“Kato v san neprobuden…”
“As if from a deep slumber…”
Names: Anarkhos, The Wheel of Havoc, Metron (formerly)
Domain: Formerly the laws of order and mathematics as they applied to art; presently, his powers seem only to reflect on mind-bending perversions of order and structure.
Loyalties: No divine loyalties, but Anarkhos will look after his own worshipers, should he acquire any. This is almost certainly a mixed blessing.
Holy Sites: None remaining. The lost city of Chorus has sunk deep into the earth, and is nigh inaccessible.
Motivations: Wanton destruction, revenge on who he perceives as his enemy, acquisition of power and authority. He also still seems interested in creating “art” but his definition of the word is closer to “abominations of geometry.” He’s been known to refer to his exploits as “performance pieces” as well.
History: Once, Anarkhos belonged to the Chorus, which was a collection of five muses of the arts. In these times, he was known as Metros, and he governed the laws of mathematics and order as they applied to art, with a particular fondness for fine mechanisms. At the dawn of an all-encompassing war, the leader of the Chorus deemed his fellows obsolete. The shrines of the Chorus were destroyed, their supplicants driven into exile or killed, and the holy city they had called home was abandoned.
Metron managed to survive somehow, and remained dormant through the millennia while the war raged above. Recently, he has begun to stir, though, and sleeps fitfully in his tomb. He is now known by the name Anarkhos, and he exists on the edge of waking; though he is far from being the most powerful deity, he would surely be a force to be reckoned with, if he were ever to claw his way back to power.
Appearance: Anarkhos appears as a spinning wheel of blades and claws, a being so warped he scarcely appears mechanical. He possesses a single, staring eye and speaks through the thirty gnashing mouths arrayed on his five arms. A mass of writhing tentacles coils and uncoils endlessly around him, eager to create more blasphemies of physics.
He was once a creature of elegant construction, and in his fury he has driven himself as far from the graceful geometries that once comprised his form, and has turned himself into this writhing, tentacled monstrosity. If he were ever gain enough consciousness and power to assume a Cybertronian form, he would appear as a mech who has been in some way mutilated as a reflection of the change of his true form.
Behavior: Despite the unbridled rage burning through every atom of this deity, he is not innately hostile to everyone. He would treat prospective supplicants as well as he could, and seems to still appreciate offerings that would have been appropriate for his original form. He’s particularly fond of timepieces. Anarkhos knows next to nothing of the new world he’s found himself in, and will, for now, reign in his hunger for destruction in favor of discovering what has changed and entertaining himself.
Anarkhos has a love-hate relationship with order, though, and if given the time and the means, will seek to dismantle what he deems as unnecessary order. He reacts with extreme prejudice against attempts to control or subdue him.
Other: He has thirty mouths, so now he’s his own chorus. (rimshot)
25th Chord, 14th Cycle
More than once as of late I have feared that this place might be driving me mad, and I would be convinced now, more than ever, were it not for the impossibility that I hold in my free hand, even as I write: that pocket chronometer, ticking softly in the pre-dawn darkness, defying every known natural law. I dreamed of the voice and the roaring darkness again for the first time in four days, and the voice spoke to me with greater clarity and calm than it ever has before. It did not wait for me to address it, but simply launched into its own speech the moment I became aware of its presence.
“Harmos’s responsibility was to make sure that each of us performed as we ought to, that we fulfilled our functions as the muses of our respective arts. I...” Here it faltered, uncertain. “I don’t know who turned him against us, but some entity outside of the Chorus convinced him that the coming struggle would render us, one and all, obsolete. He told us, before the end, that there was no place for art in war, and we would either sleep, or be reborn in the conflict that lay ahead. And then he had us all destroyed.”
“The war is over, now,” I replied. Something in the quality of the voice had changed. It seemed vulnerable, now, less commanding, less imperious.
“I know.” There was a moment of long silence. “Harmos didn’t survive, either. None of them did. Not even me.”
“And you are—“
“I was Metron. Who I am now, I don’t know.” There was no sense of great distress accompanying this statement. Rather, there was a lack of any sort of emotion that felt horrible in its own way. “There is no leader here. No leader, and nothing to lead.”
For the rest of the dream, I simply stayed in that space, listening as he spoke, repeating the words like a mantra. Even now, the echoes of them ring in my head, as vivid as any word ever spoken to me: “No leader. No leader. No leader.”
