Expedition Archive // Restricted Access
Recovered Documents Dated: December 18th, 1911
Author: Alias Voss

I did not sleep after what happened in the kitchen.

For the rest of that night, I sat beside the dying fire in the sitting room with my father’s journal open across my knees and a lantern burning low on the table beside me. I had read the same paragraph a dozen times without understanding a single word of it.

My thoughts kept returning to my mother.

To her black eyes.

To the way her skin had felt beneath my hands.

Freezing cold.

Not chilled by winter.

Not frightened.

Empty.

And then the words spoken through her mouth in a voice that did not belong to her.

Nytherion sees you now.

The phrase stayed with me until dawn.

It moved around inside my skull with the persistence of an insect trapped behind glass. Whenever I closed my eyes, I saw my mother standing by the kitchen window, her face pale in the lantern light, her body trembling violently while something vast and ancient looked out from behind her eyes.

I waited for it to happen again.

Every creak of the house made my hand tighten around the iron poker beside the fireplace. Every gust of wind against the windows made me glance toward the hallway. Several times during the night I became certain I heard footsteps moving above me near the study door, but when I forced myself to listen, there was nothing.

Only silence.

A silence that felt deliberate.

By morning, the fire had collapsed into grey ash.

Weak winter light crept through the windows, softening the edges of the room and making the terrors of the night seem almost absurd. The sitting room looked ordinary in daylight. The books still sat on the shelves. The chairs remained where they had always been. My father’s old clock ticked faintly on the mantelpiece.

Normal things.

Human things.

I remember hating them for that.

Because normality had no right to return so easily.

I had just begun convincing myself that I could not remain awake another hour when I smelled tea brewing.

Then bread.

Then the faint scrape of a pan against the stove.

The sounds came from the kitchen.

I stood so quickly the journal slid from my lap and struck the floor.

For several seconds I could not move. I simply stared toward the hallway, listening to the familiar morning sounds of my mother preparing breakfast as though nothing had happened.

A cupboard opened.

A spoon stirred inside a cup.

The kettle shifted on the stove.

I picked up the lantern and moved toward the kitchen.

My mother stood near the counter with her sleeves rolled to her elbows, pinning back a strand of loose hair with one hand while pouring tea with the other. She looked tired. Older than she had the day before. But her eyes were her own again.

Brown.

Human.

She turned when I entered.

“Alias?”

I did not answer.

She looked me over properly then and frowned.

“You look terrible.”

I kept staring at her eyes.

“Do you remember last night?”

“The storm?”

“No.”

She waited.

“The kitchen.”

Her expression changed, but not in the way I expected. No fear. No shame. No flicker of recognition.

Only confusion.

“What about the kitchen?”

“You came down here.”

“I don’t think I did.”

“You did.”

“Alias, I went to bed after supper.”

“You were standing by the window.”

She set the teapot down slowly.

“Was I?”

“You don’t remember?”

“No.”

“You spoke.”

“What did I say?”

I swallowed.

“You don’t remember anything?”

She studied me for a long moment.

“What did I say?”

The words waited behind my teeth.

Nytherion sees you now.

But I could not speak them.

Not yet.

Not while she stood there looking so completely herself.

Instead, I said, “You weren’t well.”

My mother’s face softened.

“Alias.”

“I’m serious.”

“I know you are.”

“You don’t believe me.”

“I believe that something happened to you last night.”

“To me?”

“You haven’t slept properly in days. You barely eat. You sit in that study until sunrise reading your father’s journals and listening to every noise this house makes.”

“That isn’t what this is.”

“Then tell me what it is.”

I looked toward the kitchen window. Snow lay thick across the garden beyond the glass, covering the world in a false purity.

“I don’t know anymore.”

She watched me for a moment longer, then pulled out the chair opposite her.

“Sit down.”

“I don’t want breakfast.”

“I didn’t ask if you wanted breakfast. I asked you to sit.”

There was enough of the old firmness in her voice that I obeyed without thinking.

She placed a cup of tea in front of me, then sat across from me with her own. Neither of us touched them. Steam curled gently between us while morning light pressed against the frosted windows.

For several minutes, we said nothing.

