S'tassk, my son. If you are reading this, then not only have I passed, but you have chosen to lead the Rihannsi away, to seek the twins who embrace yet rob, those sons of war yet unnamed. You will travel far, my unspoken heir, but you will not escape the madness, nor the three eldritch shadows that drive it. No, you will not escape the beast.

Eventually, our two tribes will meet again. There will be others, then, as well. Do not fear them because they are strange to you. I once so feared, and learned better.

I was not Surak Sri Sri Sri at that time. No, I was merely a failed stone-shaper running away from debts public and private, and from the blood-oath that demanded I kill your mother for a loaf of bread taken centuries ago. Laugh a little as I say again that I had other desires than her life.

I was starting to see the visions, even then. I thought it was my own madness, the stress of hearing too many times what I would have to do to redress my debts. But as I at last struck out to the inner Forge, I found him. He looked as though he had fallen from a great height, and I would swear I heard mocking laughter all about. Yet all that was visible was the morning star, descending before the light of the sun.

A thin, gaunt thing he was. His ears had no definition, and his eyebrows sloped downward, and I thought of primitives rumored to still exist. A light mind touch was all I could bear, and from this I gathered his name to be Ano Int. Or perhaps this was part of a title. Even in the mind, words carry differently. His beard and hair were long and dark, and his complexion shaded ever so slightly. Having but little time before noonday, I found the remove I knew to exist, even in that place. Fed a little of my water, he recovered rapidly. He had survived here before, somehow. The beetles and other low horrid things he knew how to pulverize with their own carapace and make to meal. I was not pleased, but nor did I come one day closer to starvation.

As we walked the Forge together, water-gatherer and food-finder, our eyes occasionally met, and I could see it. He was just as uncertain as I that both of us were truly men. My own justly defined ears seemed of particular horror to him, at times. But in that vast savage place that was then the whole of the universe for us, we two learned trust. My mind seethed with thoughts of how I could get along without this creature, and plans to do so. But I saw no gain, and much loss that way. Perhaps he saw this, too.

The day before we parted company, he drew three connected lines in the dirt. Darkness gathered around those lines, and I grew afraid. Yet this odd man merely brushed the lines away with a stone. He then scraped each of our hands with the stone, and on that stone our blood commingled. It is for him I made the last vision quest which likely ended my life, for I needed to see my companion again, and ask him what those three lines meant. Take heed of whatever I found, and if it is the beast, tell all of Vulcan before you depart.

On a scrap of cloth from his own tattered robe, my companion wrote one last phrase, wholly unintelligible. I charge you and my descendants to decipher this marking, and perhaps thereby ascertain the identity of my desert companion in a day long ahead of us all, my son.

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S'tassk looked to the very bottom of his departed father's letter, and saw a marking that made no more sense to him.

*I N R I*

S'tassk shuddered as he put the letter aside, wondering anew why his father's palms and ankles were made to spontaneously bleed before he passed.