FIELD LOG 16 — THE LETTER FROM CORVIN
Expedition Archive // Restricted Access
Recovered Documents Dated: December 20th, 1911
Author: Alias Voss
Part I
Expedition Archive // Restricted Access
Recovered Documents Dated: December 19th, 1911
Author: Alias Voss
My father’s letter began with an admission of failure.
Not a warning.
Not an instruction.
Not one of the frantic theories that filled the margins of his journals.
A confession.
If you are reading this, then I have already failed.
I remember staring at that first line while my mother’s hand remained wrapped around mine across the desk. Neither of us spoke. The study felt impossibly still around us, as though the house itself had drawn breath and chosen not to release it.
The candle flame beside the letter trembled, though no window was open.
Outside, snow pressed against the glass in pale drifts. The valley beyond the house had vanished beneath darkness and winter. Only our reflections remained faintly visible in the study window: my mother sitting opposite me, pale and exhausted; myself hunched over the desk like a stranger wearing my face.
And between us lay Corvin Voss’s final letter.
For a long moment I could not continue reading.
My mother squeezed my hand gently.
“Read it,” she said.
“I don’t know if I can.”
“You can.”
“What if I don’t want to know?”
She looked at the letter.
“Then you are already wiser than your father was.”
I almost smiled, but the expression died before it formed.
“I spent years wanting him to leave me something. Anything that explained why he became like this. Why he kept going back. Why he chose the mountain over us.”
“He did not choose the mountain over us.”
“Didn’t he?”
My mother did not answer immediately.
The silence between us was not angry. It was worse. Honest.
“At the end,” she said quietly, “I think he chose whatever he thought would keep us alive.”
“That sounds like forgiveness.”
“No. It sounds like grief.”
I looked back at the page.
The handwriting was unmistakably my father’s. Not the broken, frantic script from his final journals. Not the jagged lines carved into paper by a man no longer fully sleeping. This writing was calm. Careful. Controlled. The hand of a man forcing himself to remain steady while recording something he feared more than death.
I read on.
Alias,
If this letter has reached you, then I have either disappeared, failed to return, or become something you should no longer trust.
I pray it is the first.
I fear it is the last.
I have hidden this letter where only you would eventually find it, because if I gave it to you openly, you would ask questions I am not strong enough to answer while looking into your face.
That is cowardice.
I know that.
There are many things I have been in my life. Scholar. Husband. Father. Fool.
Coward is the one I resisted naming for the longest time.
But I have been a coward in ways you may not yet understand.
I told myself I was protecting you by keeping the truth buried beneath symbols, fragments and half-finished explanations. I told myself that ignorance would spare you. I told myself that if I could carry the knowledge alone, then the damage would end with me.
That was arrogance disguised as love.
The truth does not remain buried simply because a man refuses to speak it.
It waits.
It listens.
And when enough doors are opened, it finds another voice.
My mother turned her face slightly away from the page.
I stopped reading.
“Do you want me to continue?”
She nodded, but did not look at me.
“He knew,” she whispered.
“Knew what?”
“That he was hurting us.”
I looked at the letter again.
“Yes.”
“For years I told myself he didn’t see it. That made it easier to be angry.”
“Does this make it harder?”
“Yes.”
The candle popped softly beside us.
My mother wiped one eye with the back of her hand and gave a small, broken laugh.
“That sounds terrible, doesn’t it?”
“No.”
“It does. A good woman would be relieved that her husband knew he loved her.”
“You are relieved.”
“I am.”
“But?”
“But I am angry that he understood and still could not stop.”
I had no answer for that.
Because I was angry too.
Not in the same way I had been after Hollow Peak. That anger had been hot, desperate, helpless. This was quieter. Heavier. The kind of anger that does not burn away because it is tangled too deeply with love.
My father had known.
He had known he was disappearing from us piece by piece.
And he had kept walking toward the darkness anyway.
I continued reading.
You were a child when I first realised the dreams had reached you.
You never told me.
You thought I did not notice.
I noticed everything.
You would wake before dawn and sit on the stairs outside my study, pretending you had only come down for water. Your mother believed you were frightened of storms, but there were no storms on most of those nights.