Then she said, “You look like your father.”

I gave a tired laugh.

“That isn’t exactly comforting.”

“It wasn’t meant to be.”

“Good.”

She smiled faintly.

“When I first met him, he looked at everything as though it was hiding a secret from him.”

“That sounds familiar.”

“Yes. It does.”

“Was he always like that?”

“Curious? Yes. Obsessive? No. Not at first.”

She looked down into her tea.

“At first, your father was full of wonder. That was what I loved about him. He could look at a broken stone in some muddy field and see a civilization no one remembered. He could look at an old symbol carved into a wall and talk for hours about who might have made it, what they feared, what they believed. He made the dead world feel alive.”

“What changed?”

“The Black Sun.”

I looked up.

She kept her eyes on the cup.

“No. That isn’t fair. Not at first. At first it was only another mystery. Another pattern. Another set of myths that interested him because they appeared in places they shouldn’t. He would talk about it at dinner sometimes. He would spread papers across the table and ask me what I thought of them.”

“What did you think?”

“I thought most of it was nonsense.”

Despite everything, I almost smiled.

“He knew that?”

“Of course he knew. Your father was many things, but he was not stupid.”

“He still kept showing you.”

“He wanted me to see what he saw.”

“Did you?”

My mother was quiet for a moment.

“Sometimes.”

The answer surprised me.

She saw that.

“I know you think I dismissed all of it. I did not. I dismissed what it was doing to him. There is a difference.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I watched the man I loved disappear by inches.”

She finally looked at me properly.

“That is what obsession does, Alias. People imagine it arrives all at once, like madness in a story. It does not. It arrives politely. It asks only for one more hour. One more page. One more expedition. One more night without sleep. And because each sacrifice is small, you do not notice the shape of what it has taken until there is almost nothing left.”

I said nothing.

She continued more softly.

“Your father loved us. I need you to understand that. Whatever else happened, whatever he became near the end, he loved us.”

“I know.”

“Do you?”

“Yes.”

“Then you also need to understand that love did not save him.”

The words settled heavily between us.

Outside, snow slid from the roof and struck the ground below the window with a soft thud.

My mother reached across the table and touched my hand.

“I am not saying this to wound you.”

“I know.”

“I am saying it because I see the same look in your eyes now.”

I pulled my hand back.

“I am trying to find him.”

“So was he.”

“That’s different.”

“Is it?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me how.”

“He disappeared. He’s trapped somewhere. I saw him.”

“I know.”

“No, you don’t know. You didn’t see the Gate. You didn’t see what happened beneath Hollow Peak.”

“And you did.”

“Yes.”

“So you think that means you are safer than he was?”

“I think it means I know what we are dealing with.”

My mother looked at me with such sadness that I hated her for it.

Because I knew what she saw.

Not confidence.

Not reason.

Corvin.

“Your father said the same thing,” she whispered.

I stood abruptly, knocking the chair backward against the floor.

“I’m not him.”

“I know.”

“Then stop looking at me like I am.”

“I am looking at you like my son.”

The anger left me almost immediately.

That was worse.

I lifted the chair and sat again.

My mother’s eyes had filled with tears, though none had fallen.

“I have already lost your father,” she said. “I cannot lose you to the same darkness and pretend I do not see it happening.”

“I don’t want to leave you.”

“Then don’t.”

“I don’t know if that will be my choice.”

Her face tightened.

Neither of us spoke after that.

There are silences between people that are empty, and there are silences so full of things unsaid that they become unbearable. This was the second kind.

We sat there until the tea cooled.

A mother and son pretending breakfast still mattered.

A family reduced to two people and a house full of ghosts.

By noon, the sky darkened again.

I returned to the study.

The moment I opened the door, the warmth of the kitchen vanished behind me.

The study had become colder than the rest of the house by then. Not simply unheated, but possessed of a cold that felt independent of weather. Frost gathered along the inside of the windowpanes in delicate branching patterns. The floorboards near my father’s desk were stained with faint black ash that no amount of sweeping ever fully removed.

The room had once smelled of paper, tobacco, ink and candle wax.

Now, beneath all of that, there was always iron.

A metallic scent.

The scent of Hollow Peak.

