Godkiller - The Lumberjack Journal - 12 - The Stone in its Stomach

I had become so accustomed to wandering I’d nearly forgotten my purpose. The visions are now so commonplace I no longer react to them. I hardly noticed the one who stalked me from the Zessgorni rooftops as I walked along the docks two days ago. It only caught my eye when it killed a seagull that had been unaware of its existence until it was crushed between malformed jaws.. They rarely interact with the outside world, so I began to see those occurrences as signs. I tried to catch the aberrant dog, as I always do. Like each time before, it evaded my grasp. I barely felt the sting of defeat when I lost track of it in the alleyways. However, as I turned away from the dead-end it had somehow vanished into, a beggar spoke to me from the gutter.

“You can see them too, eh?” The ragged man spoke through a dusty beard. Adrathar’s summer winds carried sands from The Nothing at this time of the year. The dry season wouldn’t see it washed away for some time. Baffled, I sat down with the man and asked him if he knew what they were. He laughed and told me they were the kind of messenger no one wants. He simply called them creatures. When I asked what kind of creatures, he shook his head at me, saying other creatures were just kinds of these. At this point, I assumed he was a madman, so I left him a coin and began walking away.

“You’re one of them too. We all are. But only the creatures of people like us make it to the beach.” Then he threw the coin I had given him at the back of my head. I spun to face him, eyes wide. I begged him to explain everything he knew to me. He didn’t reply, he just stared deep into my soul with his tired eyes. Then he took my hand and did something. I still cannot explain it. He placed my palm on his forehead, and I could feel a stirring. A writhing. It was so disturbing it took me a moment to process the sensation. Somehow I could feel other people in his head. Just beneath the skin. Like hungry garden fish at the surface of a pond. As if his mind contained two dozen souls and was bursting at the seams because of it. More than twelve people overlapped, all sitting in the exact same spot before me. I recoiled at the horrific, impossible sensation. 

Despite millennia of living, I had never experienced something so disturbing, vivid, and otherworldly. Like everything I’d ever experienced was the blurred edge of a cast shadow from reality’s light. Forgetting my power, human nature took over, and I ran. Like a scared child. As I sprinted down the twisted alleyways of Zessgorn, I could hear the man shouting at me frantically:

“You have to kill it! It needs you to kill it! Bring back the stone in its stomach.”

By the time I had calmed my nerves, the sun had set. I went back to that spot, but the man had long gone. I berated myself as I scoured the alleyway. I felt foolish for running after searching for so long. More than foolish. I am a being of immense power. The list of things that could truly harm me can be said in a single breath. 

But believe me when I tell you there is something deeply wrong with these visions. I feel as if I am walking on the knife-edge of reality. Overwhelmed, I nearly abandoned my search, but then I spotted it. The coin he’d thrown at me. Or rather, what I thought was a coin. A small, ordinary black stone. I nearly discounted it, and then all of a sudden, its surface rippled. Like a glass of water disturbed by some great, low sound. Cymatic. Confused, I began examining it magically. You can imagine my shock when I discovered that the stone wasn’t just mundane, it didn’t even give off the fundamental signatures of matter. No magic, no informational energy, just a blank slate. As if it didn’t exist at all.