Expedition Archive // Restricted Access
Recovered Documents Dated: December 11th, 1911
Author: Alias Voss

After the thing emerged from the mirror, I stopped sleeping in my bedroom.

Not because I feared nightmares anymore.

Nightmares imply the mind creates its own horrors.

What entered the house after Hollow Peak was real.

And somewhere deep inside myself, I think I already understood the truth I refused admitting aloud:

The Gate had not simply opened beneath the mountain.

It had marked me.

For several days after the encounter, the house remained unnaturally quiet.

Too quiet.

The whispers faded almost entirely, replaced instead by long stretches of oppressive silence that felt somehow worse. Even the storm systems moving across the valley seemed muted around the house itself, as though sound no longer travelled properly near the study upstairs.

My mother noticed it too.

Neither of us discussed what happened that night.

We could not.

Trying to speak about the thing wearing fragments of my father’s face somehow made the memory feel more real. Instead, we existed beside one another in exhausted silence, pretending routine still mattered while the atmosphere inside the house slowly rotted around us.

She spent most of her time downstairs near the fireplace now.

I rarely left the study.

The room had become both prison and obsession.

Every wall still carried traces of my father’s work — maps pinned beneath rusted nails, pages covered in calculations, symbols scratched directly into the wood beside his desk during sleepless nights years before his disappearance. Entire sections of the floor remained hidden beneath scattered journals and loose papers filled with fragmented references to places that should not exist.

The deeper I searched through his writings, the more I realised Corvin had understood far more than he ever told us.

Hollow Peak was never his true discovery.

Only the first fracture.

I found references to other sites scattered throughout his journals.

Ancient ruins beneath frozen oceans.
Buried temples hidden beneath deserts.
Collapsed cities swallowed beneath forests older than recorded history.

And beside nearly every location…

the same symbol appeared repeatedly.

The Black Sun.

Not worshipped.

Contained.

The realization terrified me.

For most of my life, I believed my father had become obsessed with finding the Black Sun world.

But his later journals revealed something far worse.

He had spent years trying to stop it from returning.

That understanding changed the way I read everything afterward.

His frantic calculations no longer looked like obsession.

They looked like desperation.

Entire pages contained warnings written repeatedly across the margins in increasingly unstable handwriting.

“THE SEALS ARE FAILING.”

“THE GATES ARE CONNECTED.”

“IF ONE OPENS, THE OTHERS WILL FOLLOW.”

One page disturbed me more than all the others combined.

At first it appeared almost empty except for faint sketches near the bottom of the paper. But holding the page close to the firelight revealed hidden writing pressed deeply enough into the parchment to scar the surface itself.

I remember carefully rubbing charcoal across the page to expose the markings beneath.

Then immediately wishing I had not.

The message simply read:

“Nytherion is not imprisoned beneath the Black Sun.”

Below the sentence, my father had carved another line so violently the paper nearly tore apart.

“THE BLACK SUN IS THE PRISON.”

I stared at those words for a very long time.

Outside the study windows, snow drifted silently across the valley while darkness settled over the surrounding hills. Somewhere downstairs I could hear my mother moving quietly through the kitchen preparing food neither of us truly intended to eat.

The house itself groaned softly around us.

Old wood settling.

Or something moving within the walls.

I no longer trusted the difference.

That night, the dreams returned worse than ever before.

I found myself standing inside a vast ruined city beneath the Black Sun once again. But this time the world no longer felt distant or unreal. I could smell ash drifting through the air. I could feel freezing wind moving through broken streets lined with towering black statues eroded by ages of storms.

And everywhere…

people knelt.

Thousands of them.

Motionless figures covered in ash lining the streets and cathedral stairways throughout the city.

At first I believed they were statues.

Then one of them moved.

Its head slowly lifted toward me while black dust poured from beneath its hood.

No face remained beneath the cloth.

Only darkness.

More heads began turning throughout the city.

Thousands of silent figures slowly orienting themselves toward me beneath the eclipse overhead.