26th Chord, 14th Cycle
Last night, upon entering the roaring darkness, there was only silence. It stretched on until I could bear it no longer, so I began to speak. I could feel the presence of the dead god—no. Not dead. The sleeping god, whatever remained of Metron. I could feel it was there, and for a long, long time it simply existed in silence as I spoke. It listened. I told the voice about what we, as scholars, knew about the city of Chorus, what sorts of theories had been made about what life was like, how beautiful it must have been, what sorts of things we believed led to its collapse. It neither confirmed not contradicted anything I said, even when I presented it with theories that could not have existed together. It merely listened, until I began to speak of the possibility that one of its companions might yet live on in some form, changed or reincarnated in some way: Lyrica.
“If Lyrica survived, then perhaps the others did, too.” There was again that sense of resignation, that sad acceptance. “You said the war is over. If they weren’t reborn then, maybe they will be soon.”
“And you?” I asked. It did not answer, and did not speak again.
27th Chord, 14th Cycle
I am afraid. I do not think I can sleep tonight. I have packed the watch away because I cannot bear to listen to it ticking, for each soft sound brings me dangerously close to the memory of my last dream. I am loathe to revisit it long enough to commit it to this paper, but I feel that it is important now to stave off the feelings of deep dread that have risen within me, lest they consume me from within. I dreamed again, last night, and in the dream, what remained of Metron spoke to me again. It was angry. I knew it was angry the moment I entered the roaring darkness. “If Lyrica yet lives,” it said, “then some fragment of Harmos might persist.” I could not bring myself to speak in the face of that anger.
And then I felt a black hatred—such seething malevolence, the likes of which I have never felt before and hope never to again—I do not know how to describe it aside from a fury that was so savage that, even though I knew it was not directed at me, shook me to my very core. The emotion was so strong that it didn’t need to speak for me to understand it: there was a violent rejection of Harmos, of any echo of Harmos, of anything resembling the order that Harmos had once represented.
That rage—that terrible feeling—underneath it I could sense a pulse, like the beating of a spark, a constant cadence, a phrase that rang in the back of my mind, again and again. It was this being’s will never again to be subdued, and the words that had once been its sad and steady lament had been changed into a chant of war. No leader. No leader, ever again. An-arkhos, in the Protal vernacular.
Anarkhos.
28th Chord, 14th Cycle
I’ve seen him, by the Gods. I’ve seen him. I’ve seen him. I dare not speak that name, ever again. I regret writing it to paper. I fear that I have given him form by committing that bodiless voice to a name. I’ve tried to bring myself to destroy this journal, but I can’t. I physically cannot. What have I done? What have I done?
29th Chord, 14th Cycle
An eye. A single, terrible, unblinking eye in the center of a wheel, but a horrible perversion of the toothed wheel that was the symbol of Metron: a mass of whirling blades, claws orbiting that pitiless eye; a wheel of havoc turns endlessly at the back of my mind. I’ve seen him. The wheel writhes in a way no machine, or god of machines, should move. It is as if, in rejecting the order Hamos brought to the Chorus, he has rejected the order within himself, and sought to invert it in every way in an act of crazed defiance.
This being, changed though he was, still considered himself, in some form, a muse. He made something. He tried to show it to me, that first creation, but I could not parse it. It is some demoniac inversion of what was once the order and structure that he brought to art, nonsensical geometries that clashed with one another in an endless, roiling chaos. Even now the shape of the memory doesn’t want to stay in my mind, and I fear that it will rattle my thoughts from their moorings and leave me adrift.
I cannot bear to look upon that being or its creation again; I do not want to think of what sorts of things its twisted will with birth in the future. When I woke this morning I was full of such terror that I destroyed the chronometer. I do not know what awaits me tonight, when I sleep, but I fear it.
5th Chord, 15th Cycle
In the past week I have had no dreams that were in any way out of the ordinary, for which I am grateful. We will be leaving this site near the end of the month. My colleagues’ spirits have been rising steadily over the past few weeks, and despite the lack of solid information we have gathered on the lives of the mecha who lived here or the particulars of the Chorus, everyone is buoyed by the knowledge that they were right, and that the discovery of this place alone has made their careers. It has made mine, but I take no joy in this. Instead, I find myself perched on the edge of anxiety, always waiting for each evening to plunge me back into that horrible terror. I cannot banish the wheel from my mind; it turns and turns somewhere behind my eyes. If I am forced to look upon it again I fear I will lose my mind.
