I’ve been quite ill lately, unable to put pen to paper. I’ve only crawled out of my cot to let you all know I’m not gone. Attempted to dive to the wrecks in the harbour. Accidentally swallowed a mouthful of lake water. I thought I’d get a minor stomach ache, but it was far worse. The DRC definitely downplayed the severity of it…

Please do not worry about me.

William, my bloody computer is still giving me a difficult time. Can you please bring me the supplies I listed for you in the email? Uploading the scans of the pages to the server is fine but I need the originals as well.

Will, your email inbox is bouncing back my emails so my only recourse is to attempt to reach you here. Clean out your bloody mailbox!

I need your help. I’m getting those damned errors again. Do you think it’s the same problem? Technology really aggrivates me sometimes…

If there was one person discussed more than any down here, it was Yeesha. For good reason of course, she was the one who brought us here. She was the one who started us on our journey. She was the one who used us to free the Bahro. She was the one who left us, yet to return.

I knew so little about her, where she came from or how she gained the gifts she struggled to understand and control.

Of course, there were always rumours, the faintest whispers of stories regarding her family. I wondered about her father, a man known as Atrus. Explorers told me many things about him, Atrus, the last son of D’ni, the creator of the Age of Myst, dweller of the cleft. Was he a scientist? An artist? Did he spend weeks agonizing over tiny details in his work? Did he just write and write and write and then visit his Age, with no hesitation in his heart, only a pure exhilaration to see what things that had sprung to life under his hand?

I imagine Atrus as a tall man, proud and strong. I know he endured a great many hardships in his life, and I imagine they made him strong and he passed that strength to Yeesha. In my mind he is a strict teacher, but kind. Perhaps a bit too caught up in the delights of creating his Ages to worry about the details of what he would do with them later.

I wonder, as I sit here, wrestling with words, attempting to create the perfect flora for my Age, how Atrus would have approached the same situation. Writing and checking, revising and re-writing until it was perfect? Taking what he was presented with, manually splicing roots together to create a hybrid? Somehow he does not strike me as a lover of plants. I feel like Atrus was a man of dynamism and mechanical wizardry.

I remember the first time I heard his named mentioned.

One evening, soon after I arrived in the Cavern I overheard some explorers talking about him. One rather short explorer (whose name I later learned was Pendleton) told of an Age written by Atrus that consisted large wooden ship sticking out of a rock.

“He crashed a boat into the rock!?” said another

“No! That’s the strange part. They say he wrote the ship into the Age that way.”

“Impossible, the DRC says the D’ni couldn’t write things like that.”

“Atrus could.”

“So he wrote it so it would be stuck in the middle of a rock?”

“Dunno, he probably didn’t mean for it to be stuck in a rock though.

“So what did he do with it?”

“Nothing, he called it a failure and burned it.”

“Atrus wouldn’t do that to an Age he had written. No way!”

I thought the group were being quite ridiculous and I dismissed such a notion immediately. After some time spent down here though, I began to wonder how far from the truth it was.

Atrus created something by experimenting with the Art. Would that I could see the other strange and wonderful things he has chanced upon creating. This is how legends are born.

Rule 17: A Gentleman always sets a clear path for himself. The path is never straight, nor free of obstacles. A Gentleman recognises that his path may sometimes seem to go in circles, taking him where he has already been.

Rule 18: A Gentleman never allows external forces to alter or halt his progress down the path.

I wish I had known my Great-Grandfather. I feel he and I would have understood each other well. Perhaps he would have been able to share my journey. Perhaps he would have been proud to explore D’ni with me.

Sketches and measurements, maps and charts. Paragraphs and equations.

Why can’t the idea just flow? Why can’t the pen know what I am thinking, and put it down on the page? Why must I continue to struggle to control every aspect? The One Words still mock me. Perhaps it is the uncertainty stemming from my lack of courage to explore them that halts my progress.

My eyes are strained and my head aches. Where am I going?

