Something terrible is coming. Sleep is… difficult, now. Ayla has been holed up with her research team for weeks now, clawing an inch toward salvation with every hour.

The augurs have fled. There was a festival, a celebration of the new year. Not one could be found for the Reading, bones left where they were cast and belongings gathered in haste.

Champions, chosen, heroes – all missing. We’ve bled manpower as quickly as land, and the capital is the only truly safe place left in the Empire. Stirrings in the far north, shadows gathering en masse for the first time in years. The First Army is the only one yet to suffer any defections, and they drill endlessly. The mages not working directly with the Queen have been working full time summoning lesser beasts for them to train on. I’m not sure it’s helping.

There are no secessions left to worry about. There is no trade, though we can produce anything we need. Everyone prepares, though I’m not sure any of us know what for. Daylight wears thin. I’m trying to stay hopeful, but hope is in high demand. With each passing day exhaustion creeps further into my bones. I caught myself in a mirror yesterday and almost had a heart attack. The lack of sleep has obviously started to impact my mind, but I could swear that the more fatigued I am, the better health I seem to be in. What the Laureate described as a “Youthful Vibrance” has returned to me, even the smattering of grey in my hair has reclaimed its color.

Have I been cursed with immortality? And endless span to watch the withering and death of the people for whom I was to be a hero? Wow, that was pretentious. The sheer pomposity. Maybe my ego had grown so large the gods decided I no longer fit the Prophetic requirements.

“Nice try, kid, good luck next time,” the gods say, sweeping mighty hands across the sky and turning back fate.

If only the answer were so simple. There are libraries here that hold the sum total of the Empire’s knowledge, all accessible to me and anyone that cares to assist in the search. The hunt continues daily, though progress is slow. We’ve found no less than fifty unique versions of the Prophecy that supposedly identifies Ayla and I as the Destined Ones, but most are dialectical or minor regional variations. All seem to be lacking in something, but what remains lost to time. There are a few that are more interesting than others, but there is one that I keep returning to. An additional closing line that wasn’t part of the rest, no analogue in the popular versions. After it was discovered and translated, I spent weeks attempting to track down a point of origin. I should have been braced for the other shoe to drop, but it was incredibly easy tracking down the Oracle that had elaborated on my fate.

And she was dead.

She hadn’t fled with the other mage folk bent toward prognostication, never having truly become part of the greater magical community. Her home, a respectable – if worn – ranch in the middle of the wilderness, was full of paper. Journals, random lists of words, scraps of divination and augury and novels’ worth of predictions. Everything capable of being verified so far has been perfectly accurate. From what we can determine, the young woman spent every day writing nonstop, pausing only to cook or use the restroom. And the walls in the kitchen and bathroom were covered in writing themselves, pencils and pens and chalk on every flat surface, handwriting more cramped as space reached a premium.

There were around 2,000 volumes worth of ramblings in there, most of it prophetically accurate. Predictions of meals had by families, marriages, births, anything from fashion trends to tulip prices. All perfect. We’ve found the odd useful entry, warnings of collapse and upcoming doom. These entries, as a rule, are almost uselessly vague. Unfortunately for the team of scholars working through them, if there’s anything of value to be found it’ll make the entire effort feel worthwhile.

Meanwhile, I’ve had Chief Administrator Stubbins performing an inventory of artifacts. With every diplomatic endeavor, there would be a customary exchange of gifts. At first, it was often a local specialty or delicacy – casks of ale that could make a dwarf weep and calamari from the tentacled deer of the Inner Coast. Once the Queen made her first breakthroughs into the magitechnologies that carried our empire, promises of shared information and gifts of flying ships became far more common. As we gave, so we did receive. Now we have, I am told, an entire wing of the University devoted entirely to the warehousing of the most dangerous and least understood mystical curios we collected.

Hopefully one of the items can unravel the future. Or the past, if it can look far enough back.

Either way, I will find an answer. There has to be one. Even if that answer is “I’m not a hero of prophecy”. If I knew that, at least, I could try to find them. A hero is what we need. A Saviour.

Someone to carry us, hobbled as we are.

I worry, sometimes, that it’s defeatist to be trusting the future to what amounts to fate after how it went the last time around. I hadn’t realized how much that pull, that gut feeling, had guided my actions since arriving here. Everything I did I checked against my internal compass and without it… I’m struggling to pick a direction.

The sense of surety was comforting, but I can’t afford to wring my hands much longer. I can feel a looming sense of doom, leering down from ahead. Just out of sight, just beyond the horizon.

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

I swear, even in the middle of the day, the sky seems to have dimmed. Light itself trying to go the way of our augurs.