There was only the sound.
The pulse beneath the static.
The three impacts.
I saw the way you listened for them.
I should have stopped then.
I should have burned the journals, sealed the study, taken your mother far from Hollow Peak and never spoken of the Black Sun again.
Instead, I convinced myself that if the dreams had reached you, then perhaps you were already part of the answer.
That is the sentence I have hated myself for writing.
Because no father should ever look at his son and see a solution.
I stopped.
The words struck something in me I had not known was still whole enough to hurt.
My mother’s grip tightened around my hand.
Neither of us spoke for several seconds.
Then I said, “He thought I was part of it.”
“He was afraid you were.”
“That isn’t better.”
“No.”
“He took me to Hollow Peak because of that?”
“I don’t know.”
“I was eleven.”
“I know.”
“He knew I was dreaming about it.”
“Yes.”
“And he still took me.”
My voice had risen by then. Not loud, but sharp enough that it seemed to disturb the cold air of the study. The candle flame bent sideways for a moment, then steadied again.
My mother looked at me with pain in her face.
“Alias.”
“No. Don’t.”
“I wasn’t going to defend him.”
“Good.”
“I was going to say that I should have stopped him.”
I stared at her.
She looked down at the desk.
“I knew something was wrong before that expedition. I knew he was becoming worse. I knew he was watching you too closely, asking whether you slept, whether you dreamed, whether you heard things in the night.”
“You never said.”
“I did. To him. Not to you.”
“Why not?”
“Because you were a child.”
“That didn’t protect me.”
“No,” she whispered. “It didn’t.”
The admission settled between us like dust.
For the first time, I saw her not only as my mother, not only as someone wounded by Corvin’s obsession, but as someone who had been trapped inside it with us. She had fought a war of her own in those years, one fought in quiet rooms and late-night arguments behind closed doors while I slept upstairs imagining my parents’ silences meant nothing.
“What did he say when you questioned him?” I asked.
She exhaled slowly.
“At first, that I was imagining things. Later, that I didn’t understand the importance of his work.”
“And near the end?”
“Near the end he stopped arguing.”
“That sounds peaceful.”
“It was worse. He began agreeing with me.”
I frowned.
“He would say, ‘You’re right. This has gone too far. I’ll stop after this.’ Then a week later, another journal would arrive. Another letter from some ruin or museum. Another map. Another symbol. Another reason he had to continue.”
Her eyes drifted toward the walls covered in Corvin’s research.
“Your father was not pulled into darkness all at once. He negotiated with it. One compromise at a time.”
I looked down at the letter again.
The page seemed heavier than paper had any right to be.
Hollow Peak was not the beginning.
You must understand this.
It will be tempting to imagine the mountain as the place where everything went wrong. A single mistake. A single expedition. A single door we should not have opened.
That would be merciful.
It would also be false.
Hollow Peak was merely where the pattern became impossible to deny.
I found the first Black Sun symbol twenty-six years before the mountain. It was carved beneath a collapsed shrine in northern Anatolia, hidden behind a wall older than the temple built around it. At the time, I believed it an anomaly.
Then I found it again in a burial chamber outside Thebes.
Then beneath a Roman foundation in Britain.
Then copied into the margins of a manuscript no scholar could date with certainty.
Different cultures.
Different languages.
Different gods.
The same mark.
A black circle surrounded by fractures.
At first I believed it represented an eclipse.
Then a cult.
Then a forgotten astronomical event.
I was wrong every time.
The symbol was not a record of something seen in the sky.
It was a warning.
My mother closed her eyes.
“He never told me it went back that far.”
“Did he tell you any of this?”
“Only pieces.”
“Why hide it?”
“Because saying it aloud would have made it real.”
I looked at the walls of the study.
Maps. Rubbings. Sketches. The same mark repeated in dozens of forms, some careful, some frantic, some barely human.
A black circle surrounded by fractures.
I had seen it so many times that familiarity had dulled the terror of it. That frightened me too. How quickly the impossible becomes ordinary when it surrounds you long enough.
I continued.
The earliest texts did not call it the Black Sun.
That name came later, after fear became myth and myth became worship.
Older fragments used stranger phrases.