I’d also like to take a moment to point out something that I never thought I would see. You, fellow explorers have left more comments than I have posts. Does this mean I do not post enough? Does that mean you are that engaged by the inane ramblings of a boy playing in the dirt?

I still feel the need to share my thanks for something I never thought would matter to me so much. The connection I feel, makes the Cavern feel that much less empty.

Thank you all.

My mind now begins to whir…

An Age from me.

An Age from us.

I’ve been frustrated lately. The core concepts of Luminesce come so quickly and easily, and yet the work will not flow. I continue to second guess myself.

I guess I am just too much a perfectionist. I was always the child to have the grandest of visions, only to give them up if I could not even sketch them out properly. I cannot be satisfied by progress and refine later, it must all come out a masterpiece at the first stroke. My father would have me believe this is how it should be. What does he know…

I keep wondering about Luminesce and it’s potential beauty. Can the Age possibly communicate without the assistance of anything else? We explorers have been taught to solve puzzles, to piece together histories from remnants and leftover ghosts. Will the visitors to this place be so ready to toss that instinct away and just allow themselves to explore for no other reason than to experience it?

No levers to turn, no buttons to press. No glyphs to find or Journeys to take. Can the visitors to Luminesce truly appreciate that, or have we explorers built our love for D’ni on the backs of the dead? Luminesce, as an Age written by me, has no back-story. It has no tragic downfall or fatal flaw. No Campbell-esque adventure.

Just an experience, a place to reflect on one’s place among the vastness.

Why do I worry so much about anyone else’s opinions of my Age? It is the most intensely personal thing I have ever done. I must be content that it becomes what I wish it, not what I think others will wish it.

Can I even create such a place of beauty?

I can damned well try…

I had a dream last night.

I was in a strange place, perhaps an Age, perhaps home. The moonlight was on the hills, as I ran barefoot across the grass. A cool breeze whispered all around, from no direction in particular. There was an orchard of trees in the distance. As I ran towards them, the leaves rustled louder.

Louder and louder, until it was almost deafening. There was no fear in my heart, only a sense of freedom like I had never felt.

I entered the orchard, and walked among the trees. As I passed each one, I examined the back of their trunks. What I was looking for or why it was important, I had no clue.

Suddenly, the wind whipped up, and dark clouds obscured the sky, and yet I was unafraid. The thunder began, and yet I was unafraid. The rain fell, soaking me to the bone, and I lay down in the orchard, feeling the raindrops fall on my face. I smiled.

I felt no fear as the rain turned to flood waters. The water rose and I along with it as I floated serenely on top, made buoyant by the peace in my heart alone.

I floated on the water as it continued to rain, hiding any trace of land. Covering the world in deep ocean.

I awoke in my cot, in my quarters next to the lake. The quiet lapping sound my gentle companion.

Yet I felt very alone.

He wore wooden rings that made a soft clinking sound like wind-chimes.

T and his tracker's weapon

None of the Third Age natives seem to have external ears.

                                                                                                                                                    Lost in a city’s-worth of rubble, T and I were forced to rely on each other to survive. We would walk four hours in one direction, only to find it blocked by a fallen building or a once proud pillar. It was almost as if all the death and destruction was delicately placed to block our path and dash our hopes (if T is capable of such an emotion). Daedalus would have been proud.

Frequently we would stop to rest, and I could not prevent myself from staring at him. He was so alien, so strange. I’d been watching his people for months, but I had never been so close to one, nor did I ever expect to be. I suppose I shouldn’t have been so alarmed about it, the D’ni after all, were aliens of a sort, even though I had never met a full-blooded one.

I realise now what a sensitive olfactory system the tracker caste has. I was a fool for ever thinking I could hide from him. It’s entirely possible they smelled me the moment I first stepped foot into the sunlight of the Third Age.

While recovering, I attempted to put down on paper what I could remember T in detail. I look at them now and wonder exactly how accurate they are.

How strange, I keep wondering what T would think were I to show him these…