I’ve heard the mumblings amongst the naval officers about the High Admiral preparing something. Considering the Admiral reports only to myself, this is alarming for a number of reasons, chief among them the fact that I haven’t given any orders in almost five years now, the sea fronts faring far better than the land. Now, though, rumors of a pirate queen rising up to fill the shoes left empty by the Pirate King decades ago have been making their rounds amongst the merchant ships still willing to attempt international trade.

If ships were being sunk, it’d be one thing, but it sounds like the woman’s begun policing the waters in lieu of the High Asshole and now she’s started charging for the service. She sent an invoice to the Royal Treasurer, charging for munitions and manpower.

And that glorified abacus of a motherfucker paid it.

Shadows are deeper. Darker. I have an orb constructed of pure sunlight, woven and folded over itself to make a tiny model sun, felted from sunbeams. It’s weird and squishy and hovers about knee height from the ground, emitting any color of light you imagine as you give it a squeeze.

It makes your hands smell like dandelions for hours afterward. No amount of washing can mask or budge the scent.

But it keeps the shadows quiet, and that’s what lets me sleep.

They talk to me, sometimes. I spent my time learning everything I could about this world and its cultures after the fall of the Nemesis, but not one of the languages I speak sounds anything like what slithers cool and thick into my ears every time I find myself somewhere dark.

It’s the worst in the bathroom. The new motion sensing runework for the lights has been preventing the Grid Most Mystic and Arcane from experience full-blown blackouts during peak hours, but the eldritch voice of the sentient night whispering in my head while I try to take a shit has resulted in me performing light aerobics during every restroom trip.

I think if I linger too long in the dark to listen, I may begin to understand them. The voices, that is. They seem to want to be understood.

I’m quite sure I don’t want to hear what they have to say. I’m not convinced that it isn’t all in my head, either. No mages, sages, sorcerors, incanters, enchanters, casters or snake-oil salesmen have heard even a whisper of a whisper from the gathering gloom. This hasn’t done wonders for my sanity.

I feel a lack. Like there was something vital that has left and now without it I’m not even enough myself to know what I’ve lost. Each day for so long now has been spent hunting for any purpose to fill the void left by the last one. Nothing fits.

At this point, one starts to assume nothing will.

Ayla, my light, has pestered me to visit the best medical specialists left in the University. She seems unaware of the fact that I haven’t visited any of the campus grounds since the beginning of the collapse. The only thing holding the small territory we control together is our overwhelming sorcerous superiority.

Not even the tip of one of my fingers is making its way into that pie. The very cloth that our society was cut from was woven with magic and I won’t risk pulling at that thread.

Years ago a man who later became a mentor of sorts spent an evening sharing all the fables and legends he could recall. Stories about heroes and sages and saviours long dead. They all held common themes, allies gathered, obstacles overcome, twists and betrayals aplenty. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but the stories tread a more common path; a hero rises, evil falls, and either it stays dead and the world luxuriates in an aeon of peace and progress.

Or evil awakens and the world is plunged into millenia of darkness and desperation. Not one useless fucking bard has had a tale where the “Great Evil” returns and civilization survives. Archaeologists have managed to unearth a few relics of these predecessors that range from tens to hundreds of thousands of years old. History here is a thousand times the length of Earth’s and the only person trying to create a comprehensive history is the Laureate and William can write as moving an epic as the next poet, but Mr. Joel’s lyrics are more entertaining than educational. What has been put in chronological order is, same as everything else, quite bleak. Heroes come, the day is saved for a minute or a day, and – inevitably – it all comes crashing down again. And at the center, always, a man and a woman. And always from another world or delivered by the gods in a holy flash. I can’t tell if it’s some grand game the gods themselves are playing with the world or if the world is looking for its bona fide heroes. Sifting through decades of Earthlings and whatever other worlders within reach until the solution is found.

Am I just a random pawn? Another link in a chain of Chosen Ones running unbroken until fate finds its club and this prophecy can finally drop it’s ancient anchor?

Maybe the prophecy is a guide and none of us have managed to actually finish it yet?

I’m not sure what to do with myself anymore. I’ve been reading and researching and comparing and compiling and fact-checking and the only thing I’ve found is an endless wellspring of energy for depressing introspection.

Which, uh, isn’t much different from what I remember from life back home. There is one major difference, though.

Then? I could spend days working and nights wallowing in despair and the only one to suffer was myself.

Now? Every day I spend staring at my own bellybutton and crying silently is another day closer to the end of the world. At this point, I’m not sure what it will be but I am sure of one thing.

Something is coming.

And I can’t even bring myself to be afraid anymore.