17th Chord, 15th Cycle
Tomorrow we are going home. I will be returning to the university as an academic hero, which is something we have precious few of in these years so recently after the terrible war. My story—that of a dauntless, determined scholar who convinced his superiors to take a chance, and who uncovered what might have been the greatest archaeological find of this millennium—will be told again and again by generations of students and instructors alike. The wheel is turning.
I wish we had never come here.
19th Chord, 15th Cycle
Whatever has become of what was once Metron, I do not think he is dead. He sleeps, though, and sometimes, when I sleep, I can feel his dreams. He is too lost in his own slumber to leave the tomb of Chorus. I sense in those dreams a terrible hunger for vengeance, and though I pity him as much as I fear him, I must not allow him to wake—or, at the very least, I will not allow myself to be the one that wakes him. I do not fear that he would directly harm me in any way. I feel that I have earned his loyalty, such as it is, as the first and only being to leave his favored offering in that bleak and abandoned shrine, the first and only supplicant of this new god. They say the devil takes care of his own. In this case, I believe it. Only his slumber keeps him there, though, and I feel that the only thing that would come of his waking would be destruction.
---
My dearest,
I want you to know, more than anything, that I love you, and, if I am able, I will come back to you. I have experienced things in lost Chorus that have changed me, and not for the better. I cannot live with those memories. Fear not, for I do not seek my own destruction. I apologize if I have seemed distant since returning to Polyhex, but I have been dragged, again and again, back into a fearful place in my mind that I know I will never escape on my own.
It is not the recent disaster that befell lost Chorus that has troubled me so—though it is regrettable that a second cataclysm has swallowed the city forever, making further excavation impossible, I feel only relief knowing that no mortal or immortal will ever tread those forsaken streets again. I am not reacting in some powerfully contrary way to the success of my career, nor am I being bribed or pressured by any of my colleagues or rivals. I wish I could tell you what troubles me so, but I fear that if I share this knowledge, then I will somehow bring this terror down upon you.
For I have been living, these past few weeks, in terror.
I have sought treatment from doctors, therapists, and processor-surgeons alike, to no avail. I have left to seek the temple of Memnos, the god of memory, to plead for relief from this burden, in hopes that the memory of what has followed me from Chorus will be destroyed. If I am successful, I will come back to you, hopefully lighter of spark, and able to bear whatever hardships the echo of that knowledge might leave with me. If Memnos cannot help me… I do not know what I will do. Seek deals with other deities, if I must. The trickster gods are unreliable, but even their capriciousness is preferable to what I presently endure. The god of the crossroads rarely comes when called, but I will try, if I must. I will never stop trying.
It is not only fear that has brought me to this point, but also guilt, because I feel that if I had never brought this expedition to fruition, none of this would have happened. I have spent my entire career unearthing ancient knowledge, bringing the oldest secrets to light, and I do not regret a large part of it.
I feel, however, that there are some things that are best left forgotten, and I hope to the Gods that I still possess within me the capacity to forget that which I have seen.
I will come back to you some day. I promise, my love.
So, short intro here: I’ve never done a genuine AU on this blog before, so I figured I’d give this Godformers thing a shot. I’m writing this largely for my own satisfaction, and it’s meant to be able to stand on its own as a story with parallels to Whirl’s history, but I’ll be happy to open RPing possibilities to anyone who might be interested at the story’s conclusion.
These events don’t necessarily adhere to any one strict continuity, but rather vaguely reference common events and terminology. All participants are, of course, Cybertronian. Also, the time measurements in these entries are not consistent with canon: think of Chords as days, and Cycles as months.))
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Taken from the journal entries of Linguistic Archaeologist Articulator
1st Chord 10th Cycle, Post-Unification
It is with great joy in my spark that I write this, my first entry, with the news that after a long struggle with the more narrow-minded powers that control this academic institution, our expedition to find the lost city of Chorus has been funded at last.
I am keeping this personal journal as a record of our expedition, in the hopes that, should we be successful, I may publish my memoirs with sufficient accuracy and, should we fail, I may have something to look back up on in the future to humble myself, lest I become overconfident in any future grandiose claims.