The Hollow Light.
The Eye Without Dawn.
The Crowned Absence.
The Prison Star.
The last is closest to the truth, though even that is incomplete.
I do not yet know what Nytherion is.
If anyone claims otherwise, they are either lying or already lost.
I have read accounts calling it a god, a wound, a king, a plague, a thought that existed before thought itself. I have found prayers begging it to awaken and carvings begging it to remain asleep. I have seen records that describe the Black Sun as its throne and others that describe it as its cage.
I believe the oldest records were not written by worshippers.
They were written by jailers.
The room seemed to darken around the word.
Jailers.
My mother whispered it aloud.
“Jailers.”
I nodded slowly.
“It matches the page I found. The Black Sun is the prison.”
“But a prison needs walls.”
“And locks.”
“And someone built them.”
We looked at one another.
For a moment, neither of us needed to say what we were both thinking.
If the Black Sun was a prison, then everything surrounding it—the Gates, the seals, the relics, the Lords my father had only begun to name—was part of something constructed. Not legend. Not superstition.
A mechanism.
An ancient system built to contain something so terrible that entire civilizations erased themselves trying to keep it forgotten.
My mother looked toward the window.
Snow moved softly beyond the glass.
“It was easier when I thought he had lost his mind.”
I almost laughed.
“Yes.”
“That is a terrible thing to say.”
“It’s true.”
“It meant there was nothing out there.”
“Only him.”
“Only him,” she repeated.
The sadness in her voice was unbearable.
Then the house creaked.
Not loudly.
Just once.
Somewhere above us.
We both looked toward the ceiling.
No footsteps followed.
No whisper.
No movement.
After several seconds, my mother said, “Keep reading.”
I did.
If you have seen signs of it in the house, you must not assume they are hallucinations.
That may be the first lie it offers you.
It will make you doubt your own senses because doubt isolates a man better than any locked door.
You will ask whether grief has broken you.
Whether exhaustion has distorted memory.
Whether you imagined the voice, the reflection, the figure standing where no figure should be.
You did not.
If it has followed my name back into our home, then the crossing has already begun.
Not fully.
Not physically.
But enough.
The Gate does not only open through stone.
It opens through memory.
Through blood.
Through grief.
Through anything that reaches long enough toward what has been lost.
That is why you must be careful, my son.
The Black Sun does not first tempt men with power.
It tempts them with answers.
The candle went out.
No draft passed through the study.
No window opened.
The flame simply vanished.
Darkness rushed into the room so suddenly my mother gasped.
For one heartbeat, I saw nothing.
Then the embers in the fireplace downstairs cast faint orange light through the half-open study door behind us. It was barely enough to outline the desk, the letter, my mother’s face.
“Alias.”
“I’m here.”
“Light the lamp.”
I reached for the matches near the ink bottle.
My fingers had only just touched the box when something moved in the window.
Not outside.
In the reflection.
I froze.
My mother saw my face.
“What?”
“Don’t turn around.”
She became perfectly still.
In the dark glass behind us, our reflections sat at the desk exactly as we did.
But a third reflection stood between us.
Tall.
Motionless.
A man’s outline.
The features were indistinct, blurred by darkness and snow, but the posture was painfully familiar.
My father.
Or the shape that grief used when it wanted me to open a door.
My mother whispered, “Is he there?”
“In the glass.”
Her eyes filled instantly, but she did not turn.
“Is it him?”
I stared at the reflection.
The figure did not move.
“I don’t know.”
“Does he look hurt?”
That question nearly broke me.
Because beneath all the fear, all the warnings, all the horror Corvin had dragged into our lives, she still wanted him to be saved.
So did I.
“I can’t see his face.”
The figure in the glass slowly lowered its head.
Then the reflection’s mouth opened.
No sound came.
Only frost spreading outward across the inside of the window, forming branching patterns that crawled across the glass until they covered the figure entirely.
When the frost reached the edge of the frame, words appeared within it.
Not written by a hand.
Formed through absence.
KEEP READING.
My mother began to cry silently.
I struck a match.
The flame flared, small and yellow, but the moment it caught, the reflection vanished.
The window showed only night and snow.
