[The Oracle of Logres:]
It was a time of change. The descendants of the Atlantean mages had fallen
before the New Praesidium, and the wolves were baying at the Empire's door.
An oppressive new faith was encroaching from the east, and the sylvan liege
had locked tight the gates of his arboreal realm. And so it was that towards
the end of the Age of Mystery, the last of Albion's great Dragon Lords did
gather for what would be their final battle...
[The War-song of the Dragon Lords:]
Dragon-phalanx rend the sky, Albion our gleaming prize,
Sentinels of land and sea, guardians of destiny.
(Prowling amongst the pecseatan; Draconis Bipedes, swift and furious beast of battle!)
[The Dragon King's Vow:]
(Dragon-Runes etched by the firey tongues of the IX Legio Draconis into the
primordial stone of the great Logres Drachenstahl Cromlech):
The foes of this sceptred isle shall be driven back into the sea!
An oath sworn in battle, a vow blessed by steel,
I swear by the dragon's blood in my veins... and the dragon's heart that pumps
it!
[The War-song of the Dragon Lords:]
Dragonfyre in the fray, faith and steel shall win the day,
A god to serf and king alike, the Adamantine Hammer strikes!
(Devouring the infidel outlanders; Draconis Nematoda, great winged worm of war!)
[The Dragon King's Vow:]
To victory eternal... this world shall be our empire!
Dragon Imperium, throne of the Ancient Gods, behold the axiom, Wyruld-Cyninga!
It is time! We shall rule, and upon our dominion the sun shall never set!
[12 October: 1893]
I must commit this to the pages of my journal, while it is still vivid in my
recollection... not that such a macabre vision could possibly soon be
blissfully forgotten. Just before dawn, I awoke from a fantastic and somewhat
horrifying dream in which I traversed a great black cyclopean cityscape,
its towering stygian walls inscribed with some form of outlandish glyphs which
seemed to writhe squamously and alter their shape even as I gazed at them.
A sibilant whispering which seemed at once familiar and yet intrusively alien
compelled me to walk to the edge of a particularly sinister looking edifice
and peer out over its precipitous perimeter. When I did so, I beheld this
world of ours, recognizing vaguely the apparent shapes of the five continents,
yet the entire vista seemed so distant that the whole appeared in its entirety
no larger than a sphere which I could fit snugly into the palm of my hand.
When I turned again to behold the looming obelisks, I found I could then
easily read the previously untranslatable ciphers in the black stone. They
were the words of a great thaumaturgist who had seemingly discovered a
repository of aeons-old lore detailing the sidereal web of the cosmos, with
arcane diagrams pinpointing certain astral portals and places of empyreal
potency, a sort of pangalactic ley-line chart, if you will. Indeed, these
Star-Maps Of The Ancient Cosmographers seemed to take a not insignificant toll
on the author's sanity, as evidenced by the tone of his inscriptions, which
seem to suggest that in discovering this Pandora's Box of dark elucidation,
his fate was to be inexorably dogged by some nameless and implacable gloom;