X. On the Flight North and the Gossamer Drift

When the investigators closed in, Ritalsin did not stand and fight. He had always been more administrator than combatant, more architect than soldier. He chartered a vessel, a wooden magical sailing ship called the Gossamer Drift, out of Lichgate, telling the crew it was a research expedition. He paid in gold and they did not ask questions.

They should have asked questions.

He brought five corrupted gatewalker subjects with him, the survivors of his “expanded research protocols,” each a living conduit for Osoyo’s influence. During the crossing, he performed procedures on these subjects that the crew could hear through the bulkheads. The navigator Sven Eriksson attempted to document what was happening in a letter he never finished. The last legible lines: “He keeps them below. Five of them. I hear them at night, not screaming, worse than screaming.”

The Gossamer Drift crashed in the Crown of the World. Its wreckage, a wooden hull scored with deep claw marks of dissolved wood, as if something had attacked it with acid or bile, now lies near one of the saumen kar obelisks that form Osoyo’s binding network.

The crew did not survive the journey intact. At least one, Quartermaster Halstad, became a Hollow One, an undead creature driven by insatiable desire, whose journal entries deteriorate from supply logs to obsessive want-lists to extraction diagrams as the black sand corruption consumed him.

Ritalsin’s current location is believed to be at or near the Nameless Spires, where the binding that holds Osoyo weakens with each corrupted obelisk. His goal, as stated in his own journal, with the serene conviction of a man who has completely surrendered his humanity, is to facilitate Osoyo’s “Great Awakening.”