I lit the lamp with shaking hands.
The study returned slowly: desk, journals, walls, letter, mother.
All of it looked the same.
None of it felt the same.
My mother wiped her face.
“Was that him?”
I looked down at the letter.
“No.”
“How do you know?”
“Because if it were him, he would have told me to stop.”
The words left my mouth before I understood how certain I was of them.
My mother looked at me for a long moment.
Then she nodded.
“Then we keep reading.”
And we did.
There is a name you will find throughout my journals.
Azrakar.
Be careful with it.
Names have weight in matters such as these, and this one carries more than most.
I do not know whether Azrakar was a man, a king, a seal, or a lie built around something older. The records contradict one another so completely that I suspect contradiction may be part of the design.
Some call him the Bearer beneath the Black Sun.
Some call him the final key.
Some call him the one who closed the Gate.
Others claim he opened it.
I have spent half my life trying to decide which account is true.
Now I fear they all are.
That was where the first page ended.
I turned it over.
The reverse side was blank.
For several seconds, I simply stared at the empty paper.
My mother leaned forward.
“There’s more?”
“Yes.”
But my voice sounded uncertain.
There had to be more.
The letter could not end there. Not after everything. Not after the warnings, the admissions, the names.
I checked the envelope.
Empty.
I looked beneath the page.
Nothing.
My mother searched the desk with me, moving aside journals, folded maps and loose notes while I checked beneath the blotter, inside the drawer, between the pages of the nearby field journal.
No second page.
No continuation.
Only the first half of my father’s warning.
“It’s missing,” I said.
“Could he have hidden it somewhere else?”
“Maybe.”
“Or someone took it.”
We both stopped moving.
The thought entered the room like another presence.
Someone took it.
Or something had.
The study door moved behind us.
Only slightly.
A slow inward creak.
My mother turned toward it.
I gathered the letter instinctively.
“Stay behind me,” I said.
She did not argue.
The door opened another inch.
No hand touched it.
Beyond the threshold, the hallway stood dark.
Then something slid across the floor toward us from the corridor.
A single sheet of paper.
It came to rest just inside the study.
For a moment, neither of us moved.
The page was old.
Folded once.
Marked with ash.
And written across the front in my father’s handwriting were three words:
NOT THE GATE.
I looked at my mother.
She looked at me.
Neither of us spoke.
From somewhere deep inside the house, beneath the floorboards or perhaps far below the earth itself, came three slow impacts.
Part II
The three impacts echoed through the house.
Slow.
Measured.
Deliberate.
Not loud enough to shake the walls.
Only loud enough to remind us they were still there.
My mother and I remained motionless, staring at the folded page lying on the study floor.
NOT THE GATE.
Three words.
Nothing more.
Yet they carried a weight far greater than anything written in my father's letter.
I finally stepped forward and picked it up.
The paper felt dry and brittle beneath my fingers, older than the journals surrounding us. Black ash stained one corner, leaving faint marks across my skin.
There was nothing written on the reverse.
No explanation.
No signature.
Only those three words.
My mother broke the silence first.
"Did your father write it?"
"I don't know."
"It looks like his handwriting."
"It does."
"But?"
I looked towards the study door.
"It wasn't here a moment ago."
She followed my gaze.
"You think something brought it."
"I don't know what I think anymore."
Neither of us wanted to say the obvious.
The study door had opened on its own.
The page had crossed the room by itself.
And somewhere beneath the house...
something had knocked three times.
I slipped the note carefully inside the envelope with Corvin's letter.
"If Father wanted us to find this..."
"He chose a strange way of delivering it."
"Unless he didn't."
The possibility settled heavily between us.
Perhaps someone—or something—else wanted us to read it.
I unfolded the next journal lying beside the letter.
The leather cover cracked softly beneath my hands.
Unlike the carefully organised volumes Corvin had kept during his earlier research, this one possessed no dates.
No chapter headings.
No index.
Only page after page of observations written whenever sleep—or fear—allowed him the chance.
The first entry caught my attention immediately.
The house has begun remembering before I do.
I found mud upon the study floor this morning.
My boots were clean.
No windows had been opened.
No visitor entered.
