The Collected Works of Dendara Cammise

A collection of papers, some of which are annotated ancient sheafs or engravings thereof while the rest are notes and thoughts written in an elegant flowing hand.

"When I was young my sleep was troubled by horrible dreams. My mother told me to keep a journal, organize my thoughts, and they might go away. It didn't work for my childhood horrors, but now I think she knew I would need the advice far in the future. Whoever finds these pages I want you, need you, to know that none of what I have done falls on my parents, who raised me right and proper - let the blame be mine and mine alone."

"The Bay is filled with adventurers, not knowing the dangers of this world. I wish I could speak, say something of what I've experienced, but I know that anything I say will just lead to my death - something I deserve, and will embrace when the time comes, but what I have seen, what I have felt, the touch of ... a mad... god... I must find some cure for it, some innoculation or remedy. Mine came through fire, and screams, or was it channeling the power of that hideous scepter, I need to find out. If my conviction, my delusion, could be cured that makes it the disease - makes the truth I knew a lie, just another level of control, because the truth has no cure, the truth is what is revealed when all the lies are torn away."

"Sarat is here, he found me - how... I was careful. How he looks at me, how he looks to me, so enraptured by the thing that called itself Mane. I have him now, tied up, and I'm moving from Hampsterdam to a small village across the bay."

"I thought maybe it was the flame that cured me. I thought I needed more fire - I thought maybe it was the screams. I pushed it, I watched his flesh melt, still begging me to serve the voice. He's silent now. Another price I have to pay, to remember him the way I remember the people, burning, screaming."

"The nightmares are getting worse, I'm sure I'll burn this workshop down soon. I've made some progress, found several wrecks on the floor of the bay, and what may have once been a lighthouse in a village called Watcher's Point at the western edge of the bay. These fragments of letters that some of the traders pawn off to me hint at some kind of disaster, with very few survivors. The Red Eyed Shades that haunt our peripherary seem almost a remnant of them. They whisper to me at night, reminding me of Van Nord, remindng me of Sarat. I tried to interact with them, but I was weak and turned away - but in their gaze I saw flashes, not of something or some place but almost some kind of connections, a sense of permanence and nothing, a paradox, but one that yearned to be understood. I can't risk this route unless none other present themselves, too many have died to these Shades."

"I've traded many of the smaller relics and pages to a man named Castor, seems to be a small-time crook with an eye for ancient relics. His men pushed the mercenaries I hired out of the lighthouse area in Watcher's Point , but he's been otherwise amenable to work with. Stays far out of the light, but I had a man follow his errand-boy Tarak - they're well informed but I don't think working with Veritas, not with the voice."

"I let myself look in the water today, at my reflection. Torment. I will never be given the mercy to forget my crimes. I never write of the Voice, of what called itself Mane. I cannot give weight to the word as the voice gave to me, it bears on you, it bores into you, it claims you, it makes the truth knowable and absolute. That is what I can express, but there is something.... divine, to it. There was love, that is what I question but I still know it to be truth. What it did, it did with love - now with my mind clear, with my pain here and now, I can say that this is madness, but then, I could feel it so strongly. It was love to burn the city, to scuttle ships, it was a doctor, tenderly cleaning out an infected wound. To have even an echo of that still inside of me.... that more than anything is the nightmare that haunts me."

"A lead, maybe - it is at least something. In these tomes I found the desperate letters of men in some kind of war, rallying against some kind of disease, plague, or what I'm not really sure. They speak in tangles when they refer to the calamity - and then they rail against other things, related? Glories in the Fugue? Espers? Dark Espers? Apothi? I can't know, but I do know that the plague manifests as madness, as obsession, before something... else... occurs. Voices, they always mention voices - the power of words, of names - the power of ritual. Either way their were apparently people, named Magi, and some were working on a cure. This Xor was apparently working out of an Academy, and another man named Montsavari who had a workshop, described with great grandeur, and another, a woman named Anaise, who was seeking answers in the past. I need to track them down."

"I made a friend today. He reminds of Sarat - idealistic, bold, curious.... loves owls. I can never tell him the truth, no one would understand - isolation is part of my penance."

"I think I have pieced together some of the Wanderer's tracks, perhaps this will lead me to one of the three Magi mentioned. I'll take the Finder, it offers me something similar to what the voice once did. Some of this... though... reminds me... of something that wriggles free from my memory, of a voice within a voice, of an echo in the scream, of dissent in the divine, these symbols, these marks, these ideas, more than anything else it is the very notions I deal with that seem to scratch at my insides, tearing up walls to let in... something. Was it the voice, was it Mane, no - Mane offered clarity, this... offers... something so much more."

Amongst the many notes is a map with many marks drawn on it, with paths drawn between many circled areas. Many of them you seem to have encountered in the past, except for a location SW of The Academy Ruins marked as 'Center' with M2 and a question mark next to it.