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[Inside the darkened halls of the Monastery of the Silver Threads's abandoned dormitory, high atop the mountains of Barovia, intermingled passages are scrawled in an ashen, charcoal-like font atop the stone walls. Large, desperate phrases are surrounded by meticulous and careful paragraphs, as if the author-- using his limited space-- evolved in the midst of his work, and sought to use every available inch of stone to describe his story.]~~~
Now that I have become more stable, I am able to recount the events as they have occurred to me. The bitterness of these inscriptive methods does not escape me, however. Now even my writing is destructive, as I vandalize the walls of my room with ashen print. But as I am consumed by this ever-burning flame and the folly of fate, I am too afraid
WHAT HAVE I DONE? not to speak or be heard—even if I must risk the sanctity of history in the defacing of this abandoned monastery
My name Henri Janvier, and I am a prisoner: sealed beneath rock and fire, within a crude semblance of flesh that is not my own.
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The Drawing of the Cards
FOOL
I am unsure now what I had hoped to acquire in that gamble. For what must have amounted to weeks, we pursued the Arcanaloth beyond worlds and through time itself—and only just had we surfaced as survivors, not sparing a moment. We had won—what more was there to acquire?
How foolish we were, to wager everything we held dear.
First,
The Hoard.
At the beginning, I felt an undeniable, inexorable glee. When I turned the first card and read its words, I could not hear the shock of my peers over the sound of waterfalling coins. They were everywhere, surrounding me. I found my lover’s eyes as the piles of gold subsided in their growth—and we smiled.
That was the last time I would see her smile.
Second,
The Plague.[The writing stopped abruptly. The name of the card was written, but the area beneath it left blank-- as if the author could not yet materialize his words, or find any fitting to describe his agony and loss. A fitting abandonment, in the halls of a long-forgotten Order.]