The walls remained covered in Corvin’s research. Maps. Torn sketches. Excavation rubbings. Symbols copied from ruined temples and forgotten manuscripts. Some had been pinned carefully. Others were nailed into the wood with frantic force. Several had been marked over again and again in darker ink until the original writing vanished beneath circles, arrows and warnings.

For most of my childhood, I had believed the room was a mess.

Now I understood it was a map of a war my father had been fighting alone.

I sat at his desk and began again.

There were hundreds of pages I had still not properly examined. The difficulty lay not in finding information, but in surviving it. Corvin rarely wrote one thought once. He returned to the same symbols obsessively, altering conclusions, contradicting himself, arguing across years with earlier versions of his own mind.

At first, I searched only for references to Hollow Peak.

Then I began noticing what sat around those references.

Other names.

Other sites.

Other gates.

I found one page headed:

SECTOR NINE / HOLLOW PEAK / PRIMARY FRACTURE

Beneath it, Corvin had drawn a circle surrounded by radiating lines. At the end of each line sat another symbol, each labelled in his careful handwriting.

Greywatch.

Veilwater.

The Ashen Necropolis.

The Buried Gates.

The Scorched Throne.

Several other names had been scratched out so violently the paper had torn.

I leaned closer.

Beside the diagram, he had written:

NOT DOORS. WOUNDS.

And beneath that:

IF ONE OPENS, THE OTHERS REMEMBER.

I turned the page.

More diagrams.

More locations.

More symbols.

The same phrase appeared again and again.

THE GATES ARE CONNECTED.

Not once.

Dozens of times.

I felt the room narrow around me.

Hollow Peak had not been a singular discovery. It had been only one point in a vast hidden architecture beneath the world. A mechanism older than recorded history. A system of locks, seals and fractures built around something humanity had mistaken for myth.

The Black Sun was not a legend.

It was a containment system.

I found another page folded inside the back cover of a damaged field journal. The outer edge had been burned, but the centre remained intact. My father had drawn a black sphere suspended over jagged towers. Chains stretched toward it from five directions, each marked with a different symbol.

A crown.

A horned mark.

An eye.

A chain.

A solar sigil.

The Five.

I had seen references before, but never arranged together.

Below the drawing, Corvin had written:

THEY WORSHIP THE PRISON AND FORGET WHAT IT HOLDS.

I read the sentence several times.

The house creaked behind me.

I did not turn.

The page seemed to darken beneath my fingertips.

On the reverse side, pressed so deeply into the paper that the words were almost carved rather than written, I found the line that changed everything.

NYTHERION IS NOT IMPRISONED BENEATH THE BLACK SUN.

THE BLACK SUN IS ITS PRISON.

I sat very still.

For years, my father had spoken of the Black Sun as though it were a place, a symbol, a force, perhaps even a god. Yet here, in his later work, he had written with terrible certainty that the Black Sun was not the thing being worshipped.

It was the cage.

And something inside that cage had learned my name.

I do not know how long I remained there after that.

The candle beside me burned halfway down. Snow drifted beyond the windows. At some point, the afternoon became evening without any clear division between the two.

I kept reading.

The next pages were worse.

The Gates were not constructed to reach Nytherion.

They were constructed to keep Nytherion unreachable.

The relics were not treasures.

They were components.

The Lords were not merely rulers.

They were bindings.

And something, somehow, had begun loosening every part of the mechanism.

One note in particular had been written in a steadier hand, as though Corvin had forced himself into calm before recording it.

The Gate does not open outward.

It opens inward.

When it takes a mind, it learns the path that mind has walked.

When it takes a name, it may speak through memory.

When it takes blood, it may follow.

I remembered my mother’s eyes.

I pushed the page away and stood.

For a moment, I thought I heard someone whisper behind me.

Not a word.

A breath.

I turned.

The room was empty.

The study door stood half open. Beyond it lay the dark corridor leading toward the stairs. I could see the faint glow of lamplight from below and hear my mother moving quietly in the sitting room.

I wanted to go to her.

Instead, I looked back at the desk.

Something had shifted.

A small stack of journals near the left edge of the desk had moved just enough to reveal a narrow gap behind the drawer unit. I stared at it for several seconds, certain it had not been visible before.

