[The following is the annotated journal of an unknown Hartstone Druid, found
and transcribed by Zia Talnara in the year 194.]

Walking through the Skarch is in some ways like walking through the Astral
plane. Flurries of sand obscure the vision and make even the mountains looming
nearby seem to be strange and distorted. Every step is a step that must be
taken with care lest there is a patch of shifting ground or a sand cobra coiled
just out of sight. It is the bleakness of the place that most reminds me of
Astral, the aching barrenness under the glare of Father Sun.

There is little to make me enter the Skarch, but in the autumn of 194 I went to
make a sketch of the cacti that grows only in the southeastern part of the
desert, near the lucidian encampment. I had just sat down to draw the plant
when a little movement caught my attention. It was a journal half-buried in the
sand. A feather served as a bookmark, and it was that flutter in the hot wind
that drew my attention. I picked the book up, and although the cover was
cracked and worn, it fell open in my hands to the marked page, which was
heavily splattered with blood.

What follows is an exact transcription of what could be deciphered in the
journal. I have noted in the text details regarding the original condition of
the book, adding comments only at the end.

- Zia Talnara

* * *

25 Roarkian 173

My friends and guildmates are at the Moonhart Mother ready to celebrate a new
year, but I don't feel like attending. The sun set a few hours ago, and I felt
merry, then suddenly a sense of deep dread washed over me. I looked up into the
darkening sky and felt miniscule and powerless. I know that Mother Moon watches
over us, but the endless face of Mother Night seems so vast sometimes that I
shiver and am afraid.

I think I will end this here and leave these thoughts behind. It would do me
some good to celebrate with my friends, and an ill start to the new year to
dwell on such things.

- P -

8 Estar 174

I usually enjoy sleeping, but I think I'll start using my control not to. Momma
caught a winter cold and passed it along, and for some reason it hit me hard.
I've been feverish and having bad dreams. Sometimes I see Glomdoring, though
never have I laid eye on it in waking. What disturbs me most is how calm and
soothing my dream self finds this vision, as though I am intimately familiar
with the warped landscape. Other nights, I dream of running desperately through
the Serenwilde. Something pursues me, or more than one thing... I am mindless
with terror. Then I trip over a protruding root and land on my hands and knees.
The thing leaps at me before I can move, and there is a flash of pain in my
vitals and something closing around my throat...

I've woken sweating and shaking for the past few nights from one of these
dreams or the other. The healers are treating the illness, so it should pass
soon, and I can stay awake until it is gone. Daddy always said fever-dreams are
the worst.

- Pen -

13 Urlachmar 174

I know I shouldn't be dreaming. I don't need to sleep. Yet I had that dream
again... I saw the southern forest, and the undead standing at their twisted
nexus with the crows flying overhead. Was I in my dreambody or hallucinating?
I've been reluctant to even use dreamweaving lately.

It felt so real this time, though, I wondered if I had walked through the dream
realm and was actually there. I stood before the Ravenwood - there were eyes
glowing in the trees, and the undead druid himself stared at me with his face
empty of all life and yet unnaturally animated. The horror of it turned my
stomach. Then with a flick of his wrist, he sent a shadowy web floating through
the air towards me, and powerless was I to move even as the thing unfolded and
opened to enclose my body. I tried to scream as I was entangled and drawn
irresistably forward towards the Ravenwood to be consumed.

I've dreamed this sort of thing before, but what struck me this time is that
the web itself felt alive... it wanted me, it was sentient and it had chosen
me. I was blessed among women. I would be saved from the putrid remnants of the
Serenwilde, I would be drawn from stagnancy and made anew in the Wyrd...

What lunacy is this? For a moment I was swayed and I wanted to be infested
with... I just can't write this down anymore. I don't want to talk to my
guild... no, I'm sure it will pass. I have faith.

- Pen -

21 Kiani 174

I am losing control of my dreamweaving powers. There have been no waking dreams
since my last, and so I dared venture into my dreambody yesterday. I was quickly
overwhelmed with a sense of vertigo, of unbelonging... it was as though my
conscious self was severed and drifting no where. I think I blacked out, for
when I came to myself, I was descending the hills and steps from the southern
border of Glomdoring. I know I was not dreaming, for as I felt my legs moving
of their own accord. My heart yearned to enter the forest, but my mind
panicked. I ripped my body to myself - I don't know why I didn't think to leap
back to the Serenwilde. When I reunited with my body, I was indeed on the
fringes of Glomdoring.