I, of course, being an accomplished archaeologist and the foremost expert on Protal Vernacular in the region, am here to translate any records we might find in the city. I will be accompanied by my contemporaries Knuckleboom, an accomplished geologist, Reclaimer, a theologic archaeologist and my academic partner on this proposition, as well as several students, who will handle the fieldwork with what I anticipate to be no shortage of enthusiasm, for this is their chance to make their mark on the field of archaeology before they have even earned their final titles.
Our expedition is still in the preliminary stages, and as such we won’t be setting out for several weeks, which should give us all ample time to gather our records and prepare ourselves for the trip.
(Inserted into the journal between these entries was a section that had been copy/pasted from an earlier work by Articulator, an academic essay written earlier in his career about the city of Chorus and the gods from which it took its name)
The city of Chorus was once home to the Chorus that gave it its name, these being the divine muses of the arts. A great many claims are made about the eventual fate of Chorus, but nobody is entirely sure how the city became lost or if it even existed as it is described in the myths. The most probable explanation is that, as the divine wars raged, it was simply abandoned for practical reasons. It was never built to be a defensible location and was of little to no strategic use to any side, so siege or attack was highly unlikely.
More fanciful tales tell of a great cataclysm that opened the ground and swallowed the city. This is not entirely implausible, as the region is known for its great yawning cave systems, but a sinkhole of such size would surely have left some mark on the surface.
As far as is known, no God had turned a vengeful eye on the city of Chorus. The muses were by and large neutral entities, dedicated wholly to the arts and the way art is expressed, with no strong affiliations to either spectrum in regards to the wider pantheon. They are not regarded as being especially important in current day. Their names live on in references to classical mythology, but they are no longer worshiped, or seen, and have no active role in the day-to-day lives of we mecha, as the other Gods very clearly do. Their shrines have long since disappeared from the world; any rituals that speak of their preferred methods of worship or their offerings have no definitive record. What we do know about the Chorus is precious little:
Said to be the greatest in power and chief of the muses was Harmos, the Muse of harmony. His principle role was to guide the actions of all the other muses into a single cohesive whole. Harmos was honored on days coinciding with great celestial events, such as eclipses and planetary conjunctions, as this was believed to be a wider representation of his work in the arts.
Lyrica was the muse of words, and was strongly associated with song, poetry, and the power language. These days, poets, playwrights, and novelists invoke Versos, who is believed to be a reincarnation of Lyrica and the current host of the power he once held.
Metron was the muse of structure, and governed the laws of mathematics and mechanics as they applied to art. Metron was strongly associated with the marriage of form and function, with some vague ties to architecture. It is said his preferred offering was his favorite artistic endeavor: the timepiece.
Coda was the muse of the end. Coda was associated with sadness in art, from dirges, to tragedies, all forms of poignant verse. “Beauty from sorrow” is a phrase that some claim can be traced back, linguistically, to prayers to this muse, but I have found no strong links to this in my studies. This muse is of special interest to me, as it is the one who ignited my passion for the lost city of Chorus.
Tempos was the muse of dance and graceful movement. This muse, more than any other, had the strongest connection to music. Since the fall of Chorus, many new Gods have risen that now have strong ties to both music and dance, but they seem to have no connection to Tempos, and it’s widely believed that any power this deity once held has faded.
11th Chord, 12th Cycle
I have been regrettably remiss in the regular upkeep of this journal in the days leading up to our expedition, but there is quite simply very little to write about. All of our time has been taken up in rather humdrum preparations that scarely require notation here. It takes a good deal of paperwork to move such a large undertaking through foreign territory, especially in the wake of the war. There is also the matter of provisioning ourselves and hiring outside of the university for such tasks that fall out of our academic purview, such as nurses and operators for the heavy-duty machinery—all necessary, but incessantly dull tasks.
14th Chord, 13th Cycle
Tomorrow we will be leaving, at last! A small gathering of my closest friends came to my home tonight for a going-away dinner, which was perfectly lovely, and likely the last time I am to enjoy vintage high-grade for the rest of the year. I feel I will miss the company of my conjunx even more, but even in the field, it is not difficult to keep in touch.