Slowly, I reached inside.

My fingers touched paper.

No.

Not paper.

An envelope.

Old.

Thick.

Sealed with dark wax bearing my father’s personal mark.

My name was written across the front.

ALIAS.

Nothing else.

I forgot how to breathe.

The envelope was yellowed with age, but undamaged. It had not been shoved there in panic. It had been placed carefully. Hidden deliberately. Waiting.

For me.

I sat down again.

I do not know why, but I could not open it immediately.

Perhaps because unopened things still contain possibility. A sealed letter may still be anything. A warning. An apology. Instructions. A farewell. Once opened, it becomes only itself, and whatever truth it carries cannot be made unknown again.

I held that letter for a long time.

Eventually my mother came to the study door.

“Alias?”

I looked up.

She saw the envelope in my hand.

“What is that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is it from him?”

“Yes.”

“Are you going to open it?”

“I think I have to.”

She came into the room slowly and stood beside the desk.

For once, she did not tell me to leave the study. She did not ask me to put the journals away. She simply looked at the envelope, then at me.

“Do you want me to stay?”

I almost said no.

The answer rose automatically, born from weeks of trying to carry horror alone.

Then I stopped.

“Yes.”

She sat in the chair opposite me.

Neither of us spoke for a moment.

Then she said, “He always wrote terrible letters.”

I looked at her.

“What?”

“Your father. He was useless with letters. Too formal when he was trying to be affectionate. Too dramatic when he was trying to be simple.”

Despite myself, I laughed.

A real laugh.

Small, brief and almost painful.

“I can imagine that.”

“He once wrote to me from an excavation in France and spent four pages describing the soil composition before remembering to say he missed me.”

“That sounds like him.”

“It was infuriating.”

“You kept the letter?”

“Of course I did.”

We smiled at one another then, and for the briefest moment, Corvin was not a ghost between us.

He was a man again.

Awkward, brilliant, impossible and loved.

My mother’s smile faded first.

“Whatever is in there,” she said, “remember that he was afraid.”

“I know.”

“No. I need you to truly understand that. Fear changes people. It makes them secretive. It makes them cruel sometimes. Your father was not trying to abandon us.”

“I know.”

“Do you?”

I looked down at the wax seal.

“I don’t know.”

She nodded.

“That is honest, at least.”

My fingers tightened around the envelope.

“I’m angry with him.”

“You’re allowed to be.”

“I hate that he knew more than he told us.”

“So do I.”

“I hate that he left this for me instead of telling me when he was alive.”

“So do I.”

“I hate that part of me still wants to follow him.”

My mother closed her eyes.

When she opened them again, the grief in her face nearly broke me.

“I know.”

“I don’t want to become him.”

“Then do not make his mistakes.”

“I don’t know what his mistakes were.”

“Yes, you do.”

I looked at her.

“He carried everything alone,” she said.

The study seemed very quiet after that.

I broke the seal.

The wax cracked sharply beneath my thumb.

Inside was a single folded sheet.

No diagrams.

No symbols.

No frantic calculations.

Only my father’s handwriting.

Steady.

Careful.

Almost painfully familiar.

For a moment, I could see him sitting at this very desk, years younger, writing by candlelight while the house slept around him.

I unfolded the page.

My mother reached across the desk and took my free hand.

Together, we read the first line.

If you are reading this, then I have already failed.

I stopped.

The words blurred.

I did not realise I was crying until the tear struck the page.

My mother squeezed my hand.

Outside, somewhere far beyond the house, thunder rolled across the valley.

Or perhaps it was not thunder.

Perhaps something beneath the world had moved again.

I looked down at my father’s letter.

And for the first time since Hollow Peak, I understood that Corvin Voss had not vanished into mystery.

He had left a path behind him.

One he had prayed I would never have to follow.

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📖 CONTINUE THE CHRONICLES

FIELD LOG 16 — THE LETTER FROM CORVIN

Corvin Voss speaks one final time through a hidden letter, revealing fragments of a truth buried for centuries. But as Alias reads deeper into his father's words, something else begins listening

→ Continue to Field Log 016

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