Chrysalis

This talk of 'ancients', mysterious creatures of supreme power that supposedly rule in the depths of our world is naught but superstitious nonsense. As a scholar, how can I put my faith in hearsay, tattered records and stories passed down over centuries? I need evidence. I need facts, verified by firsthand accounts. When we actually sit down and try to prove the existence of these monsters, what do we actually have?

Almost no written records survived the Rending, certainly not any that I can access or have heard of, a fact which I believe lends credence to my own arguments. If the pre-cataclysm society was so powerful, so wondrous, as many of my contemporaries would claim, then surely they would have survived the scourge of the Dungeon far better than they did. Waves are nothing new, we have experienced hundreds of them in the millennia since they first began. Many kingdoms maintain cities, outposts and forts in the Dungeon during these times, something that we know the civilisations of old were unable, or barely able to do.

"Oh," those who disagree would say, "you are comparing people with hundreds of years of accumulated expertise against those taken by surprise, without any knowledge of what lay beneath their feet!"

A foolish point that only lends further strength to my view. My detractors seem to be unable to see the contradiction they themselves have constructed. Were the old kingdoms immensely powerful centres of learning and strength far in excess of what we now possess, as they claim? Or were they weak, falling victim to the ravages of the wave and being swept away by a tide of weaker monsters capable of existing on the surface? It can't be both!

I have heard such nonsense as to suggest that the first wave that occurred during the Rending was simply of a scale larger than any that has occurred since, but again I ask: where is the proof? More than a thousand years later we have records of waves all over Pangera that date back centuries, and nothing such as what is posited to have taken place has ever been recorded. Not only has it never been recorded, the level of mana readings have never approached even HALF what would be necessary to create the conditions they describe.

indeed a real event, to say otherwise would be foolish as the weight of evidence on this matter is conclusive, but that rather than the delusion of impossibly strong societies falling to monsters of such strength that have never been seen or heard from again, instead the Cataclysm consisted of weak, unprepared societies falling victim to what was, at worst, a slightly above

lack of concrete evidence. In truth, the old-races of Pangera have never been stronger and the ancients do not exist. These are the facts and I challenge any who dispute me to provide evidence to

• of Scholar Grans to the

is far more fun that it really ought to be, and deep down I think I feel the stirrings

in as much experience as you can. Can't have you lagging behind me

to hit a monster since, idiot. Which may be true, but

the form of its full terror, her three mouths revealing themselves from within the shadows of

instantaneous as many rear back clutching at their heads or simply dropping to the ground, writhing as their sanity is assaulted by the psychic waves of fear that accompany her roar. Waves I can sense now, thanks to my antennae. Just how sensitive are these things? I can clearly detect the mental assault that