Dust Covered Journal

This note is found in the Crumbling Watch. If these crumbling stones could speak, what tales the would they tell? A thousand years of history lost to the ravages of time. What wonders, and horrors, have these stones seen? The splendor of a shining kingdom and the corruption that brought it all crashing down, all told within a few bits of rock. All of it is lost now. Only fragments remain in the old tombs and the forgotten places. I often wonder if King Rhowan was deceived, that by abdicating his throne he brought about the very thing he wished to flee?

I also wonder how many of those last lords of Arkovia fled to this once great fortress to escape the collapse of their empire? The great Arkovian Watch, guarding the southern borders. Did they hide in futile hope of being overlooked by the rampaging peasants who sought them out for their greed and arrogance? Or did they fight to the last? Were they captured and hung from the walls of their own strongholds? Or did they flee into the catacombs only to perish among the relics of the past?

I sit here now and wonder what my fate will be among the ashes of the past. Will I join them, equally forgotten? Or will the bandits and horrors now stalking the world find me in this hiding place and tear me apart? Not sure it matters anymore. All the knowledge that I've gathered, all of the scrolls and tomes and memoirs that I've written...none of them matter. That world is gone, lost to time as the great Arkovian Empire.

We have been reduced to savages, fighting for scraps of food and blankets like packs of wild dogs. We murder one another for a place to sleep and sacrifice our friends and family to blood cults in vain promises of safety. I always questioned whether the history of Erulan would stand the test of time as Arkovia had before us. Now I'd rather we were not remembered at all.

-Scribe Phegan of Burrwitch