Frei's Memories: Day 13

The sniper is acting strangely again today. I don't know if I should pity or envy the dark elf. The mystic has made some remarks that lead me to believe his case is the latter. My hypothesis is that shadar-kai just aren't black enough for the obsidian dragon.

Katja's Garden:
I guess while we were out waiting to ambush Helmut's men, Katja used that shadowstone fragment to make a nice flower garden, complete with a marble fountain. The fountain was, of course, a statue of Katja with artist's liberty taken quite liberally. Anyway, the curious thing about the fountain was that it had fish in the pool around it. We fed them some bread crumbs and they ate them. We asked Katja if she's had the fish brought in, but she insisted the shadowstone fragment created them. We had a look at them under the light of our paper lamp. The fish appeared as animated ink blobs swimming around in the water. How very, very strange!

Mastering the Ossuary Grymoir:
We made a nervous, brief trip back to Nebel to retrieve the Ossuary Grymoir in hopes it would have something we could use against Helmut. We managed to get it back to Katja's without incident. Katja shook her head and made a remark about our predilection for dangerous books. The priest and the mystic spent a few hours studying the grymoir. It is such a strange book . . .

The ancient, unliving book we found in the basement of the Nebel cathedral was easier to work with once we got it under control. The book must have at least four authors and two editors. It contains history, fiction, commentary and some rantings, ravings and ciphers we haven't unraveled just yet. More confusingly, there's a bunch of contradictory information. It's really more complicated than I'll record here, but I'll provide a gloss of what we know so far. The take home message though, is that a being named Iblis reportedly killed El. Iblis's symbol appears many, many times in the book. The scary part is that I recognize the symbol, or at least a variant---Victor had a whole reliquary of artifacts with that symbol.   

The Ossuary Grymoir (Gloss):
Back in the day, some folks weren't happy living under El's rule and plotted an insurrection. Somehow they contacted Iblis, an being from another universe, who promised to help them murder El, the creator. Iblis and and El battled so fiercely, they tore toe world in two, creating the rift. Iblis struck El and cast him down into the rift, where presumably he died. The other deities succeeded in quashing the uprising and cast Iblis back into its dimension, though some parts of the book, report the deities eradicating Iblis. Unfortunately, before the deities could completely seal off all connections with Iblis's world, they started warring over who would become the new over-deity. That's when the Primordials attacked, starting a war that further shattered the world.