke of. Those Gods obviously beyond our comprehension yet they understood our humanity. It was quite by accident when I ran across something of intrigue. I was in a small town in Northern Scotland, searching for more tales on why the druids thought that summer was actually death, while winter was the beginning of life. Quite the opposite in almost all other religions that I have ran across.
Apparently not but a few years before, the town was beseiged by an army of the dead. Various things of decay, skeletons and zombies had raised from their graves to attack the living. No one would speak of it but a few of the old men and women. People whose lives were finally close to ending and they had no fear of the past. Their futures held little for them to fear now... they knew they would be joining those dead things soon enough.
They spoke in hushed whispers of warlocks and necromancy. Of things magic and science, that should never have been mingled. They spoke of a young peasant hero who killed the man that raised the army of the dead and how the army fell to the ground as his final breath passed his lips. All fanciful tales you say. Hah! What old wives and hermits speak of, may be needed to be taken with salt but what they say usually has a grain of truth in it.
So it is, that I began to hunt for more tales of this Necromancer and the hero who slayed him. I found that the hero fell dead with the Necromancer, and both were buried among the dead things that had risen up. The hermit I spoke to even kindly pointed to the caern that the two were buried into.
I dug into that caern at night over the next few weeks. Taking care not to alert the peasants of that town. Each night I dug a little deeper and each night I became a little closer to the truth. I finally made it one night and studied the burial chambers both the hero and the vilain were in. The hero was buried in old style with the remains of the spear he smote the necromancer with, by his side. The vilains body was in a stone sarcophagi with many pagan marks of warning and mystical significance. I felt an odd palpatating presence there. As if something was watching me. Waiting. I felt as if the necromancer himself wished for me to open the sarcophagus. Or perhaps something else was there. Daring, daunting me forward. Calling me to let loose the truth of entropy.
I pushed on the heavy stone lid that protected the world against the truth, strangely, it moved with but a nudge from me. As if it was not flung from its resting area by me but by the gods themselves. Perhaps the demon Bhall himself gave me the strength or perhaps only the cause, the want for information was needed and action of the touching allowed the watchers with in that forlorn place opened it for me. Never the less, the truth was now upon me.
There lying in its own bile was a body of excrutiating cruelty. The face of the necromancer not suffering one iota of entropy that the hero of the story suffered. His body was stiff yet not suffering from decay as other bodies normally would after such a long time of death. His eyelids were covered as tradition dictated with coins which I removed.
The horror of horrors then fell upon me. His eyes were not even gone! His eyes once the lids were opened still seemed to burn with an intensity even the most fierce of a blacksmiths fires could burn. No. He was not alive but he felt alive. As if he was still there, staring at me, angered at my intrusion upon his sleep. Yet the area felt as if it still pushed for me to gather information.
How odd a sight to find his body at full health, still here, years after death. His clothing had fallen to ruin long ago but not his flesh. The obvious cause of his death still there, a hole the in his chest, gaping. Earth surrounded the wound, which I gathered to be his once blood, now outside of his body, decayed, like normal. Yet he himself found some way! He had found a way to protect his own body against entropy, even though, those things that lived life outside of his body suffered as all normal things from time.
Oh what a discovery! What hope humanity now had! For the pagan gods of the north has now shown me the truth. Truth that we all could live without suffering of the trials of time.
Now I am to profess, my excitement got ahead of me. I thought of how things would be for all humanity with this discovery but all things came to a crashing halt when I realized, yes, this thing found a way to defeat entropy but it had taken the ways of such life with him in his death.
How could I replicate such? How could I find more truths when they were wiped away with the meddlings of a boy who knew nothing but followed the path of ignorant good? Oh, such foolish folly for a boy to follow a god who would promote ignorance and insanity! A god whos good book states that the idiots will be given a special place in his afterlife but a man of knowledge may go to hell. How sad for humanity that this Gods hero, would be an idiot while truth and intelligence is the enemy.
I sat there ruminating on such horrors as has befallen humanity when the body of the necromancer moved of its own accord! What shock! What horrors befell my mind as I watched the body and sarcophagi fall to the ground. I remembered such horrific tales of Wights and Revenants, and fear gripped me as I thought my time had finally come. Perhaps it truth that the evil dead could come alive and I had now meddled in things man was not meant to know.
