2026-08-14. Writ two days behind, my hand being now steadier.
The day was wrong from the morning: warm at dawn, warmer at noon, warmer again at dusk, which is not the order the hours keep, and by midnight hotter than any noon of the summer.
The four went into the city by the low docks. What they met there I have since bought of their own telling, they talking freely, as men do who have lived. The people of the docks are alive and gone from themselves: townsfolk in rags a week worn, hair torn out by their own hands, eyes gone yellow, that come on quiet and do not much mind being broken. The four were near overrun, and the half-orc ended it by pulling a building down upon three of them and himself, and was dug out at the edge of death.
The one door open in all Westcrown that day was the Bank of Abadar’s. The talk is that healing there went at fifteen gold the head, the priestess naming it surge pricing; that she went into the back, where the blood was, and came out wearing a silver circlet she had not worn before, and spent what was in it upon them; and that for two hundred gold the half-orc had her professional opinion, which he has since given away freely to any who will hear it: that the god of man had fallen ill, not in body, for a god cannot suffer so, but in mind, and that the yellow madness in the streets was his presence going before him. Also that the half-orc carries a curse from his birth that eats the magic of any who lay divine hands upon him, the curing whereof she quoted in the high hundreds of thousands, with a written estimate to follow in seven to twelve business days.
The palace answers no divination, which is old knowledge, so what passed on its approaches I have only from them: guards whose legs are melted into their posts, their eyes the color of fool’s gold, still working their ballista. One bolt took Drusca through the thigh at range, yet up close the same guards would not aim at him, and none of the four could say why. Stripping the armor of the dead cost Drusca his fingertips, the flesh there fusing to living flesh; save that it does not fuse to the half-orc, where his hands went it fell to ash, and none could say why to that either.
Of the midnight I need no seller. The heat, and over the city a golden light with no pupil in it, and then the voice, which was not heard but had, every human at once, myself among them. I put down only what I am sure of: I love you. Those of you that are mine are the elect. I will arise not through divine flesh; I shall make your flesh divine. And the question: what is the price you would pay for peace? And at the end: God has come, God is dead, and God will rise.
What passed at the statue itself I have from their telling. Drusca was drawn up to the pedestal and named, I anoint you, my Herald, and a second, far quieter voice unsaid it. Twelve figures stood where one statue was, an old man, a nursing mother, a drunkard among them, pleading. The god owned that he had touched what ought not be touched, that the ruin was his own, and begged of mortals a help he said he had no right to ask; and then an end of him. Drusca was carried out senseless, a closed eye on his arm now open.
Then every pain the madness had been keeping came home to its owners at once, city and camp together, and the night went to the tending of them. And so to bed, at dawn.