More disturbingly, as I struggled not to cry aloud, I looked with fear into the
forest, and there was a dark figure standing before my eyes. It was a ghost, but
not like the spirit of Chuchip. It was... I guess it would be called a shade, a
sorry imitation of life, and its eyes burned purple with the tainted Wyrd.

It took all my will to crawl away from this wraith - yes, I had to crawl like a
beast, fighting the compulsion to run into Glomdoring.

I will not be dreamweaving again.

- P -

15 Dioni 174

I have not slept for three days, and not from any control dreamweaving gave me.
I am exhausted beyond anything I have ever felt... lifting the pen is even an
effort, but I cannot bear to hear that voice in my dreams again. It tells me

[The page is torn in half here.]

19 Dioni 174

She whispers in the back of my mind, most often between dusk and midnight. She
lies to me until I can barely see the face of the truth... Mother Moon, do you
hear me praying? I cannot go to the Ethereal realm to speak to the Avatars or
tend to the Aspects. The Mother tree itself is painful, for I see druids,
druids of Brother Hart, hung in gruesome rows from the branches. And the voice
does not whisper then, it begins to keen and echo around me like a thousand
wails of despair. Drops of blood fall to the ground in this vision, and land
like trees crashing upon the ground. Bloated faces, lolling tongues, eyes
rolled in horror... She lies to me. These have to be lies.

I must sleep. I must sleep. I must sleep.

6 Vestian 174

I am not this person. I am not this voice. She names me Zakiyyah, and being her
name it is well enough for my own. I woke and did not know where I was, but that
there were bloodied feathers on my hand and an empty nest at my feet.

The world is cruel. Life is cruel. I am

No, of course not. But I see her now, Zakiyyah, behind trees, lingering in each
shadow, just around the corner, and I want to find her... I want her story. I
cannot help but think that those I called 'guildmates' and 'friends' are
witholding information. They look at me from the corners of their eyes. They
whisper, and stop speaking when I enter their presence. I think they know that
I have seen the druids hanging from the Mother tree, and that the only people
who have ever held sway over this land and this forest are the druids and the
wiccans, those I thought so benevolent. I have been raised by lies and taught
lies and believed! Zakiyyah would know the truth of all this. I will find her
and ask.

20 Vestian 174

I knew her at once. Even wreathed in the shadow of death, I knew her. I had
seen her face far, far too many times - hair awry, purple eyes rolled back into
her skull, olive skin obscured by bloat, blood pooling under her limp body. She
had been hanged from the changeless Mother tree! They had ripped apart her
life...

She explained it all to me, how she had wanted transformation and change. All
life must bend to grow, she said, and if it cannot bend alone it needs our help
before all falls into stagnation and rot. To punish this? Misguided,
treacherous, vile!

She wishes me to meet someone in the dreamworld, a man she has watched over as
she does me. I told her that I am afraid, but she only says that fear is a
disease and an oozing wound. Sometimes such things must be burnt from the
flesh, cut away as you would a gangrenous limb. The pain itself will be
clarity.

When she calls me, I will go.

- P. Zakiyyah -

2 Avechary 174

[Waterstains obscure parts of this entry.]

... one of the dark faelings. His eyes haunt me. They frightened me, but I
approached as she bade me, and then I felt her presence surge into my mind and
nearly black out my thoughts. ... eyes flashed purple. I was Zakiyyah, and
somehow so was he, and we came together ...

... no difference between us. There was only the one, only Zakiyyah, only her
will. For a moment, I saw her thoughts as my own, and through them the thoughts
of the man. ... felt such sadness, loneliness, loss - and from Zakiyyah the
burning desire to transform by force. I think she wants ... The light faded and
then I woke ...

... afraid of the future. I will burn before ... purge the weakness. ... for
Zakiyyah.

[Several pages are torn from the journal at this point.]

11 Roarkian

The baby I am having is Zakiyyah. She tells me no, she cannot take corporeal
form, but I know. I know. She cannot fool me. I am giving her a life again. I
will stay in the Serenwilde though the winter, but the spring will find me with
Zakiyyah in Glomdoring. We will find the dark faeling, the father, and we will
raise her up and she will teach us how to spread the Wyrd.

I won't go out into the forest except at night. I don't want Zakiyyah exposed
to the festering Serenwilde.

