Valeria’s healing powers do not work on the people of this land. Troubling. The power of Gilead is the power of existence itself, so it surely must be able to heal all living things. I wonder… I have been forming a theory, these past few days, that we have not left the mind of Gilead entirely, but have left its core, floating closer, as it were, to the surface of the dream, to another layer of the Cosmos. At the same time, though, we have not moved farther away from the Divine Mind, but closer to it; that was precisely the purpose of my Lady Valeria’s portal. If these people live closer to Gilead than I do, then it is entirely possible that my own soul is too impure to channel power that will heal them. Then in a sense they would be right to look at me and my companions with mistrust. But what are we to do?

An odd thought lurks in the corner of my mind: what if we are outside the Cosmos, and these people’s souls are not of the Divine Principle? It would explain the failure of my healing and would mean that my Lady’s picture of the Cosmos was exactly right, but in light of our experience the suggestion is manifestly wrong: all that exists outside Order is Chaos, and we are most clearly not in a realm of primal Chaos. But perhaps something like this is true, something half-way between my two guesses: perhaps, just as the Cosmos is much broader than I had suspected, so too is the Divine Power a more diverse pool of magic than I know. Perhaps the substance and sprit of this world, though of the Divine Principle, are not of the limited aspect in which those of my world have experienced it; and perhaps, therefore, the aspect of the Power on which I can draw is not suitable for those who live in this corner of Gilead’s mind.

But I can speculate all I want and get nowhere. I must learn more of this world’s magic.

Mission’s end. We have arrived in Kam Nerubi, and I see that the food we bring was sorely needed. I have already asked Valeria to feed some of the refugees living on the city streets, and in return I have learned something of the evil in the North. Not much, but perhaps enough for today.

As I understand it, the trouble started in the lowest depths of the underground kingdoms. The nightmares were the first sign, and at first they came only occasionally and only to a few; but soon they were much too frequent and too common to be coincidence. Like many nightmares, these begin innocuously: you wander, in the aimless manner of dreams, through the familiar tunnels of your subterranean home. Your friends and neighbors are there. But there is a sense of wrongness, and you know that there is something else in the darkness, something that is not your friend, something threatening. You must not let your friends out of your sight; they are in danger. And yet, as is the way in dreams, you inexorably find that you lose track of them… and then they are gone. Simply vanished, without a trace. And you know that the lurking evil has taken them, and that it is still near, drawing closer, closer, and yet you cannot see it, cannot come face to face with it even though it is almost upon you already—

You wake, you shake off your terror, and you go back to sleep. It was, after all, only a nightmare. You think nothing of it for a week. And then you have the dream again. And again two days later. By now, you’ve heard that your neighbor has had the same dream, and maybe heard even more disturbing rumors. By the time you realize just how real the danger is, it is probably already too late for your settlement. You flee if you have the means; otherwise, you stay, and the nightmares grow more intense and more common each night.

Then one morning you wake from the dream and find that your family has vanished.

Tomorrow, perhaps you yourself will never wake up.

How can we fight such a thing? How can we defend ourselves? In our world we know evil, have fought evil for millennia. But the evil we know can be opposed with sword and spellcraft; this new world is haunted by things we cannot even comprehend, and for the first time I begin to understand the horror of it. And, my Lady, I am afraid.

Later. So much good news to record! We have made our delivery to the khan, and he has turned out to be a great sorcerer indeed, capable of the sort of magic that only Toram Par can attain in our world. He has given us each an amulet that will allow us to understand the tongues of this land. I only wish I had had more time to speak with him; he is wise in many matters, and quite an engaging speaker.

And we have defeated one of the Salashanael! (I don’t believe I’ve recorded the word before. They are the assassins from Aramai Alia whom we first encountered in Kam Ceisai.) I say defeated, but in fact we barely held our own, as a party, against just the one of them; I myself was gravely wounded and am recovering only with Valeria’s power. Also marring our triumph is the obvious, troubling question: who wants us killed? We are apparently generating rumors. The khan took it as self-evident that we are the heroes foretold by the nomads’ prophesy; are there those who would oppose these heroes? And, to put the question bluntly, are we who they think we are?

Finally, there is Zephyriel. I cannot do him justice in the few moments I have now, but suffice to record that he is either a true mystic or a lunatic, and my magical senses rule out the latter.