19th Chord, 13th Cycle
We’ve arrived at our excavation site at last. Even if I had not suspected the sad remains of a once-great city lurked beneath our feet, I would have recognized the pall that hangs over this saturnine place; the land is barren and unwelcoming, washed-out from periodic floods from the rust sea. This, I’ve been told, is part of the reason why the cave systems beneath the silt are so extensive; the sea seeps down and erodes its way through the softer metals, following gradually-formed channels that have widened to pools and caverns over the centuries.
26th Chord, 13th Cycle
At last, our first sign! We’ve uncovered what seems to be a section of outer wall. I must caution myself against optimism, because this wall could be part of any number of structures, and in fact our geologist has assured us that this structure has not been buried nearly as long as the city of Chorus has been lost. I remain stubbornly hopeful.
28th Chord, 13th Cycle
We’ve uncovered more and more buildings. There are signs of relatively recent, but temporary habitation here—sometime in the last million or so years, during the course of the war—and we believe these outer ruins were used as places to temporarily shelter while traveling through the otherwise featureless land. So far we have found no large structures or anything more sophisticated than a simple dwelling.
Stratigraphic records indicate that these structures have been gradually buried, rather than concealed through a single, cataclysmic event. Our geologist has pointed out, with great enthusiasm, the bands in which we can see a lack of the lighter silt sediments, indicating drought years, which he has matched up to historical records of such events. We are digging deeper, and we are going further back in time as we do.
4th Chord, 14th Cycle
I scarcely know whether to categorize today as an unprecedented success or a disaster. The only reason I countenance the first is that I retire tonight with the knowledge that none of my team have been seriously injured; one of our students took a nasty knock on the head today, but has since rallied admirably and has been cleared by out medic to be quite fine, aside from a slight concussion. The student in question is less bothered with the injury than our medic was, and expressed, over dinner, a great deal of amusement to be the first person to have been knocked unconscious during the discovery of a lost city.
During our regular excavations, there was an enormous collapse. I did not see it happen, but I witnessed the aftermath: apparently our digging equipment, while moving further and further into the layers of silt, caused too much stress on the weakest parts of a cavern roof, which promptly collapsed and swallowed one third of the camp into it. A great deal of equipment have been lost, as have many excavation sites that we’d been painstakingly caring for. On a very personal note, several of my instruments were broken, as well as a lovely pocket chronometer I had purchased as a gift for myself upon my last promotion.
After we’d accounted for everyone and dragged our poor unconscious student to the medic, we ventured down into the mysterious, stygian chamber with lamps in hand to investigate what dread hunger had interrupted out work.
And there it was; largely collapsed, dashed upon the rocks below like a poorly-constructed model of a city. It had been locked away, sealed in this cavern for untold millennia. The level of preservation is highly inconsistent. In some places we could see the original panels of constructed streets, and in others liquid erosion had all but wiped away everything except the natural metal. There was no mistaking what remained of the ordered structures that could be glimpsed among the tumbled walls and the avenues half-smothered with silt.
For we have, at last, unearthed the city of Chorus.
*please accept the offering of a pocket watch from a frustrated artist*
He was aware of the offering the moment it was made, and was delighted, but the sleeping god could only respond to his supplicants in dreams, so he waited until they were asleep.
He didn’t properly appear to them in the dream–he was still weak, still old and forgotten and not yet full of the vitality that comes with a proper rebirth. There was enough left of him to do what he’d always done for his worshipers, though: he peered into their mind, seeing the knot of frustration that tangled their thoughts, and stifled the flow of their creativity.
I’ve been dead for so many years, and somehow you’ve remembered me. I always did like mortals a little more than my fellows. It should’ve come as no great surprise that a muse’s connection to the mortal realm was a bit stronger than most, as their powers often manifested themselves through mortals. You poor thing, Anarkhos said soothingly, you’ve put shackles on your mind.
Some shade of his physical being flickered briefly into being to wind the supplicant in a sinuous embrace. It seemed to come from all directions at once, unraveling until it had wound its way into the boundaries that caged the artist’s thoughts. Let me inspire you.
With a single, wrenching twist, those boundaries were gone. The artist would wake tomorrow with a mind filled with impossible visions, the vague memory of being wrapped in that bizarre embrace, and a feeling that was not so much inspiration as it was a frenzied need to create.
