Doctor Blight

“From the starless void beneath and from before creation lives the dweller in the void. By Silus' will was it given form and through the tearing of the veil were the hands of chaos laid upon the world. Though the Crypteia are the heralds of Chaos, only I am the right hand of doom. By the well of power am I given strength. Through me the shadow of the void is cast and by the will of Uul the word of Silus is given voice. Hear me and tremble. Approach and embrace oblivion.”

-- Doctor Blight, The Children of Doom To say the faculty at Pelcroft were uncooperative when first presented with Alastair's “evidence” would be an understatement. Shunned for his obsession with obscure folklore and laughed at for his insistence on a forgotten “hidden” continent, staff and friends alike mumbled pejoratives just out of earshot suggesting an unbalanced mind, drawing comparisons to the infirmed at Silverwood Asylum.

But the Yerivin Manuscript could not be ignored. Though indecipherable, the illuminated volume hinted at lands and flora somehow lost, suggesting a rich landscape ever so near but inaccessible to the uninitiated. As his critics grew more vocal he grew ever more determined, reclusive and choleric, buying the artifacts he could and stealing what he could not to fuel his obsessive research; obscure tablets in jade, strange figures carved in hardwoods unknown, and fragments of rotting velum in writing nearly identical the Yerivin volume. But still they would not believe.

Everything changed when the first sightings were made. The seas themselves had suddenly shifted, alien currents with strange fish had interrupted trade routes and samples described in university articles gave at last incontrovertible evidence for Alastair's claims. Though gifted now with funding, celebrity and a clockwork steamer to make the voyage, his sleep became restless, haunted by whispers of fear and greed.

On the sea he grew thin, unable to eat, feeding instead on his growing delusions, disappearing from the shore camp on arrival, returning late that first night wild-eyed, raving of ruins in the jungle and of visions of a flaming caldera where all questions would be answered. The crew muttered. The ship's captain hid the guns and rum.

The next morning he was gone. It was a fortnight before reports reached the shore of great swaths of jungle blackened and dead with tales of a crow beaked shadow bringing death in its wake.