22nd Light beneath the eleventh Moon

3761 Cycles beyond the Dark

722 Years after the Repentance

Entry: 1/043

Dear self,

The dream was different tonight. The day sky was gone and replaced with a starry night heaven. It was the new moon, so only the cloudy constellations were visible. The night was much brighter beneath a cloudless sky within this apparent untamed wilderness. The lack of civilization might have meant less competition for influence over the local mana for the more natural and celestial aspects.

That cheeky sun was still here, not at any level of strength now that night reigns, but I found it being chewed on by Rahph. He appeared to like the taste of it’s fiery radiance. This time I could approach him at an equal height. He was still taller than he was in real life, but I had gained more power within the dream.

The little sun squeaked sharply for help, but I was more in the mood for some answers. Vivid dreams are not something to take lightly if you don’t know the source of them, and I was no mystic like Anora. Rahph was clearly involved somehow, but I suspected it was mostly some coincidence on his part. This little star of smokeless fire had connected us for some reason, even without being all that powerful if its predicament is any indication. This dream realm was its doing even if the contents were formed from Rahph’s mind.

The little sun was poor at communicating. I mostly got some repentant empathy from it and some petulance, but I also got a name. Vamera.

We didn’t open the shop today, and the morning was spent preparing for the spells and rituals we may or may not find useful while capturing the Interloper. Surprisingly the Guild had sent news that some wizard or warlock happened to be nearby and interested in helping. Either would be ideal, or even a thaumaturge could work. They advised us not to attempt to banish the entity by ourselves and letting whoever was coming help deal with it.

I am not exactly fully experienced so ultimately the ritual wasn’t left to me. We did decide to incorporate a good bit of Nightgloom. Mum might not have an affinity to the stuff but the constructs she can incorporate it into is more than worth it. We will mostly be using Dawdlium to hopefully help contain the Interloper and we will use the Nightgloom as an ambient isolating agent to help keep the entity and any other possible interlopers from traveling too far away or proliferating somehow. After we perform the ritual it will have a constant effect and remain ambient until every Outer being is banished, which is actually a derivative construct based off of a ritual I use against rats, only applied a little more grandly.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Tracking the interloper was a lot simpler than finding the rift had been. Its mere presence is constantly interfering with the ambient Solacium to a lesser degree and the areas it has affected have been decreasing in mana. It became harder to track the thong the closer we came. All generalized scrying tends to be more a curate used over distanced and over wider regions. Closer ranged tracking always takes more specialized, individual components to either tie to the agent or the subject, which we lack in this case.

We ate lunch in the forest and spent hours wandering in circles in one particular area until we realised it had just been were the interloper had stopped to chew a little on a random rock. The rock looks really weird now, and seems to have a tendency to stay the same size relative to your perception to a degree now, which means staring at it too much while walking away or towards it will eventually give you a headache.

When we found the thing it ignored us at first. The first few cantrips I tossed at it went straight through it like it wasn’t there and the invocations failed to stick to it. When it ran at me I fell over in fright but it passed through me mostly harmlessly. I do feel a strange phantom pain where it went through me. It was ethereal and a slippery kind of eldritch entity so most of the normal methods we had to target it were ineffective. Because it isn’t a living being and lacks blood Mum was incapable of using her best powers against it. The one that ended up working was a random Jolly Darling which I threw at it for lack of a better idea, but the invocation stuck after the mushroom disappeared into its body. I immediately told Mum that it seemed to work but she was already channeling through the invocation.

We now have the interloper largely contained. Relatively. We piled five different kinds of bindings through the invocation and I think only one or two of them are actually having any influence. We could at least drag it around and keep it mostly confined to a circle. It keeps periodically breaking the binding without breaking it somehow, so every now and then it can move around freely but then it becomes contained again at the new location it shifted itself to. I don’t even know how the confinement circle is being moved around with it when it does that, but it can’t seem to move too far between when we check back in on it.

It is still only visible to me, so only the circle is visible to anyone else, and strange distortions in how light moves through space when it headbutts something from my perspective. It’s making those same weird creening noises that kept me up late last night. They sound creepy and seem even stranger when compared to the frankly adorable physical appearance it has. No one would believe me when I tell them it’s sort of cute.

It has no eyes, and long floppy ears that have split ends like a fork if you look closely enough. It’s head is basically just a large nub extended from its torso and its tail changes in volume every time I look at it.

The only part which unnerves me is its mouth, which opens from the lower base of its head nub and then stretched across the length of its body. I can’t see it at all when it’s closed, but it opens when he coils around an object and worries it. It might not look like it has teeth, but I’m sure whatever weird parts it has in its mouth are doing things that I do not want to understand.

It faces me sometimes, and then I feel like it can see me. It makes that phantom pain come back.

Hope we fare well.

Regards,

Me.

~*M*~