Page 34 of Blood Red Woes

I shut the journal and cause a whiff of dust to fly at my face. I wave it away as I say, “Looks like our guy went onward from here. It sounds like he left this journal here because he assumed Frederick would try to follow his trail eventually, if he never came back.” And he would’ve been right, had the guards not stopped Frederick from leaving.

I haven’t run into any more storms lately, so maybe Frederick could’ve made it here on his own. But that’s taking a chance, a chance that might’ve killed him.

“It appears we must go forth, to Acadia’s castle. I know you don’t want to see any of the empresses, but you might not have a choice,” Rune says.

Getting up, I stuff the journal into my bag. “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. I want to search the rest of the tower before we go, just to make sure there’s nothing else important here.” Even if I can’t find Fred’s body anywhere or his other research, at least I found his journal. It’ll be something to bring back to Frederick.

“Good idea.”

I work my way down. Some of the floors hold nothing but old, withered garden pots with plants long since dead. One of the floors has nothing but maps upon maps. All useless to me.

As I work my way down, floor after floor, I find more books. Old, thick tomes. Bookshelf upon bookshelf, it comes to a point where I’m surrounded by smelly tomes, and the sheer volume of books overwhelms me.

Shit. There’s no way I can go through each and every book just to see if there’s anything pertaining to portals or the woes in here.

Rune must read my mind, because he suggests, “Why don’t we venture onward, hmm? We can always swing by the tower on the way back to Laconia if we don’t find our researcher.” He is right. We should move on. Coming back wouldn’t be too hard since the tower is just off the river.

So, even though I had grand plans of searching through the tower, we leave. Before we go, I do wash my clothes and take a quick bath in the river—as good as I can, anyway, since I have no soap. Before I know it, I’m zooming along the river, moving on.

Acadia’s castle isn’t close to the tower. It’s not quite in the heart of Acadia; more like on its opposite end, where the river eventually empties out into a big basin surrounded by plains. Even zipping along the water like this, it’s going to take me days to get there. And all the while, all I can do is hope that time isn’t passing the same back home, that only a few minutes have passed.

That I haven’t lost everything.

The deeper I get into Acadia, the more I start to realize just how wrong this is. So much empty space. So few villages, scattered in between. Many of them are on the river side—and I do a quick check of each them before moving on—but they’re all empty, devoid of any other living creature. Even the animals are few and far between.

It’s a wasteland, even though it’s green and beautiful. It’s like I’m the only living thing here, and that just feels wrong.

At night, I read more of the journal. A few pages here and there before the sun sets and takes away my light. Fred details some of his experiments, some of his thoughts on the woes—so at least, if this is all I can bring back, it’s not like I’ll come empty-handed. Some of Fred’s thoughts are hard to follow. The guy’s obviously smart as hell. It’s too bad the woes got him.

It’s the fourth day after Catarin Tower that I read a passage in the journal that sticks with me. I’m lying on the grass, using mycape as a makeshift pillow. The sky is purple and pink, the sunset nearly complete.

I’m not the first to wonder where exactly the woes began, nor will I be the last, should Laconia survive. The deeper I go into Acadia, the more I start to wonder if there’s more to it. There are wildlands everywhere. Even before the woes it was dangerous for anyone to leave the main roads during their travels, and I can’t help but wonder what secrets Laconia holds? What secrets have been lost to time?

What have we forgotten as the centuries went by?

I suppose it is possible this is not the first time the woes afflicted us. I have searched and searched through the library of Laconia, read through every volume I could get my hands on. The history of the land is not as well-preserved as we might hope it is. There are gaps, missing pages in some of the old texts. Some of the words have been lost to our language.

But even then, the library did not hold all the answers. For instance, who were the first empresses? Were they always attuned to the aether? Who gave them their power? Why is Laconia divided into three regions, not four? Not more? Our written histories simply end, leaving me to wonder just what has been lost to the sands of time.

We are a small people, but strong and proud. We give our praise and our thanks to our empresses, but even they are not immune to the destruction and the chaos dividing and conquering our kingdom. Again I ask: how can they control the elements while we cannot?

Are the empresses connected to the woes, and if so, how? Why?

It is these questions I must ask Empress Morimento. I pray to the gods that she still holds strong. Empress Krotas instructed me to fix this mess, and I must do as she commands. I can only hope that Empress Morimento lives and that themadness has not yet taken root in her mind and her heart. If she is lost, then surely Empress Gladus is lost to us as well.

Without our empresses, what are we? Who are we? Are we nothing more than poor souls, trapped, waiting to die?

No. I will not let such a fate come for my son and my wife. I have a duty to this land, to Empress Krotas. I am on her quest, a quest that she herself is unable to commit to. The aether may just be our saving grace. I will discover what caused these woes, and when I do, I will do anything to right what wrongs have been committed across the land. If that means I must die, then… then I am a man faced with his own death, and I accept the inevitable.

I close the journal and stare up at the darkening sky. The questions Fred asked are good ones. This might not be the first time these woes hit Laconia. If their records only go back so far, who could say for sure? If that’s the case, then obviously someone had to survive. The woes had to end. Nature itself had to recover.

And the empresses… Fred suspected they were connected to the woes somehow. It’s obvious the woes are magical in origin, and if the empresses are the only ones who can command nature, what if they were the cause?

It sounds like they lost their minds, like they went batshit. People with that kind of power, people who lose their minds like that… it’s not a far leap to suggest they might’ve done something they shouldn’t.

The people’s precious empresses might be the reason so many are dead. Somehow I don’t think that idea would ever be accepted in Laconia.

That goes back to what I told Rune at the tower: it’s not my problem. I’m not here to save them. I’m not some high and mighty hero who’s come here to save the freaking day. I justwant to get home, go back to my slightly less than average life and pretend this was all a fever dream.

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