Paths of the Past

Report Excerpt We thought the world was dying. It took centuries for the fraying mist to spread across the surface, maybe longer. Just a little change in the air at first. The problem is the change never stops. It starts with the plants and smaller things and then it goes to people. A few days inside turns you mad, makes you see things that aren't there. After a week, your body's not the same either. Most don't make it past that point, but a few do. If they manage to come back at all, it's just to feed on the first victim they find. They tell me it used to be a grand old world a couple thousand years ago, and I guess with some of the things we've found down here that must have been true. Complicated runes sit around forgotten while giant machines dominate the caverns, so maybe it was really something. They couldn't stop the mist though.

The mist doesn't care how important you are. The mist doesn't have favorites, or take prisoners. When the fraying mist arrived, we ran. Whole cities emptied overnight at the first signs of the chill fog and turned nomad, tearing up the land where they went, desperate for food and resources. Eventually they split up for their own survival and went to search for another way. We all came to the same answer though, and that was to start digging. The mist doesn't go underground. We don't really know why. Maybe it just doesn't like getting dirty, although it sure seems to like leaving a mess behind. Might be because magic doesn't work the same way either. Then, the big one happened. We realized time was running out and there was no place left to run anymore.

The nomad cities sent out scouts to look for some help, anything they could use to stave off the end just a little longer, and when they were just about to run out of time they found this place. Our own little haven, created and abandoned farther back than anyone remembered. By the time they found it, the others had already moved on to avoid the mists, so the scouts were forced to stay. We don't really know who was first but we do know everyone agreed that there was no place for old grudges. We were all in it together against the fraying mist, and they took in everyone they could find. We figured out how to find food down here, even grow it to some extent. The old kinds probably tasted better, but it's pretty amazing what you can do with some mushrooms if you know how.

We built our homes from stone, because wood was just too much of a rarity now, even figured out how to turn one of the machines on so we had plenty of water too. All that was a few hundred years ago, but we've grown since then and it's not so bad in our haven beneath the stone. Some days you see the ringmaster strapping another soul to the wheel who was caught doing something he shouldn't have and you know the priests will be pulling his bones from the cleaning pit the next day, but some days it's quiet. Friendly even. Everyone just works together, trying to go back to what we used to be, or what we think it was like. The elder council does their best to keep that dream alive. We never stopped being scouts though.

Maybe it's because we still have some kind of hope, but there's always a brave few who are willing to return to the surface and defy the mist. They've gotten good at it too, because we don't lose so many any more. Time and again they'll dive in, searching for a way back to everything from before, looking through the mist for the paths of the past.