#Lore24 – Entry #214 – Helica Month #2 – The Angel of Grad Artanais
Excerpt from the Journals of Azita Gaji, Explorer of Helica
The tales of an angel, seen and heard across the broken expanse of the once great city of Grad Artanais are true! I have witnessed her with my own eyes, heard her voice singing the Eversong with my own ears!
As I dared venture down from the overlook in which I camped last night, a thick fog rolled in from the poisonous sea that borders the ruined city. On the one hand, it would be useful in concealing my presence from the roaming demons that fill this place, but on the other, so too would they be concealed from me. It didn’t take long for me to hear them, their claws scraping over the broken skyscrapers that lay about in piles, rending the ancient metal remains of machines that were somehow frozen in time, still there and not rusted away by time and seasons. I tread carefully, using every sense I had to navigate in the direction I had chosen, careful to avoid notice.
It was perhaps two hours into my dangerous trek that I began to hear the Eversong, the reverent and soothing tones echoing eerily through the dead city’s remains. Then I heard her voice, the voice of the angel herself, clear and distinct, chilling me to my very core. Her voice sounded otherworldly, a starkly beautiful, yet hauntingly melodic sound amongst the fog-shrouded decay and littered remnants of demon-infested civilization past. I saw her guiding light then, piercing through the fog, and in the direction I had intended to go, a ball of light in the dim fog, like a beacon. And so, I followed the light and the song, sensing not the demons as I went to her light. As I neared, the light faded out, only to be replaced by another further along, her voice moving with it, leading me, guiding me.
I followed the angel for perhaps an hour, my tension eased by her voice and her holy light, finally coming to understand what it was that those summoners and their protectors who had survived this place to tell the tale had experienced, for truly she is a being of the divine. And she led me exactly where I had deigned to go! It was nearing midday, the fog finally starting to thin, when I finally came upon the ancient shrine complex, broken and decayed, but still recognizable to me as the place I had discovered in the lost records where many of the Amaranths were once worshipped.
There the angel left me, and I ventured forth into the ruin, seeking the shrine of Saghirah, and hopefully, one of her ancient, forbidden scrolls.