I do not yet understand why the mists bring me what feels like it could be friendship, only to snatch that feint connection away from me once more. I cannot help but reflect on the encounters I have had with the doctor, the soldier and the magician. I met them first on a small ship which was set upon by a great serpent of the sea. It seemed so ridiculous I could scarcely believe that there was any truth to the encounter. While the others may have been physically far stronger than me, none could take command in a crisis. Perhaps it was the abject futility of trying to understand that a giant serpent was tearing our vessel to driftwood, but my heart did not tremble and I stood strong. I would scarce say it was my bravery that saved the lives of those poor men, for it was possibly selfish pride that forced me to find a way ashore. The sailors did not survive, leaving me with a motley crew consisting of a brute with a sadness behind his bravado, a nervous doctor and a man from a very strange land whose will could flare as though with magick.
The jungle island was a hostile, cruel place, where vicious savages lurked in the shadowy woods. We happened upon the house of a civilised man who described himself as a surgeon, but how he had arrived there seemed to make no more sense than the monster of the deep whose tentacles had thrashed our ship to pieces. His daughter was kind to me and allowed me to take spare clothing to replace that which had become water-logged. Luckily, the girl was slender and the dress a good fit, if a little loose around the midriff. Less fortunate was being woken in the night by a hellish scream. My companions rushed to be heroes, only to discover the surgeon treating a wild animal. I took the opportunity to indulge my curiosity and filled the folds of the dress with vials of something they had called ether. It smelled heady and noxious and struck me as a dangerous thing to carry.
The surgeon asked us to visit a monastery on the cliff-top, where he said a cult of priests held a relic of great and terrible power and he asked that we wrest it from him. Sensing that there was perhaps more to this matter, we made our way up to the monks. The order was a strange and largely silent place with withered old monks shuffling around the cloisters. The abbot met with us, but his faith had become perverted by isolation, I fear, and he had fallen deep into delusion and sin. They believed it their sacred duty to protect a stone table that granted them a hollow immortality; they aged eternally but their souls clung to their bodies.
The order filled me with horror and revulsion. Although we held no particular love for the surgeon, these monks had such a hideous vision of the world that even I considered their actions blasphemy. We conspired to take their altar away from them that they could no longer leech their profane sustenance from it and that they would be released from their purgatory. Anger and indignation consumed me and when it seemed we would not escape, I took it upon myself to take the ungodly life of the Abbot that we could freely escape.
When our actions were discovered, the monks revealed their hideous rage and chased us towards the edge of the cliff. Fortunately, the ether I had purloined proved to be very effective in igniting the straw in the courtyard and creating a blazing barrier between them and us. The monastery itself took up in flames as we made good our escape. Taking the relic from them seemed most effective in ensuring that the flames ended their heresy.
While the men carried the ungainly slab through the woods, back to the surgeon's house, we spied a ruckus ahead as the native folk were laying siege to the house. At first, we were stirred to strike them down and save the surgeon and his household, but then it struck us that he, too, was exploiting the recuperative powers of the table and using its curse to experiment on the local people, fusing their flesh with that of base animals. Realising that only the savages of the land had any shred of dignity left, we left the table in their custodianship and let it sway the skirmish in their favour.
We fled the island with the help of the daughter only to discover that she too had been a victim of the surgeon's perversion and that she was only part human, the rest being some kind of porpoise. Had she left with us, she would have been starved of the infernal power that sustained her unhappy life and we left her to swim back to try to bring a little sanity back to the island.
As we watched the smoke billowing from the scorched ruins of the monastery, I wondered if, as my companions suggested, I might possibly continue to travel with them, but when the mists surrounded us, it was in a very different land, and one where I found myself alone and without the strength of three men, however nervous and melancholy they may have been and I was forced to learn to fend for myself in a cruel environment. But that, and the story of the haunter manor in which I met these men again, is a tale for another time, for the mists are closing and I must ensure I do not lose this journal - some day soon I fear it will be the only connection I have to my past as the veil between my homeland and this dark realm grows ever thicker.
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