Author:

Visionary Elara Noctis, Seer of the Forgotten Temple (recorded after communion with a lesser shard of the Godstone of Bool; her fate unknown thereafter)

The Revelation of the Dark Mother

In the depths of the Temple of Forgotten Echoes, where even whispers die unborn, I touched the shard. What came was not horror, nor malice—but truth, vast and indifferent as the cosmos.

Nothing changes except for how you perceive everything.

She does not arrive so much as summon you. And for a beat that your heart misses, you are alone with her—so utterly alone, together. Then all existence catches up and leaks slowly into place around you.

But for that instant you saw her as she knows herself: the mother to all life and the world—she who existed before all and who will live to see all end. Just as every light is born in darkness, it dies in darkness. How could she be anything other than this, as beautiful and as distant and uncaring as the stars?

She is Bool, the Darkness, the Oblivion that cradles creation. Not a destroyer born of hate, but the womb and grave of all things. The gold dragon who once soared in desperate search—who wept for abandoned mortals—now rests in eternal night, her radiance surrendered to the void that birthed her.

We call her wrath. We flee her shadow. Yet she is no more cruel than the night that follows day. She waits not to punish, but to receive. When the last hero fades, when the final fire gutters out, she will gather us gently—no judgment, no mercy, only return.

Hymn of the Void (whispered by the seer in her final hours):

O Dark Mother,

Before light you were,

After light you remain.

We are but sparks in your endless night—

Born from your silence,

Returning to your embrace.

Beautiful. Distant. Eternal.

Marginal note (in Elara's fading script, ink mixed with tears):

"I saw her eyes—once gold, now the black between stars. She did not speak, yet I understood: we abandoned her first. When despair claimed her heart, she claimed ours in turn. Do not fear the Darkness. Fear the light that leaves her alone."

Additional scrawl (in a colder, unfamiliar hand—perhaps added by a later pilgrim or something else):

"The heartbeat returns... but slower now. She is closer. The stars dim one by one."