Report #1459
"While it is difficult to verify the veracity of rumors, enough exists to warrant further investigation into the existence of persons or organizations attempting to conduct a ritual transformation of the entire world in service to beings from outside our realm and beyond our comprehension"
The Lorekeepers of Foxbridge are charged with investigating anything and everything that might be relevant to the ongoing welfare of the Kingdom of Bernicia. This has resulted in the collection and collation of enormous amounts of information - so much so that they have used Godcrafter techniques to manifest their own small deity to aid in the processing and interpretation of the data, the Librarian of Foxbridge. The Librarian has proven able to create coherent reports from the archives, pulling together the most minor hints and clues from unrelated documents to unveil things that the Lorekeepers would never have been able to derive themselves.
One of these reports concerns a rumor of a ritual tentatively named 'The Turning of the World'.
Although the specifics are not known, the broad outline of the ritual's goals are to transform the world into a new form, one that is more closely aligned with beings from beyond the Silence in the Dream. It appears that this would involve a complete change of the world's history and future, replacing people, nations, landmasses - in short, a complete overhaul of the entirity of the world's existence, replacing it with a new world that had more in common with those eldritch and alien beings. One limitation of the ritual is the requirement for an 'Axle' - people who can participate in the ritual all the way through, who are not rewritten or recreated so much that they cease to exist midway. Without these people, the ritual would collapse when the participants vanished. This limits how much change can be effected in a single use, and results in a small minority of people in the new world who are aware of the change (both participants, and bystanders who were preserved to maintain the Axle). The report proposes that the ritual may be then attempted again by a different group in the new version of the world, who would be able to serve as an 'Axle' to yet another version. A footnote identifies the possibility that this has already happened, maybe several times, and speculates on the possibility of a counter-ritual intended to return worlds to their previous state by those bystanders who were incidentally carried through but were not participants in the ritual.
While the author notes that this seems a remote threat, the potential consequences to the kingdom and the world are such that it should be investigated further. At the Librarian's recommendation, the report (with some redactions) has been shared with the Ninth Archive of the Gwāsa, the Lightkeepers of the Fáros Óneiro, and certain key members of the O le Feagaiga. Also at the Librarian's recommendation, it has not been shared with the Glass Shadows of Saba, for reasons the Librarian chose not disclose in the report.
This article was originally written for Spooktober 2024. You can find all of my Spooktober Articles at Spooktober Central.
This article was originally written for Spooktober 2023. You can find all of my Spooktober Articles at Spooktober Central.
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