To my dearest heart, my baby son Laurence. I'm sorry we will never meet but I wish you the world. I hope that one day Angus will have the chance to tell you about me, but at this point that is all I have left. My name is Grace, and I gave birth to you ten days ago. In most respects I am your mother, however thanks to situations that are out of my control I will never be there to raise you or hold you. I will not be there to see your first steps or the moment you begin your journey because I must fight with the rest of my clan, of our clan.
We made a mistake. It might be hard for you to believe, or easy, but the Hephaistia clan has made a monumental mistake that has doomed all those who share the name or the blood of the clan. We swore that we would fight to the last man, but the fact of the matter is I cannot bear to see my newborn child die. You are the first child we are sending off in order to have seeds that might allow for our clan to survive in the future. Once again, you are our hope. However that is not all.
Laurence, my love, you specifically are special. We fight with the enemies of life itself, not the madmen of the Mephisto clan, but rather the cult of Gi, the blasted Avalonians to contain a creation that should have stayed hidden. There was a Manifestation that was created by a desperate woman to save her love's life. She created an object that can grant wishes, ANY wishes. It has been sealed away for more cycles than man remembers, but the keys have always been present within our clan. There were three, and they are entirely indestructible for as long as the well exists, because we were always worried that a situation could occur where we needed one of the many things we sealed. It’s entertaining to think about, but I guess the great clan of Creation was simply a family of hoarders. I tell you this because with your cot I left a small metal hammer. This hammer is the first of the three keys, and you must guard it with your life.
You might be wondering what object could be so dangerous that our entire clan would be threatened with extinction because of it, and the answer is simple. Within the Book of Creation there is a Manifestation that has been doctored. Well truthfully there have been two doctored Manifestations. The first is Manifestation number thirty-four, the Pen of Falsehoods. This pen was an object made a long time ago that can change information recorded within the Books. We believe that it is the only way to obscure truths in any form, but still it is not perfect. It changes the Books but it does not change people's memories. That single fact was our folly, because we could not erase the memories of the people who knew about the twelfth Manifestation. This brings me to the second of the doctored Manifestations, number twelve, the Wishing Well of Yoth.
The well... It’s a hole in the ground that we have hidden within the tower. I honestly don’t know much more than that, but I do know that making sure that the keys never see the light of day is your highest priority. If the Avalonians ever gain control of the well they would use it to upend the tower. Yoth was never very precise about the abilities of the well, so we have no idea of the true extent of the damage it could cause, but we know it could do things that are beyond the scope of any Ascendant Immortal.
Please be careful Laurence, I know this is a lot to ask from someone you’ve never met, but it is the reason why you fell. Know that no matter what, I will always love you, for you are my son and my pride. You are my heart.
Grace Absolutex Hephaistia.
The paper barely crumpled under Laurence’s palms as he finished reading. He swallowed, liked his lips and brushed his hair out of his eyes before he folded the paper closed and placed it back inside the envelope. Turning it round so the cursive script depicting his name was on the front, he left it propped up on his table. Pensively he stroked his beard as he stared at the letter. There was so much for him to take in, some of it he knew, or could imagine, but some of it was so fresh that he could not help but be blinded by it.
In his mind there was one piece of information that stuck out more than any other; the Wishing Well of Yoth might be able to reverse the path of death. It might be the answer he was looking for, and the answer that Peter was looking for as well.
“Damn the risks, I’m going to bring her back,” he whispered. Laurence stood and walked out of his room, through the gallery and out onto the mountain. He stared at the moon as it hung low in the sky and walked round to a small patio near Fen’s room. There was a chair set up with a table and a simple white book upon it. Picking up the book, he sat down and began to watch the moon as it climbed the night sky. He flicked through the pages of the book until he found a blank one, before pulling a stylus out of the cover of the book and beginning to scribe down what he had discovered.
The book in his hands was one of his oldest and most prized possessions. It was his infinite journal, the Absolution codex, and he had used it for as long as he had been climbing the tower. It had seen thousands and thousands of pages of information written into it, and at some point had grown so dense with information that he had to rework how the pages were stored within the book itself. The book was not one of a kind, in fact there were several descriptions of how to make variants of the book within the Book of Creation, but he still had a great sense of pride whenever he looked at it. After all, there were very few things that had survived his journey through the floors of the tower, and of the things that had survived, there were even less that had stayed relevant in some way. Quality materials becoming more common as he climbed the tower as well as a change in the way he crafted prompted him to cast aside many of his tools, or reforge them until he had something that was far greater than the original. Even his arm had been replaced, with an upgraded, stronger version of Inklight imbued inside. He still had the original arm, but it was sealed within a frozen moment like Cleo was within his gallery. The original arm possessed too much of his own essence for him to simply leave it to evolve sentience and run around freely upon the mountain. He knew that he would suffer if anything were to happen to it, so all he could do was exploit some of the gift he had gained from his Manifestation to bind it.
Laurence continued to write in his book until the moon was high in the sky before he stood up and put the book back where he had found it. Turning round to look at the world around him he sighed. Tomorrow there would be much work to do.
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