- P. Zakiyyah -

17 Estar 175

She still insists that the baby is not herself, and she has given me a name to
give to it - but it is a girl's name, and so I know that she is lying. I am not
angry, and I try not to be upset, that she cannot trust me to know about her
reincarnation. If Seren found out, they would smother the baby in her cradle.
They might kill me before the birth. If they can hang druids in rows from the
Mother, and all of these only people who believed in change and moving towards
perfection, then a child destined to overrun their foul stench with the beauty
of the Wyrd... they would kill her without blinking, and I must protect her at
all costs.

9 Kiani

Zakiyyah does not talk to me now. I tell myself this is because soon she will
be born, but it is hard not to panic without her voice to calm me. I can only
touch my stomach and imagine how it will be when she is born again. I want to
go to Glomdoring, but I don't know where to go, what to do first. She will tell
me. I will wait. I can wait. I have no choice.

Nothing matters but Zakiyyah.

- PZ -

3 Dioni

Pain started in the morning, but I wanted the child born under the face of
Mother Night, and so I held my tongue and endured. Late in the afternoon, they
found me gasping, and I was secluded with the midwife. They did not understand
that the pain was a joy, burning out the disease of the Serenwilde even as it
prepared my body to deliver Zakiyyah.

I did not want the Seren wench to touch the child, but so it had to be.
Zakiyyah could not help me, and so it was that a Seren would play midwife to
the demise of the Serenwilde.

Hours passed. I remember little, although I relished in the pain as it came
faster and faster, and then I was told to push, and so I did, and again I was
told, and again I pushed, wave after wave until she was born.

And the midwife gasped before she turned to lay Zakiyyah in the cradle. I knew
what was to come. Her aura was easy to recognize, even in the infant form she
possessed. The midwife knew. I trembled and bled as I pulled myself to my feet
- but pain does not weaken, it strengthens. One blow to the back of her skull
with the marble finished it, and there was blood all over the floor. I did not
know what was mine or what belonged to the wretch fallen at my feet.

The child... the child was marked over as though tattooed, but I was taken
aback. I saw the face of Mother Night imprinted across the left side of her
pelvis, but it was a kind, gentle Night that I did not expect. And on the right
side, the rib cage, it was not Crow, it was Brother Raven poised in flight.
Tendrils of darkness wrapped around her limbs... but she had the dark wings of
the man, and so I knew she had not been snatched or traded for another baby
while I lay dazed from the birth. I stepped over the midwife and took the child
and we left, slowly, my blood and the woman's still scattered across my clothing
and the line of the baby's nose and cheek.

We have gone to Skarch, and we will stay here until Zakiyyah is old enough to
tell where to go to Glomdoring. I feel weak.

[Undated]

When will she tell me? I am lost...

Dvarsh 175

I dreamed of the child grown into a woman, a stunning faeling with Zakiyyah's
purple eyes. She laid her hand upon the verdant forest floor - it might have
been in the Serenwilde - and the wyrd spread from her fingers, spread through
the wholesome grass, warped the underbrush, darkened the emerald leaves
overhead.

It was the most glorious thing I have ever witnessed, waking or sleeping.

Juliary

I am nearly too tired to write. The lucidian healer has begun feeding me a vile
concoction that tastes rather like sand and wakabi dung. I find myself so calm
after, though, and the dreams stop plaguing my waking moments, and I sleep like
the dead.

They tell me that children learn to speak around their first birthday. I can be
patient. Zakiyyah will tell me when she can.

- P. Z. -

13 Dioni 176

I will not take the potion anymore. My mind is clearing... I wonder if they
were poisoning me. Every day I wait eagerly. She will talk soon! She will thank
me for this year of such loneliness, and my sacrifice that she could be born
again. I will sit at her right hand and we shall feast upon the Basin, we shall
transform the very face of the land and the souls of the people. The wyrd is
life, and the wyrd shall consume life. We will all of us be remade in her
image: Zakiyyah the brave-hearted and serene, Zakiyyah the wise and powerful,
Zakiyyah the fated, the leader, everything...

[Undated, the last entry is scrawled in wavering print. Drops of blood obscure
some of the message, and the entire bottom half of the parchment is so drenched
in dried blood that nothing can be made of its contents.]

She is not Zakiyyah. ... in despair. I don't know what ... go to Glomdoring
anyway. I have faith in her. I can't give it up. Maybe the child ... destined
for great things anyway. But ... am alone, alone, alone.

