From the journal of Dr. Leopold Tempes – Vitria, 286 A.T.S.

If Vitrian society were to have a singular flaw, most, I think, would call it Arrogance.

I believe this is a common misconception.

Make no mistake, we are a proud people, but we are rightly so. While our continental counterparts crumbled and assimilated under the thumb of the old empire, our Houses and traditions endured generations of occupation, deprivation and slavery. We emerged from those dark times as a unified, powerful nation; one uniquely equipped to exploit the advantages provided to us by the advent of the System.

Like many of my contemporaries, I do not believe that our high aptitude is simply the luck of the draw. It is Providence. To call us arrogant implies unfounded pride, and there are graveyards full of those who thought the Numbered Houses to be less than they are.

No, our flaw is more insidious.

In his seminal work, “Twin Ambitions” Van Liez describes Vitria as a dual track society. He posits that the Celesian empire collapsed because of solitary ambition. It was a society where every man sought his own advancement above all others. Lying and cheating were the norm within the empire and no thought was ever given to the advancement of the whole. This resulted in a low trust civilization where even the emperor’s ceremonial guard could not be trusted.

Conversely, the various successor states such as Imuria or Xacia have placed their focus on the nation state over the individual. This collectivist approach served them well during the social upheaval that followed the collapse of the great empire, but has caused a ‘power drain’ of sorts where individuals of note see little value in subjecting themselves to the will of lesser bureaucrats and either leave or inevitably seize political power.

Only Vitria with our system of Houses, Induction and Imperial Authority has struck a healthy middle ground between the needs of the individual and that of the state. In Vitria, a man can grow to heights unimaginable, and that growth is accompanied by obligation and authority in equal measure. Reciprocity ethics exist at the very core of our society, culminating in the Fate of the Imperators.

But it is that system of interlocking bonds that is at the core of Vitria’s flaw. Patronage is an equal measure of give and take based in an honest assessment of the needs of each half of the relationship, something the rest of the world vehemently rejects. We expect that any agreement will be mutually beneficial and rarely ask for what is not already offered.

In short? We are terrible at bartering.

So it was that I spent the spring and summer of 239 A.T.S. buried deep in a cargo hold alongside an especially ornery mule named Elekazir.

But I should backtrack somewhat.

Subsequent to the cleansing of Laye, I was invited to the court of Prince Duval for a clandestine symposium on items discovered therein. This event lasted six weeks, which was five weeks longer than I would have liked.

Simply put, the assembled academics were long on hypothesis but short on concrete facts. Wild theories were thrown around without the slightest foundation, and apart from some scant information regarding pre-Imperial artistic trends, I learned nothing from the whole affair.

Even so, it was not time entirely wasted. While I had managed to conceal the Codex I recovered from beneath the hilltop carving, the hundreds of journals kept by the village foreman were another matter entirely. Those were state property.

Thankfully my part in the matter had rendered Prince Duval quite favorable to my pleas, and I was able to work out an arrangement through which I, or rather a small team of scribes, could copy the journals. A process that took nearly eight weeks.

The journals themselves were of little academic use in their existing state. Though written using the continental alphabet, the journals were illegible in any language with which I was familiar. During the symposium the matter was discussed at length, leading to two competing hypotheses.

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1. The Journals were cultist gibberish.

2. The Journals were written in code.

My initial assumption had been the latter, but I could not write off the former.

For one thing, the journals were written in block text, without any formatting, dating or punctuation. Each page, save for the final one which was unfinished, contained precisely six hundred and ninety-seven characters, though the specific characters varied wildly from page to page. Such structuring seemed more at place in a diseased mind than in documents intended as a record or communication.

More troubling was the lack of any discernible pattern.

In this, I must admit that I am nowhere near an expert, but as it was explained to me there are any number of ways to code a document. Among the most popular were simple substitution ciphers. A->E, B->F and so forth, as well as transposition ciphers wherein the letters are scrambled. These were written off almost immediately by Prince Duval’s advisors.

Such concealment, they explained to the assembled body, could be defeated by an appropriate intellect. If the cultists had only jumbled or substituted letters, the message could be deciphered by looking for expected words or patterns and solving backward from there. The words Harbinger or Kol Daua for example, would almost certainly be used somewhere in the cultist’s journals and if one were to find those words, then it would become trivial to guess at others until a proper ‘coded’ alphabet was gleaned from the text.

Sadly their attempts at breaking the journals in such a fashion proved fruitless, as did a host of alternative methods involving books and blocks that I only lightly understood. Through each step the men took great care to reiterate that encryption was not their primary discipline. After two weeks of research and debate it became clear that I would need talent from somewhere less… provincial.

My initial urge was to return promptly to the homeland. I had already been absent far longer than I had intended, and had hopes of finding a proper expert among my peers. Sadly, those hopes were dashed in the last days of the symposium when I received a letter from Professor Elzmyr informing me that all attempts at review on the sample pages I had sent them had been met with failure.

This was disappointing, but not surprising. While I would never stoop to calling it a vice, the Vitrian taboo against lying is known to express itself counterproductively in a distaste for adjacently ‘dishonest’ fields such as spying, encryption and acting. Most of our institutional knowledge in such fields came from adopted citizens and cultural osmosis, neither of which inclined my colleagues towards a breakthrough on such a difficult task.

Unfortunately, I would need to go abroad.

A number of possible destinations were proposed on the final day of the symposium, but only one was seriously considered.

The steelborn city of Null was known for its mechanical wonders, in particular its computational devices. Such equipment could, supposedly, break all but the most complex codes in a matter of days. Surely the codes of a subsistence farmer would prove little challenge to such a mechanical wonder.

There was only one problem. The city of Null was found far to the east, on the continent of Nusume.

Half a world away.

I balked at the mere suggestion that I make the journey, not for the least because it was simply unaffordable. VISIT née VSSS had provided me with a modest grant to fund my demographic research, but I had scraped my purse almost to the strings, first with my visit to Imuria and later with my additional research in the Principalities. A cross-continental voyage was simply out of the question.

I should have known that Prince Duval would cut that argument off at the head. I had not even finished articulating it before he informed me that he would be willing to cover the full cost of the expedition.

Within reason.

Unable to deflect any further, I was forced to fall back on blunt honesty.

I did not want to.

Yes, I was intensely invested in the mystery of both Cyre and Laye, and what this Harbinger might have to do with the origin of the System, but I was not a traveller at heart. The research I’d conducted for my compendium was the first, and Mother willing, only field research I had ever been a part of. I was an academic who adored classrooms, dissertations and the comforts of a proper city.

Prince Duval’s counterpoint was succinct. He did not trust my peers in the symposium, nor did he have anyone with a similar academic background that he did trust. I had been direct with him from the start, honest in my intentions and I was a Vitrian besides. If he took my word and sent me abroad, he knew with certainty that he would get the answers that he craved.

In retrospect I see his weakness. He was just as invested in the project as I was. I could have extracted concessions in terms of funding, I could have met him in the middle by proposing a colleague of similar skill but more considerable wanderlust. At minimum I should have demanded better accommodations.

Instead, I ended up sharing the cargo hold with a pile of journals, two junior aides, a mountain of a bodyguard and of course, Elekazir.

As I said, terrible at barter.

With luck and good seas, my journey aboard The Prince’s White Sands was expected to last no more than two hundred days. With a similar allotment for the work and the return trip I hoped to return in no more than two years.

Instead, I was gone for nearly forty.