Recovered from the ruined study within the demiplanar donjon — water-stained pages, scattered rather than bound, in the hand of Ashyra herself. Presented here roughly in the order they were written.
“My name was Ashyra Veil, for whatever that’s still worth to anyone. I have not knelt at an altar in longer than I can say, and yet I want, and yet I am answered. Let that trouble whichever god still bothers to look for me. I do not need to be chosen to be capable. I only ever needed to be clever enough to take what was never going to be given.”
“It is not an altar, and it is not a god, but it answers like one if I feed it enough. I bring it what the dreadnought drops — meat, bone, whatever this place has finished with — and it gives back more than I put in, the way a hearth gives back more warmth than the log you laid on it. I have stopped calling it a well. A well does not want. This wants. I have simply been careful never to give it enough to matter.”
“The wards around this study, and the ring outside it, are the same working as the chamber door — lead and old law bent to the same purpose: keep the worst of what’s out there from ever reaching in. The gate took longer. I built it in pieces, over more years than I let myself count, waiting each time for the dreadnought to swallow some new fool’s forgotten cargo — a hinge here, a keystone there — until finally there was enough of the world’s own metal and craft in it to open.”
“At the spell weaver ruins by the Great Rift, I found reference to a thing not yet born and already dead — a stillbirth adrift somewhere out past the world’s own light, dreaming of the moment it finally opens its eyes. They wrote of it the way one writes of weather, inevitable and far off, and did not seem to understand what they were describing. I understood. I have spent my whole life being hunted by gods who feared what I might become. I would give a great deal to see them feel, even once, what it is to be afraid of something that cannot be reasoned with or prayed to. Perhaps that thing, when it wakes, will do what I never could.”
“I have avoided writing the name for a long time, as though not naming it kept it from being true. It is not simply divine residue, not simply a fragment. I have seen what it does to the meat I feed it, how it doesn’t rot so much as continue. I believe it is Moander, or what centuries left of him. I do not know if that changes anything I do here. I suspect it changes everything.”
[a final entry, in a hastier, uneven hand] “Something is wrong tonight. I feel it in my own blood now, not just in the offerings I bring it. I will not let it finish what it’s started in me. Whatever comes next, I do not accept that this ends me. I have refused every god that ever tried to end me. I will refuse this too.”
Scrawled across the shelves
Not part of the journal proper — written separately, in dried, rust-dark streaks across the bookshelves and the wall above her writing desk, in a hand nothing like her neat journal script