A Plea from within the Maw of Darkness
Windsday, 12th day of Taurus, Year of Santus Chand, 981
We had heard the stories of how these blood-plagued abominations overwhelmed villages and towns in the surrounding lands, but experiencing it for oneself leaves me naught but terrified. Were I a wordsmith with talent and time to pen, I still could not offer even a measure of the despair that fills me in this moment.
In twilight they approached, but unlike any army. They first came wandering out of the woodlands in packs, lured like wolves sniffing their prey in the wind. It would have been almost mesmerizing how they swarmed in ebbs and flows if it weren’t for the horrifying fact that they were only seeking to tear us apart.
In their rising fervor to find us, they began wandering closer to the outer walls, but it was not until the musketeers began their volleys that the true direness of our circumstance was realized. The muskets did little but disclose our whereabouts and stir them into a frenzy. The whole hoard charged toward the castle as fast as I have seen any man run. Were they feeling men and women, they would not have approached so carelessly, but they were not of their own minds, not any more. They heeded neither obstacle nor trap laid out before them and plunged themselves unwittingly upon the pikes dug into the ground. Those behind them kept pushing until the pikes were either upended or there was a pile of writhing bodies high enough to climb over them. In much the same way, they bridged the trenches, filling them up with bodies and surely drowning those at the bottom in the rainwater.
Once past the outer defenses, they raced across the clearing and slammed themselves upon our walls, scratching and clawing as if to tear through the stone. In the firelight, I could see the lot of them caked all over with blood, likely as much from their victims as their own infectious blood seeping from their pores. The soldiers did all they could to drive the hoard off the walls, but the hoard was undeterred by oil and fire. They continued clambering over each other in a frenzy to reach the defenders on the parapets. Like ants swarming a larger enemy, their mass grew taller and taller, and once the parapets were reached, it was as if we had opened the font gates. The walls that were designed to keep the most cunning of invaders out were overrun in mere minutes by mindless creatures.
I watched it all in horror from the highest window in the keep proper, but I fear to report that it too has been breached. It is only a matter of time before they find their way up to my chambers and break through the door. Had I living family somewhere, I would ask the finder of this journal to give them my love, but my family lays before me, poisoned by my hand to save them from the oncoming horror. I would poison myself too if it were not a worse sin than murder, but at least I can beg forgiveness for my crime was an act of mercy. So now I sit still with my candle light fading and the shuffling and scratching beyond the door creeping ever closer. Either they will sniff me out and in their unnatural frenzy break through the door and tear me apart, or I will die from wrenching remorse. At least my family is with Daeus now. Daeus save us all.
— Journal entry of an unknown noble
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