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.

this matter is conclusive, but that rather than the delusion of impossibly strong societies falling to monsters of such strength

age' despite the lack of concrete evidence. In truth, the old-races of Pangera have never been stronger and the ancients do

• of Scholar Grans to the

fun that it really ought to be, and deep down I think I feel the stirrings of the long slumbering Dark Anthony. No! I reject thee, evil one! I need

and vacuum in as much experience as you

able to hit a

form of its full

now, thanks to my antennae. Just how sensitive are these things? I can clearly detect the mental assault that rides along her voice, somehow attacking the mind of her foes without even employing mind magic. It's like an injection of pure fear, straight into the vein, and it appears to work wonders on the foe in front of us as they cower back from Crinis,