Then the whispers began.

Not from the sky.

From the kneeling figures themselves.

“THE BEARER RETURNS.”

The words echoed across the ruined streets while distant bells rang somewhere beyond the city.

Heavy.

Ancient.

Mournful.

I turned toward the sound and saw the towers for the first time properly.

Massive black structures rising beyond the ruins into crimson storm clouds surrounding the Black Sun itself. Colossal chains extended between the towers disappearing high above the city into darkness too deep for the eye to follow.

And hanging between them…

something enormous moved.

Not clearly visible.

Only glimpsed through storm and distance.

But even from impossibly far away, I understood one horrifying truth immediately.

The thing surrounding the Black Sun was alive.

I woke choking for breath.

The study was freezing.

Every candle inside the room had extinguished itself except one burning weakly near my father’s desk. Frost covered the inside of the windows while black ash drifted slowly through the air around me.

Then I noticed the footprints.

Ash footprints crossing the floorboards.

Fresh.

Leading toward the hallway outside the study.

My blood turned cold instantly.

I grabbed the lantern and followed them into the upper corridor.

The house remained silent.

Too silent.

Even the wind outside had stopped completely.

The ash footprints continued toward the staircase.

Downstairs.

Toward the sitting room.

“Mother?”

No answer.

Fear spread through me immediately.

I moved faster down the stairs gripping the lantern tightly while shadows stretched unnaturally across the walls around me. The lower floor looked darker somehow, as though the firelight no longer reached properly beyond the sitting room doorway.

The footprints stopped beside the fireplace.

My mother’s chair sat empty.

The fire had nearly died.

And written across the wall above the mantle in black ash were three enormous words.

HE IS SEARCHING.

I stumbled backward instinctively.

The letters looked smeared by human hands.

Fresh enough that ash still drifted slowly onto the floor beneath them.

“Mother?”

A weak sound answered somewhere deeper inside the house.

Crying.

I followed it immediately toward the kitchen.

The lantern flickered violently the closer I moved through the dark hallway connecting the lower rooms. Every shadow seemed slightly delayed against the movement of the light itself.

The crying grew louder.

Then suddenly stopped.

I reached the kitchen doorway and froze.

My mother stood motionless beside the far window staring into the darkness outside.

Her back faced me.

At first I thought she had simply become frightened after finding the message above the fireplace.

Then she spoke.

“Alias…”

Her voice sounded wrong.

Flat.

Distant.

Like someone repeating words they did not fully understand.

I slowly stepped into the room.

“Mother?”

She remained perfectly still facing the window.

Outside, snow continued drifting silently across the valley beyond the glass.

Then slowly…

she raised one hand and pointed toward the darkness outside.

At first I saw nothing.

Only snow and distant trees beneath moonlight.

Then lightning flashed silently beyond the hills.

And for one brief second…

I saw the figure standing beyond the treeline.

Tall.

Motionless.

Watching the house.

Even at that distance, I recognised the silhouette immediately.

My father.

Or something pretending to be him.

The crimson fractures beneath the figure’s skin glowed faintly against the falling snow while black ash drifted unnaturally around him despite the storm.

The figure slowly raised one hand toward the house.

Then the whisper came again.

Not inside the room.

Inside my thoughts.

“THE GATE REMAINS OPEN.”

My mother began shaking violently.

I moved toward her immediately, grabbing her shoulders and pulling her away from the window.

Her skin felt freezing cold.

The moment I turned her toward me, terror punched the breath from my lungs.

Her eyes had turned completely black.

Not corrupted.

Empty.

Like shadows filled them from within.

And when she spoke again…

it was not her voice.

“Nytherion sees you now.”

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

📖 CONTINUE THE CHRONICLES

FIELD LOG 15 — THE LAST NORMAL DAY

As the Voss residence falls eerily quiet, Alias and his mother begin uncovering the truth hidden within Corvin's final writings. The answers they seek are closer than ever—but so is the darkness.

→ Continue to Field Log 015

← Previous Field Log

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━