The Elarith Archives

To those I have named, and to those whose names I will not write beyond this chamber:

You are summoned not as soldiers of a common campaign, but as the last measure of a kingdom that has spent too many years dying by degrees.

The war goes badly. I will not insult you with softer language. Our borders recede. Our granaries thin. The houses that still fly our banners do so from habit as much as hope. What I may say in open court is not what I may say to you.

I will not describe every inquiry that has been made in desperation. There are practices, ceremonies, and older beliefs that a king should be ashamed to entertain. Whether they have bearing on what followed, I cannot say. I will not pretend to knowledge I do not possess.

Something has appeared.

I have no honest name for it. It is a threshold. A wound in the air. A passage into a place our maps do not contain and our scholars cannot classify. Those who have looked upon it return with little more than unease and contradiction. I do not know whether it was made, awakened, called, or merely found us at the hour of our need. I will not waste your courage on guesses.

Beyond it, expeditions of the briefest kind have recovered materials unlike the ores, salts, and relics of Elarith. Artifacts without lineage. Shards that do not belong to any mine we keep. Other substances I will not enumerate here, lest this letter travel farther than your hands.

I believe these things may yet turn the war. I believe they may determine whether Elarith remains a kingdom, or becomes a story told by whoever inherits our ruins.

You are chosen because I still trust you: warriors, scouts, scholars, explorers, and those whose talents I will not reduce to a single word. You will enter. You will observe. You will document with the care of people who expect to be believed. You will recover what can be carried and what can be used. You will return.

That last command is not ceremonial.

I cannot accompany you. I cannot tell you the nature of the place that waits. I cannot swear that the threshold will remain open for your coming back. I can only tell you that if you fail, I will have spent the last of Elarith's true strength on a door I do not understand.

Go. Do not linger in wonder. Wonder is a luxury of kingdoms that are winning.

When you stand on the far side, remember that what you find has no value unless it is brought home.

By my seal, and in the sight of whatever still watches Elarith,

The King

The remainder of this passage has been destroyed.

May you be the ones who return.

People of Elarith,

It is my duty to speak of those I sent beyond the threshold, and of the silence that has answered us.

The company chosen from among our most trusted did not return. The passage by which they departed is closed. Search is not possible. Recovery is not possible. I will not dress this in the language of delay.

They are presumed lost.

I address the families first. You gave the kingdom your sons, daughters, husbands, wives, and kin under a command that came from this crown. I accepted that weight. I accept it still. What I cannot accept, and will not offer, is an account of their fate. I do not have one.

Several lines have been lost to fire.

I will not claim that we understand the place they entered. I will not claim that we command the threshold, or that it answers to Elarith, or that it will open because we wish it to. Those who speak with certainty on this matter speak from fear or from hunger, not from knowledge.

To the citizens: you will hear rumors of riches, of warnings, of a door that was never real. Let the rumors belong to the streets. This notice belongs to the record. An expedition was sent. It did not come back. The way is shut.

[illegible]

I have ordered that the names of the lost be kept, so far as the clerks are able, and that no house be made to beg for that recognition. If a name is missing from the lists, it is because the lists themselves are already wounded. War has taken more than soldiers. It has taken paper, witnesses, and the hours in which a kingdom might still be precise.

[torn away]

I will not ask you for forgiveness in a public square. A king who spends lives upon a mystery has already spent something he cannot repay. I ask only that you remember them as they were sent: capable, trusted, and ordered home.

Should the threshold ever show itself again, this crown will not pretend the last departing was a triumph.

████████

Until such an hour — if such an hour exists — let the names that did not return be spoken without ornament.

By my seal, though the wax remembers more than I will write,

The King of Elarith

The closing benediction is burned away. Only the impression of a broken seal remains.