Yet the footprints led only one way.
Toward the cellar.
I have not gone below for twelve days.
I no longer trust my own memory enough to know whether that statement is true.
I felt a coldness settle in my stomach.
My mother noticed my expression.
"What is it?"
I turned the journal towards her.
She read silently.
Then looked up.
"He never showed me this."
"I don't think he intended anyone to."
She looked around the room.
"Do you think..."
She hesitated.
"...the house really was changing?"
I answered without looking away from the page.
"I think he believed it was."
"And you?"
I remembered the reflection in the mirror.
The whispers.
My mother's eyes turning black.
The figure beyond the frosted glass.
"I don't think belief matters anymore."
Several pages later another entry had been circled repeatedly.
The ink around it had been pressed so heavily that it nearly tore through the paper.
There is an error repeated throughout every surviving record.
Scholars speak of opening the Gate.
That is the wrong word.
The Gate is rarely opened.
It is persuaded.
Every action leaves an impression.
Every name remembered.
Every symbol restored.
Every truth uncovered.
The Gate does not break.
It responds.
Like an ancient wound remembering how to bleed.
I read the passage twice.
Then a third time.
My mother was already shaking her head.
"I don't understand."
"Neither do I."
"What does he mean... persuaded?"
"I think..."
The words came slowly.
"...he's saying the Gate isn't a door."
She frowned.
"But we've seen it."
"Yes."
"But perhaps the stone beneath Hollow Peak is only the place where it becomes visible."
She looked towards the window.
"The thing beneath the mountain."
"The thing in this house."
"The dreams."
"The whispers."
"They're connected."
I nodded.
"The Gate may exist in more than one place."
The room fell silent again.
I thought about the note.
NOT THE GATE.
Perhaps Corvin hadn't been warning us about Hollow Peak at all.
Perhaps he had been warning us that we were asking the wrong question.
My mother stood and crossed slowly towards the shelves lining the far wall.
For years she had avoided entering the study unless absolutely necessary.
Now she began examining every journal as though searching for something she herself had hidden.
"I used to hate this room."
Her voice sounded distant.
"I thought it stole your father from us."
She ran her fingers across the spine of an old notebook.
"Perhaps it was trying to warn him."
I looked up.
"What changed your mind?"
She smiled sadly.
"I've stopped believing the world is simple."
She removed a small leather-bound notebook from the shelf.
"I remember this."
"Have you read it?"
"No."
"Then why remember it?"
"Because he never let anyone touch it."
She handed it to me.
There was no title.
Only a symbol burned into the leather.
Not the Black Sun.
Something older.
A circle enclosed within six broken rings.
Inside, a single sentence had been written.
Do not continue if the dreams have already begun.
I looked instinctively at my mother.
She stared back at me.
Neither of us needed to say it.
The dreams had begun long ago.
The notebook contained only a handful of pages.
Each had been written in different ink.
Different handwriting.
Different decades.
Different languages.
Corvin had translated them beneath each passage.
One fragment read:
The darkness is patient because it has forgotten the meaning of time.
Another:
Those who seek the prison believing it contains treasure become its newest walls.
Another simply said:
Do not follow the voice that sounds most familiar.
I stopped.
My mother noticed immediately.
"What?"
I pointed towards the final sentence.
She read it twice.
Then quietly sat back down.
Neither of us spoke for several minutes.
Because both of us had heard Corvin's voice.
More than once.
"I keep asking myself the same question," my mother finally whispered.
"What?"
"If that wasn't your father..."
"...then what wanted us to believe it was?"
I had no answer.
Only silence.
Outside, snow continued falling across the valley.
Inside, the study seemed somehow smaller than before.
As though the walls had shifted while we were reading.
I glanced toward the window.
Nothing.
Only darkness beyond the glass.
Still...
I found myself checking my own reflection.
Just in case.
I returned to Corvin's letter.
The handwriting remained calm.
Almost comforting.
As though he had somehow known we would need his voice more than ever.
The next page began differently.
Not with research.
Not with warnings.
With an apology.
Alias.
If there remains even the smallest chance that you have ignored everything I have written and chosen an ordinary life...
then stop reading now.
