The Letter

On a strange day, you wake, and a leather-bound book, wrapped in this letter, is on your pillow. The letter is weather-bound and worn, but the script is strong and the ink clear.

If you ask, no one recognizes the handwriting, knows of its author, or has any recollection of when or how it appeared.

You are about to read a very special book.

What follows is a collection of critical observations across the infinite incarnations of our benighted world. The briefest glance of our shared multiverse: of its uncanny commonalities, of its wild variances and, perhaps most importantly, of the Shadow that has improbably arrayed itself against all existence.

I have been called a prophet, an Archmage, and a heretic; power-hungry, a fool, and even an agent of the powers I’ve opposed in my doomed quest - but the truth is that I am just a simple woman who once chanced upon a curious item: a Lens that let me peer into every world that is, that could yet be, and that once might have been.

Through the Lens, I found light and dark, madness and truth, everything and nothing. All these things are known to me now, but they are not enough.

There is neither time nor space (a delicious irony) to relate all that I have perceived. Death comes for me; I have seen her many faces often through the Lens. Before she overtakes me, as my final task, my knowledge must escape my possession – indeed, my entire world — so that one day, you can at last stumble upon it.

You who will, in the end, have little choice but to follow in my footsteps.

I have left you what I could. By the time you read this, all but this single volume — and the Lens, of course — will be gone. Perhaps with more luck and opportunity than I had, the wisdom you unearth will teach you how to escape the clawing tendrils of our mutual doom. To confront the Shadow and to end its dark tyranny.

Perhaps it will only give you enough time to do as I did: to package what you have learned and launch it blindly into the dark, daring to hope it finds its way into hands and minds more capable than yours were before your end.

It does not matter anymore. You are now the heir to my legacy. Cross the Deeps and find my tomb to claim what is now rightfully yours. Recover my Lens. Join me in my madness, and save us all from the deathless Shadow.

And remember me when you do, in hatred or in fondness. Either suffices, so long as you remember.

Until then, I remain:

Jehanna Ashmorrow, Sage of the Lens