Dr. Etward Ritalsin

Being an Account of the Man Who Was Once Our Colleague, His Corruption by the Blackfrost Whale, the Betrayal of the Illuminated Consortium of Epochs, and the Trail of Murdered Dreams He Left Behind Him on the Road North, Compiled from Consortium Records, His Own Private Journal, Intercepted Correspondence of Inhuman Origin, the Testimony of Survivors, and the Increasingly Bitter Recollections of Those Who Once Called Him Friend

I. On the Man Before the Fall

I knew Etward Ritalsin. I feel I should state this at the outset, because everything that follows is colored by that fact, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. He was a colleague at the International Consortium of Epochs, a co-founder of the organization alongside Professor Sabine Wriedt.

He was an older man, white-haired and bespectacled, given to dark academic robes and the kind of buttoned waistcoats that suggest a person who considers their appearance a statement of scholarly seriousness. He took his tea with milk, never sugar. Sugar made him ill, a detail I include because it would later prove significant in ways none of us could have anticipated.

He was brilliant. I say this not as praise but as clinical observation. Etward possessed an intellect that could hold multiple contradictory hypotheses in suspension while simultaneously designing experiments to test all of them. He was also, beneath the veneer of collegial warmth, a man consumed by a hunger for recognition that bordered on the pathological.

His manor, a two-story house of gray stone and dark timber on a fashionable Lepidstadt street, was decorated not as a scholar’s home but as a monument to ambition. Expensive wallpaper, brass fixtures, oil paintings arranged to project not mere scholarly competence but greatness. The entrance hall, as investigators later noted, reeked of overcompensation. The desperate display of one who had spent a lifetime being dismissed as a quack.

This hunger for recognition is, I believe, the crack through which Osoyo’s influence entered. Not the Night of the Missing Moment, that was the mechanism. The vulnerability was already there, carved into Etward’s character long before the white light filled the elf-gates. He wanted to matter. And something vast and terrible offered him exactly that.