Close this letter.
Burn every journal.
Take your mother somewhere far from Hollow Peak.
Forget my name if you must.
I would rather be remembered as a coward than become the reason you follow me into darkness.
If, however...
you are still reading...
then I already know the choice you have made.
Because you are my son.
And curiosity runs through our family like blood.
That was always our greatest strength.
It may also become our greatest weakness.
Part III
I lowered the letter onto the desk.
For a long while, neither of us moved.
The study had become strangely quiet again.
Not peaceful.
Waiting.
The oil lamp burned steadily beside us, casting long amber shadows across the journals that had consumed my father's life. Beyond the windows the snow continued to fall, blanketing the valley beneath darkness. It was beautiful.
Almost enough to make a man forget what waited beneath Hollow Peak.
Almost.
My mother folded her hands together.
"I've been trying to remember him."
I looked up.
"The man before all of this."
She smiled sadly.
"You wouldn't remember."
"I remember pieces."
"No."
Her eyes drifted toward the fire.
"You remember the years after it began."
For several moments she said nothing.
When she finally spoke again, her voice carried warmth I had not heard in years.
"When we first met, your father couldn't sit still."
I blinked.
"What?"
"He was impossible."
She laughed softly.
"If there was a ruin nearby, he'd disappear before breakfast. If someone mentioned an old monastery, he'd already be halfway there before they finished the sentence."
"That sounds familiar."
"It should."
She looked at me knowingly.
"You inherited more from him than his eyes."
I couldn't help smiling.
"He once climbed halfway down a collapsed Roman well because someone claimed there were carvings at the bottom."
"What happened?"
"He broke his ankle."
I laughed.
"And did he learn?"
She looked at me as though I'd asked the most ridiculous question imaginable.
"Of course not."
For the first time in what felt like months, we both laughed together.
It only lasted a few seconds.
But for those few seconds...
the darkness seemed farther away.
"He wasn't always frightened," she continued quietly.
"People think obsession begins with fear."
"It doesn't?"
She shook her head.
"It begins with wonder."
She looked across the study.
"Your father loved history because every forgotten place meant another question."
Another silence settled between us.
"He used to tell me..."
She closed her eyes, remembering.
"...that the greatest adventure wasn't discovering treasure."
"What was it?"
"Discovering that everything you thought you knew was incomplete."
I looked down at Corvin's letter.
"He never stopped believing that."
"No."
"He simply discovered something that should have remained incomplete."
I unfolded the next page.
The handwriting remained steady.
Almost painfully calm.
Alias,
If you have reached this point, then you deserve honesty.
Not answers.
Honesty.
There is a difference.
Answers suggest certainty.
I possess very little of that.
The older I became, the less certain I found myself.
The world became larger.
History became older.
The impossible became increasingly difficult to dismiss.
There came a point when I realised I was no longer searching for evidence.
I was searching for reassurance that I had been wrong.
I never found it.
I paused.
My mother watched me carefully.
"He wanted to be mistaken."
"Yes."
"He wasn't chasing the Black Sun because he enjoyed it."
"No."
"He spent years hoping it wasn't real."
"Exactly."
The thought changed something inside me.
For so long I had imagined my father driven by ambition.
By obsession.
By pride.
Now I realised those years had been something else entirely.
He had spent decades trying to prove himself wrong.
And failed.
I continued.
There are moments that divide a man's life into before and after.
For me...
it was not Hollow Peak.
It was a library.
Hidden beneath an abandoned monastery whose name has long since been forgotten.
The monks had sealed an underground chamber centuries earlier.
Not to protect what lay inside.
To imprison it.
There were no treasures.
No gold.
No relics.
Only books.
Thousands of them.
Most had rotted into dust.
One remained untouched.
Its final page had been torn away.
The last surviving sentence read:
When the Sixth...
Nothing more.
Only those words.
When the Sixth...
For twenty years I believed the missing page contained the answer.
Now...
I believe someone removed it to protect us.
My mother frowned.
"The Sixth?"
"I don't know."
"No."
She looked at me.
"I mean your father didn't know."
I stared at the page.
For once...
the uncertainty comforted me.
Even Corvin had not uncovered every secret.
