Report To The Overseers 3

2nd of Capricorn, 1944

Supplemental Report: Tragedy in Cairo

Councillors,

The linguist I mentioned in my prior reports, Johan Brigit, is dead. He had ceased correspondence with our encampment, and two days ago Kleppman set out to hold him up for it. They found him locked up inside his own chambers, apparently having engaged in some rather ungentlemanly behavior before slashing both his wrists with his pen. Servants had reported hearing him screaming in the night, but also that he rebuffed all attempts to approach or speak to him.

But what is profoundly more disturbing than the grotesquery of his death is the content of the translation he had produced that night. The scholars he had consulted were indeed able to match the Erikeshan script to one of the extinct Mekan tribes of their region, and were highly grateful for his newly provided firsthand evidence. Flush with success, Brigit shut himself up in private with the photographs and set to work on what he termed the "Erikesh Codex."

According to the text, the Erikeshans, like the Nälkä (and ourselves, it must be admitted), hated and feared the superphysical beings of this universe. They wrote the Codex to be less a holy book and more a sacred vow and witch-hunter's manual in one, to pass on the knowledge of how to Keep the world sane. Many times they struggled against the gods and their worshipers. Many times they lost, and some few times they won. Eventually, all that was left of them was Erikesh-um, where their way of Keeping began.

Here Brigit's translation grew muddied, likely due to fatigue and blood loss. All that could be discerned from his work as it was was that the Mekans then sought some concession from the Keepers, in exchange for some weapon to help them in their campaign.

I have delegated operational management of 231 to Kleppman and Captain Morstan. I will leave for Cairo in the morning and take over the translation. I must know what he died for.

— Alexander Teles

Unless otherwise stated, the content of this page is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License