Stolen

The map Lucian made me is gone, most likely taken the night I met Eurethrus. My tale only becomes more confusing instead of less.

Cain is taking me to a man named Argus, a man, like me. He quickly told me things about my past, things that would have been easily known, but this impressed me nonetheless. He bid us to sit and for the first time I had been able to see his face, one heavy with scars and laced with mutilation.

He told me he could see the cloud of confusion, the bits and pieces and hardships.

I told him that I sought the key of the dead that would save me as I lay close to the doorway of the City of Dust. Did it really exist? Or was it merely the rich treasure of a feebled minded fable.

He told me such a power did .. does exist.

I told him of my lineage, repeated the story of the curse, of how no man would beget male heirs on my line. But I continued where I usually had stopped.

We attract a certain type of man, men who love us much more than they should, who sacrifice for us much more than we are worth. Their love does not die easily, if ever, but neither is it always.. nourishing. We act as a drug, an addicting sense of something they can never have enough of. Once a man truly tastes us, he is forever bound to us, only death breaking the hold.

He had moved towards a shelf, taking down a leather bound volume, showing me a picture of the amulet. It was in the shape of two intertwined serpents. One male one female.

He told me that the man who sought me out.. the men who sought out my mother and her mother before her and so on, were not just overly loyal addicts drawn to their sustenance. They are the other half of a locks to cosmic keys. That the key existed and would find it, but that I was looking in the wrong place.

I was afraid to touch the drawing, afraid that by some unwanted exploit of magic, it would crumble in my hand.

I was still staring at the union of entwined serpents when Cain spoke, telling Argus he could not and he immediately began pacing.

My line spoke of the Estrucans. Argus could not help me.. but Cain.. could. Another clue in my endless pursuit.

We were bid farewell, Cain relentless pulling on my arm, half dragging me through the catacombs, telling me he was a fool to have brought me here, that we would have to find another way.

I could feel his fright, the sudden surge of his emotions which seemed to be escaping into me. It was only when I tripped over a cobble that that I insisted he stop and tell me what was going on.

He told me that Estruscan and Armarnian Arcane are kith and kin to each other and the most carnal of the houses. That when he had told me there was more to my gift than the cards it was truth, but that I was afraid tap the power. He was right.

I have always shunned other knowledge, not wishing to delve into things I cannot control, things I do I understand. I have never been open to perceptions beyond what I know so well

But all that was about to be forever changed.