Featured in The Copper Press, 30 January, 2159 A.M.

My name is Lenora Bale, field correspondent and accidental historian. This will be my final dispatch. If it finds you, take what warnings you can before burning the pages—they carry more ruin than record.

Our expedition—eight scholars, three mercenary minders, and myself—set out for the Hinterglass Crater: a scar where a Shardisite meteor fragment was rumored to have punched into the glacial plateau of southern Lemuria. Travelers speak of an Emerald Vault formed in the ice cave below, its walls veined with crystallised green memory. Touch a pane, they say, and the past whispers its price. The vault, untouched, promised discoveries to rewrite half the histories I’ve inked. It has certainly rewritten us.

Seventeen days of sled-hauling through crevasses, guided by aurora and compass needles that had a tenuous grasp on the concept of reliability. On the eighteenth dawn, we found the entrance—a ragged vent exhaling air warm and metallic-sweet, scented with sap and mineral rot. Frost melted on our boots. Mercenary captain Roarke posted guards, but echoes made shouted reports meaningless.

We lit shard-flares and descended. Emerald walls reflected our procession in sympathetic delay; each step’s image lagged by just a heartbeat, and tinted deep, dark viridian. Dr. Vell, metaphysicist, suggested the crystal held the light like a water clock, letting it pool before release. A poetic notion. The vault opened into a cathedral chamber where stalactites dripped liquefied green resin that hardened mid-fall into glassy tears. In the centre loomed a monolith of blackened Shardisite, facets swirling, interior pulsing a steady, hungry green.

Against warnings, archivist Halvor brushed his gloved fingers over the monolith. He jerked as if struck by lightning. His eyes rolled back white. He froze for just the few second and then he frantically laughed, claiming he’d just witnessed the crater’s birth from heaven’s vantage. He described meteoric green fire blossoming over the land, the sky split by emerald radiance. We were thrilled until blood beaded from his nostrils, appearing black on his face against the green glow of the monolith. Within hours Halvor collapsed. His veins lit from the inside like lantern filaments from untamed arcana until it consumed him in pale green crystalline facets. His last breath escaped as a cloud of glittering green dust, leaving him hollow like a blown glass bottle and just as brittle.

Fear argued retreat; curiosity won. We established a perimeter, catalogued glyphs and witnessed swirling imagery behind translucent, fractured walls. Depictions of bygone cities washed in viridian light, lovers parted under green auroras, wars won and lost in battlefields unknowable. Each of our party chose a pane, hypnotised by their own private obsessions.

Roarke’s men kept watch but slept poorly. Sergeant Dyrk vanished on night three; his footprints ended at a wall streaked with fingerpainted blood depicting a macabre sunrise in sickly green. The crystal there remained warm, as though freshly touched. We swore we heard distant surf though none could exist under kilometres of ice.

One by one, watchers succumbed to visions. Dr. Vell announced the vault acted as a memory prism, refracting hope and regret into solid hues of green. He theorised prolonged exposure could crystallise thought into permanence. A tantalizing albeit chilling theory.

On day six, mercenary Roarke shot at his reflection, convinced it moved independently. The bullet ricocheted, shattering a stalactite and green resin rained down from above. The droplets hardened mid-air and shattered on the ground around his boots like quick-cast glass, pinning him. We chiselled until shards sliced through our gloves, freeing him minus two toes. Roarke begged us to leave then. We listened too late.

Night seven, the monolith brightened, its pulse accelerating. The walls chorused a low chord that was unmistakably musical, a resonance that vibrated bone. Figures emerged from the emerald crystal: silhouettes of our lost companions flickering in shades of moss and malachite, beckoning loved ones arms open in invitation. Dr. Vell stepped forward, hands outstretched, and the monolith split open like a blooming flower.

Within stood something neither crystal nor Shardisite. A matte void shaped roughly humanoid, edges smeared and shifting, eyes like lanterns of hollow green. It reached for Vell and where its fingers met, he crystalized. His flesh turning translucent emerald before fracturing into sharp pebbles that scattered at our feet.

Panic scattered us through the tunnels. Captain Roarke led three others up the ascent path, but the entrance had sealed under impossibly fresh ice, veins of green light threading through the obstacle. As we ran we could hear them yelling as they chipped away at the barrier in vain. Soon their echoes dwindled, then ceased.

I ran deeper with the surveyor twins, Mara and Sien. Before it eyes tunnels rearranged in impossible geometries, routing our movement to the inevitable rather than allowing escape. Every direction led us back to the monolith chamber, now pulsing brighter, void-figure waiting now knee-deep in a pool of luminous green resin.

Mara screamed and hurled a shard-flare. It passed through the figure, but it ignited the pool of arcane resin which burned an eerie emerald-blue. Its immolation released a choking miasma that shimmered in the air like petroleum oil on water. Our skin blistered where the crystalline vapors touched. Sein collapsed first, foaming green ichor spilling from her lips. Mara tried to drag her out but slipped; both sank into the softening tar like floor, slowly encased in translucent jade.

I alone remained ambulatory, memory stone clutched in my hand. The void turned to me becoming mirrorbright, showing my fondest wish: my brother alive, lungs whole, enjoying a sunrise over Mombasa free of storm clouds and the constant wail of unknowable horrors. The vision shimmered before me like a gentle green silk curtain, forgiving and whole.

I stepped forward.

My boots fused instantly. Pain flared through my body. Ice-cold at first, then numbed to a distant pressure. Resin crept up my calves, abdomen, then my ribs, sealing me in frigid forever. My breath shallow, I commit this recount to this memory stone while my fingers still move.

The void leans close.

It is not malevolent.

I can feel that its yearning to preserve this moment in perfect emerald.

We arrived seeking arcane knowledge; we will endure as its exhibits.

—End of field notes, retrieved from crystal-encased recorder near Hinterglass Crater. All personnel status: deceased, preserved.