What the Comm Unit Carried

The last record ended with word from HQ, the Starfinders anxious and the Devourer named. This one opens in the middle of a fight, somewhere deeper in the wilds. Nothing written down covers the time between.

I want to be plain about that. The records don't say where the party went after they spoke with HQ, or how far, or how long it took. One line survives from those days. A ksarik was hunting by scent, and it was hard to hurt. It doesn't say what the ksarik was hunting, or how that ended. Nor do the records say how the party first met Solask, or why the fighting started. When the notes pick up again, the shooting has already begun.

A shot got through someone's armour. The note doesn't say whose. ED, Grek's robot, was back with the party, and it began firing at Solask. Then a couple more shots, and then the notes move on to searching bodies. That is the whole of the fight. I think he wrote it the way he would have lived it: quickly, and without looking back.

The search took longer, and he set it down carefully:

Two Defiant long swords.
Shock grenades, four of them.
Two utility scatterguns, and forty-seven shells.
Four weeks of field rations.
A sign of the Cult of the Devourer.
An old Stewards crest.

Four weeks of rations is a long time to plan to be out here. The two items at the end are why the list was worth keeping.

When the party reported in, the Starfinders had asked for the Devourer to be found. Now its sign was on the dead. The records don't say which of them carried it, or whether all of them did. Beside it was the crest of the Stewards. He noted what everyone knows about them: they are the Pact Worlds' diplomats and peacekeepers. The crest was old. He doesn't say why a peacekeeper's crest would be travelling with a Devourer's sign, and I will not guess for him.

There is a line here I have read many times. Water is protecting them from the weird stuff in the temple. It is the first time the temple appears in the records, before anyone has seen it. The records don't say who "them" is. It might be the party, or the dead, or the people they fought for. It also says the water kept off a kind of weakening as well as the strangeness. Whoever wrote the note understood it. The rest of us have only the sentence.

Then Grek opened the comm unit and got into it. What came out was Eoxian. The note says Zo season, and then a string of words run together: viscerally survival death match extreme. Zo! is the Eoxian showman whose broadcasts are built on blood sport. That is what the dead were part of, or were working for. There were two separate groups out here. The smaller one was the group the party had already met. In the traffic, a woman described how she had harassed them. They had been reporting in, but weren't getting much information. After that the note says only Text, as though there was more and he stopped copying it out.

I don't know who she was. The records don't say whether she was Solask. The records don't say whether she was among the dead.

The Field Canon keeps one line from these notes. It is short, and novitiates tend to remember it:

Search the fallen before you mourn or leave them. They carry the question of who sent them.
(Kopalo, from field notes; Castrovel.)

— the Field Canon, on Predation, later additions

After that, they climbed. The trees began to thin. The ground began to take on shape: straight lines among the growth, a sense of streets. The note says they were coming into a city-like area. Partway up a mountainside stood a temple, shimmering, with wide stairs.

Note where the trees grow thin.
Do not say the forest ends. The forest is changing its mind.
Note the root that runs straight, as roots do not.
Note the stone beneath the moss, set level by a hand.
Where the canopy opens, something held the ground before it.
Do not hurry into the open place.
Note what will not grow there, and ask why.
Note the shine that is not water and not leaf.
The forest remembers what was built in it.
It remembers slowly. It remembers well.
So climb. So look.
The thinning is the doorway. Learn its edges.

— the Observances, from the Readings on Thresholds

We are taught this Reading when we first leave the order's grounds, usually on a hillside, usually in the rain. Taeon would have learned it the same way. His notes stop at the stairs. The temple shimmers, and that is the last thing written down.