5th Chord, 14th Cycle
The ruins of Chorus tell us an unusual and fascinating tale. There are absolutely no Cybertronian remains here—the cataclysm that claimed the city happened long after it had been abandoned. We’ve made a rough map of what portion of the city remains underground, and it’s certain that more of the city’s outskirts remain buried above us, in the silt. We’ve also carefully tracked the areas of intense destruction and corroborated these with the surrounding signs of long-term erosion, but there are some intriguing inconsistencies that suggests it was the work of a will, rather than nature, that is responsible for some of the devastation.
We have thus far located the temple of Coda and the central shrine of Tempo. They are sadly destroyed, and I have been able to glean precious little information out of what remains of the inscriptions on the shattered walls and the mournful remains of the once-fantastical mosaics. Our theo-archaeologist has, with cautious optimism, suggested that some records may yet remain in catacombs underneath the temples, but I find the prospect highly doubtful. This is because the temples seem to have been deliberately razed. They were not worn away by years of flooding, or fractured in the collapse. More than any other part of Chorus, these holy sites have been systematically destroyed, and all evidence indicates that this destruction happened long, long ago, possibly when the city was still inhabited.
No records exist of either side of the war effort targeting the city of Chorus; nor do any religious records exist naming the muses that lived here as enemies of any god or their followers. It is entirely possible that grave-robbers and treasure-hunters were responsible for these events after the city had been abandoned, but it is still a curious discovery.
7th Chord, 14th Cycle
We have unearthed the central shrine of Harmos today. What a magnificent building this must have been! Surely the grandest of all the structures built to honor the muses, it occupied a place in the city’s heart. We believe that we can extrapolate the remaining temples based on the locations of the ones we’ve uncovered and their relative position to the central shrine of Harmos. Frustratingly, though this temple is in better condition than the previous two we’ve found, there is precious little information to be gleaned from it; the inscriptions have been deliberately chiseled from the walls, and any statues or reliquaries that might have been here have either been taken or are broken beyond recognition.
8th Chord, 14th Cycle
We discovered the temple of Lyrica today. It was utterly destroyed.
11th Chord, 14th Cycle
I have found myself, despite the monumental nature of this discovery and the knowledge of what it will do for my career, growing increasingly more melancholy. I can tell that Reclaimer shares my mood. Though we are mecha dedicated to knowledge, we still honor and revere our gods; they are as real to us as the ruins upon which we stand, as the scientific methods through which we discern details about these long-ago times and places.
Perhaps it is standing in the sad remains of what was once a place of art and beauty. Perhaps it is knowing we walk on the graves of gods. Either way, my spark has grown heavy these past few days, and I do not know how to ease its burden.
13th Chord, 14th Cycle
I have noticed something strange. Those of us at the site—the students, we instructors, and the laborers working for us—have come to a consensus without ever having spoken a word to one another. At the shattered shrines, members of the expedition have been leaving small trinkets, and more than once I have seen people making the triangular holy symbol with their fingers at the doorstep of each of these cruelly demolished buildings. At dinner tonight, once he had finished taking his sustenance, our theo-archaeologist filled the small basin that served as his dinner-plate, poured a minute quantity of oil into it, and lit it. A small, but serviceable flame burned in the basin for hours, the closest approximation we could come to a sacred candle. It is obvious to me that all of my colleagues must feel, to some degree, this lingering miasma of woefulness, and we have all decided, discretely and silently, that even dead gods are worthy of our respect.
14th Chord, 14th Cycle
Today we have uncovered the shrine of the last remaining muse, Metron. It, too, has been regrettably destroyed—the walls broken, the altar shattered. No etchings or records remain. The only sign we have left of this dead muse is a sole remaining bas-relief above where the altar used to be, carved in the shape of one of Metros’ favored holy symbols: the toothed wheel, a gear. Moved by the sight, so especially forlorn and out of place amidst such ruination and despair, I left the only offering on my person I felt suitable: my broken pocket-chronometer, placed on the temple floor where Metron’s altar would have been.
15th Chord, 14th Cycle
I have had a most vivid and frightful dream. I have just woken up, and I feel compelled to commit these visions to paper, not for fear that I will forget them, but for fear that if I do not, they will somehow fester in my processor, like a spot of rust. I only remember a dreadful roaring darkness, and somewhere in the tumult a voice, asking over and over, “What has become of my city?” I could not muster any strength of will to answer. The call was plaintive, and even now the memory of it wrenches at my spark. I feel that the ancient grief of this place has seeped into my very subconscious. Tomorrow we are going to shift our focus to excavating more of the dwellings in the city, to see what information we can learn about the people who once lived here. Perhaps spending time away from the forsaken temples of these dead gods will give me peace of mind.