I can't ... and I've decided to leave ... in the care of the lucidians. I have
left instruction that she be sent to Glomdoring as ... out of the Portal of
Fate. I just can't ... not without Zakiyyah. ... find the man and find
Zakiyyah.

Daughter, always remember to ... And don't trust the Serenwilde. They have
killed your mother. I must find her in the next ... They are ... and deluded.
Make sure ...

24 Kiani 190

[Written in a distinctly different hand.]

It is my fifteenth birthday, and after all this time I think it suitable to
provide for the rest of my history. If no one else, my father may be interested
in the years that passed between my birth and my coming of age, for I wish to
follow the instructions left to me and find him. There is little enough to go
on. He was a faeling, and she met him in the dreamworld, so he must be a
dreamweaver as well.

But whatever the case of my parentage, the woman who wrote the proceeding pages
killed herself when I was about fifteen months of age. I was apparently with her
in that moment, for the lucidians have told me that they found her lying in her
own blood and they thought she had murdered me before taking her own life. I
was, they say, sleeping against her dead body and covered over in her blood.

It is obvious even to me that the woman was insane, or at least driven to
lunacy by the Zakiyyah she wrote of so often. I cannot have much sympathy for
her weakness, however much I try. I am told that I look nothing like her, that
she was fair and tall where I am dark and tiny. I would rather think of
Zakiyyah as my mother, for that sort of power and manipulation is admirable. I
think she must have chosen the woman knowing that the experience would be too
much for her, and so that I have no maternal ties to she who gave me birth. I
am free to forge a bond with my father when we are reunited.

The lucidians raised me with the finest education they could muster, alongside
their own children. I am grateful for the effort they made on my behalf, but I
am eager to leave this place and these people. My home is in Glomdoring and my
place is there with the druids of the Blacktalon. I think even without this
journal to put my existance into context, I would know that. The only trouble I
have is how to find my father. Faeling, dreamweaver, old enough to have sired a
child sixteen years ago... how many men fit this description? I can only remind
myself to be strong, and trust that Zakiyyah will emerge with some sign to
indicate the truth to us.

* * *

We in the Serenwilde have long understood the Wyrd as a subtle, seductive
force. The nature of its attraction has been largely a mystery however, though
most of us have watched friends or family succumb to its temptation, or we have
befriended those fortunates who saw the truth and freed their lives from its
clutches.

I have transcribed this journal foremost for its insight into the nature of the
Wyrd and its power over even the pure-hearted. This is not the story of a woman
drawn by the promise of power, glory, or fame. This is a person who was used,
the very core of her being stripped down to nothing as she was driven insane.

The Wyrd is sly, however. The spirit showed to this unknown woman, this Pen or
P, a sliver of the truth. It is recorded fact there was a group of Hartstone
druids hanged from the Mother Moonhart tree at some point in our history. The
brutality of this was necessary because of their efforts in spreading the
vileness of the Wyrd within our very borders.

The indication, of course, is that the spirit who called herself Zakiyyah was
one of those misguided souls who were hanged from the Tree that day. We know
that the spirits of these were eventually sent to live within Glomdoring
forest, and that they can infest the followers of Crow in the dark rite of
rebirth. There is no way to confirm this conjecture, but Zakiyyah may be the
dark spirit of the shadowcaster faeling mentioned in the journal.

Perhaps most intriguing in all of this is the brief mention of the markings on
the child's body at her birth. If all the details are to be trusted, this is a
child born through the meddling of the Wyrd. She claims little relation to the
author of this journal and openly admires the spirit who drove her mad. All
this, yet at her birth it was the untainted and un-Wyrded faces of Night and
Brother Raven. Is this the result of the innocence of childhood, a
representation that there is hope for this child to free herself from the Wyrd?
Or is this another cruel joke, a touch of irony that the Wyrd would inscribe the
true faces of the Great Spirits on this child?

Whatever the exact details of this woman's life, and her untimely suicide, I
believe the journal serves as a mute testimony to why exactly the Serenwilde is
so adverse to Glomdoring. As for the unnamed daughter, chances seem likely that
she is currently in the dark forest, but the journal is blank after her single
entry, and the lucidians refuse to speak of ever taking in an insane woman and
her newborn child.

- Zia Talnara, 14 Klangiary 194