Osmatar

Hello, fellow wanderer. If you are reading this I assume you must find yourself trapped in this cursed place like myself. I wager you came upon these papers while frantically searching for a way out. Perhaps you are currently fighting overwhelming dread having failed to succeed so far. Or you may have begun to lose hope that you ever will. I will make this clear right away: I cannot provide you with an assured escape route. Nonetheless, I urge you to sit down (should the chairs still be there) and give yourself a breather while you read what I have to say. Unless you have come across something I never did, it is unlikely a few minutes of rest will hurt you. I myself have been confined here for so long I cannot begin to estimate the span of time, but my once fresh wounds have scabbed and scarred over and my nails have grown troublingly long. I cannot explain what has happened to me, or rather to us, nor what this confounding place really is. I have, however, come to certain

The International Mars Mission crash landed and the space suits got vented out on the surface in the impact. The crew survived but were stuck in a small capsule with limited air. They started arguing over who should go outside unprotected to fetch the suits. "It's -50 °C out there!" protested the British astronaut. "Robert Scott died in milder temps than that. There's no way we'll make it to the suits and back alive." "We fought hard to keep the retirement age at 64 years," argued the French astronaut. "I'll be damned if I have to die in my 30s!" "I don't know what -50 °C is in Fahrenheit and I'd gladly die for my country," said the American, "But I was sent here by Mr. Musk and he won't cover my kid's health insurance if I don't complete the mission." At this point everyone turned to the Russian cosmonaut, who lifted his hands up and said: "I know what you're thinking. Russia would pay my family handsomely if I died, and truth be told, -50 doesn't sound that bad. But there is a

III Science and Magic In the Age of the Sword, it was believed that only evil spellcasters could turn into trolls. Some were even claimed to turn back into humans at will like werewolves. In some parts of the world all practitioners of magic were persecuted out of fear that they might become trolls. In Ancient Danarkim even a respected magus could be put to death if they developed a suspicious mole or a wart. After the rise of the Halandirite Magocracy the founders of sarcomancy sought to understand this vexing problem in the hopes that no more gifted mages would be lost to trollhood. Their findings came close to being wiped out by the War of Ruin, but ultimately spread to become common knowledge in the Old World. Early sarcomancers discovered that visible mutations would appear in many common animals if they were subjected to high levels of raw magic energy. While cells were usually able to repair damage from intense magic exposure, a set of changes cropped up. These usually had

II The Curse of Immortality Trolls possess a regenerative capacity that exceeds anything seen in animals native to Gea. A troll’s wounds knit together at such speed they are practically immune to bleeding out. Losing a limb is a temporary hindrance, a new one indistinguishable from the old will grow in its place. Even decapitation can be survived, though the troll remains helpless for the duration of the regrowth of a new head. The one thing a troll cannot regenerate are all the memories lost to severe head trauma, which can reduce a troll to the level of a simple instinct-driven animal. How much of a person’s former self is retained in a troll remains an unresolved question. There are stories of trolls that retain fluent speech indefinitely, able to maintain friendly relations with people for entire human lifetimes. On the other hand some newly transformed trolls rampage through villages and towns with no regard for human lives - or their own. It's possible the mind of a troll

Enormous. Gruesome. Feral. Ravenous. Trolls strike fear in the hearts of commoners everywhere. The mere mention of the word is considered a taboo in places. But for mages they are a living reminder of an ever-present threat, the high cost of magical power. Many monsters on Gea have been created through magic either intentionally or by accident. Usually these anomalies fall into one of two categories: they either breed amongst their kind like any other creature or are unique isolated instances forever gone once slain. Not so with the troll. While trolls have roamed the wilderness at least as long as historical records go, they are almost never born. Rare exceptions exist, but nearly every troll in history began its life as a human being. What at first glance appears a hulking beast once used to be a friend, a lover, a parent or a child. It can be so hard to reconcile this contradiction that most people - if aware of it at all - would rather brush it aside and pretend it's not true.

What people mean by success is to launch yourself in the air from high up on the clifftop to plunge down towards the jagged rocks not even knowing if you are a bird and learning at last that you have wings.