The house settled around us.
Wood creaked somewhere upstairs.
The old clock in the hallway ticked once.
Then stopped.
I frowned.
"Did you hear that?"
My mother nodded.
"It stopped."
"It hasn't stopped in years."
"No."
Neither of us moved.
The silence that followed felt wrong.
Not because it was quiet.
Because the house itself seemed to be listening.
I read on.
Whatever follows my work into this house...
do not mistake curiosity for invitation.
Some mysteries are patient.
Some merely wait to be noticed.
The greatest mistake I ever made was believing that observation could remain passive.
It cannot.
The moment you truly begin searching...
something begins searching for you.
A cold shiver travelled down my spine.
Without thinking, I glanced toward the window.
Only snow.
Only darkness.
Only my own reflection.
I looked away.
Then immediately looked back.
My reflection remained exactly where it should.
I released a breath I hadn't realised I was holding.
My mother noticed.
"You thought you'd see him again."
"I don't know what I thought."
"Neither do I."
The final page felt heavier than the others.
Almost reluctant to unfold.
When I finally opened it...
the handwriting had changed.
Not in style.
In pressure.
The words had been written by a man whose hands no longer remained steady.
If I have disappeared...
do not come looking for me.
If I am alive...
I know where I must remain.
If I am dead...
leave me there.
Whatever you believe happened to me...
I promise you this.
The truth is worse.
I stopped.
My mother covered her mouth.
Neither of us spoke.
I never wanted this burden to become yours.
If there had been another path...
I would have taken it.
If there had been another man...
I would have chosen him.
If there had been another way...
I would never have written this letter.
Remember me before the journals.
Before the mountain.
Before the Black Sun.
Remember the father who carried you upon his shoulders.
Remember the man who built your telescope.
Remember the nights we counted shooting stars together.
That man existed.
Do not let the darkness steal him from your memory.
Love does not disappear simply because fear arrives first.
Know this above everything else.
I never stopped trying to find my way home.
Your loving father,
Corvin Voss
I reached the bottom of the page.
There were no more words.
No final revelation.
No explanation.
Only a father's signature.
For several minutes neither of us moved.
The silence hurt more than anything written upon those pages.
My mother reached across the desk and gently rested her hand upon the signature.
"I'd forgotten..."
She whispered the words almost to herself.
"...how beautiful his handwriting was."
Tears rolled silently down her face.
I reached over and took her hand.
Neither of us cried loudly.
There was no anger left.
Only loss.
Then...
someone knocked.
Three times.
Not beneath the house.
Not upstairs.
At the front door.
The sound echoed through the silent house.
We both looked toward the study entrance.
Another three knocks.
Slow.
Patient.
Exactly the same rhythm we had heard beneath the floorboards.
My mother stood.
"No."
I caught her wrist.
"What if someone needs help?"
"No one walks to this house in weather like this."
The knocking came again.
Three measured impacts.
Then...
a voice.
Soft.
Familiar.
Almost impossible to hear.
"Elizabeth..."
My mother's face drained of colour.
It was my father's voice.
Exactly as we remembered it.
Not distorted.
Not whispered.
Simply...
Corvin.
She took one step toward the hallway.
I stepped in front of her.
"He came home..."
"No."
"Elizabeth..."
"It's Alias," I said automatically, my pulse racing. "Mother... listen to me."
She stared at me, dazed.
"He came home."
I shook my head.
"What did the journal say?"
She didn't answer.
"What did it say?"
Tears streamed down her cheeks.
Slowly...
she whispered the words.
Do not follow the voice that sounds most familiar.
The knocking stopped.
Silence filled the house once more.
Then, from the other side of the front door...
came a final sentence.
Spoken gently.
Lovingly.
In my father's voice.
"Alias..."
"...open the door."
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📖 CONTINUE THE CHRONICLES
FIELD LOG 17 — LEAVING HOME
After hearing Corvin's voice at the front door, Alias and Elizabeth realise something has followed him home. With nowhere left to hide, they must abandon the Voss house forever and begin the long journey back to Hollow Peak—never knowing what is waiting in the darkness behind them.
→ Continue to Field Log 017
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