16th Chord, 14th Cycle
It is dawn, and I am weary. The same dream came to me again tonight, only now the voice has become angry, filling me with fear. So great was my agitation that I found myself unable to sleep after having been jarred awake, and I have spent the past few hours vainly chasing rest. I can only hope that these visions fade as I focus on more practical work. The pall that had once hovered over the sparks of my companions seems to be lifting, and I will do my best to draw from their cheer to bolster mine.
17th Chord, 14th Cycle
The same dream, tonight.
18th Chord, 14th Cycle
I spoke to it, and it spoke to me. As I write this, I am frightened. Tonight I had the same dream, only instead of clawing my way into consciousness, I answered the voice. I recognized that I was in the dream the moment it began, as I have since the second night, and perhaps out of a desire to drive the vision from my head, I raised my voice, and I received an answer in return.
“What has become of my city?”
“It is destroyed. Chorus is no more.”
There was no verbal response, only a wave of anger and despair. The possessive way in which the being spoke led me to wonder of its identity, and, given some amount of courage by the knowledge that I was standing in the realm of my own dreaming mind, I spoke again. “Did you build this city? Are you the memory of the muses who lived here?” No response. “Are you their leader?”
The reply was swift and vehement, “There is no leader here.”
“Who are you?”
Only silence, after which, I awoke. It was morning, and time to work.
20th Chord, 14th Cycle
I cannot account for the purpose behind the disturbing fancy that has taken root in my mind. My dreams have become ever more vivid, and now possess a sense of continuity. For the past two nights, I have dreamed again of this voice, and carried on a conversation with it. The first of these two evenings was by far the most frightful, because it was the first time I felt the full brunt of this unnamed entity’s anger. As I slipped into the familiar dark space in my dream, I once again heard the voice. “Why are you here? Why are all of you here?”
“We are mecha of learning, and we have come to study this city. Until recently, many did not even believe the city of Chorus existed. We are here to make record of it, so that it is never again forgotten.” The voice remained silent, but I felt a sense of satisfaction from it—satisfaction tinged with something else, a sort of resignation. The exact feeling is difficult to define: it was rather like a sort of sorrowful acceptance of something inevitable, but deep and much too complex for mere words to record. I let it pass over me, and, desiring to clear it from the air, I asked the question that had slowly been forming in my mind, “Are you Harmos?”
“Harmos. Harmos.” With each repetition, a new emotion flooded into the void. First realization, followed by shock. “Harmos! HARMOS!” And then, quite unexpectedly, I was struck with a wave of anger so deep, so dreadful, that I could feel my mind clawing away the last vestiges of unconsciousness, preferring the shelter of simple mortal weariness rather than braving another instant washed in this dreadful rage. I awoke, and remained awake for the rest of the night.
The following evening I dreaded sleep, and tried to stave off slumber for as long as I could, but weariness ultimately overtook me. Perhaps some signal from my body, which was beginning, after so many nights of incomplete rest, to show signs of exhaustion, had some role in shaping the events of my dream, for this time, when I entered the roaring darkness, the voice was distant, subdued, as if it had withdrawn. It spoke three simple statements to me: “Harmos betrayed us; he killed them all. Retrieve your offering tomorrow.” And then my mind tumbled into mercifully dreamless sleep. I have only made one offering in all my time here in Chorus. I think, for my own peace of mind, I will do as the voice said. Perhaps in the completion of the act my mind will absorb some sense of finality and close this frightful dream-narrative once and for all.
(entered further down the page)
The watch I left in the shrine of Metron is working again. I cannot account for it. I opened it to examine it and nearly half of its delicate innards poured out into my hands, but when I closed it again and gazed upon the face, it was still working. I don’t know how this could happen, but I am afraid.
21st Chord, 14th Cycle
I did not dream last night.
((*uses his innumerable dread tentacles to spray paint the anarchy symbol on as many surfaces as possible. Inexplicably, they all look like crappy geocities-era animated gifs*))
