Recovered Field Journal is a tale written by Crazah.
The following pages were recovered from a leather journal found in a drainage culvert in the Cascade City sewer system by municipal workers on ██████. The journal was waterlogged but partially legible. Handwriting analysis has been inconclusive. DNA recovered from the journal does not match any individual in domestic or international databases. Pages are presented in the order they were found. Many are missing or illegible.
Page 7 (partial):
…three weeks since I resigned my name. I was told the grief would pass. It has not passed. It sits behind my teeth like a second tongue. I find myself mouthing the syllables in the dark when I think no one is watching but of course someone is always watching. That is the first lesson.
Page 12:
They are wrong about the ALTERs. Not in the way the civilians are wrong, believing they do not exist. And not in the way the Order is wrong, believing they understand them. The Order treats them as a disease to be cut out. We treat them as weather. You do not fight a storm. You learn its shape. You move through it. You let it move through you if you are strong enough and if you are not then you were never meant to be here and that is also acceptable.
I asked the one they call Second what happens to those who fail. Second said nothing. Second never says anything. Second communicates through the pressure of a hand on your shoulder and the specific quality of silence that follows. I understood the answer.
Page 15 (partial):
…saw one today. Forming. It is not what they describe in the texts at Aethergarde. There is no grand emergence. No rupture in the sky. It was a man sitting on a bench outside a ramen shop in District 12. He was crying. The tears were black. Nobody could see them but me. Nobody could see that the shadow under the bench was the wrong shape and was breathing.
I did what I was trained to do. The man stopped crying. The shadow dissolved. The man looked at me and said “thank you” and I wanted to say “you're welcome” but I don't have a name to attach to pleasantries anymore and it felt dishonest to pretend I was someone who could accept thanks.
I walked away. The ramen shop smelled wonderful. I have not been hungry in some time.
Page 19:
The others say Resolution is a gift. I think it is more like a loan. Something given to you with the understanding that it will be collected later, with interest, and in a currency you did not agree to when you signed.
But I did sign. That is the thing. I signed and I gave my name and I stepped into the space between the world that people see and the world that is actually there and there is no stepping back.
I do not regret it. I want to make that clear in case someone reads this. I do not regret it. I am writing it again because writing it once was not enough to make me believe it.
Page 23 (partial):
…followed the trail into the sewer system. Three Shadows. Moving in formation, which is unusual. They are not supposed to be organized. They are supposed to be extensions, puppeted limbs of a greater will. But these three moved like soldiers. They watched each other's flanks. One of them looked at me and I could swear that it hesitated.
I destroyed them. It took longer than it should have.
I am becoming increasingly certain that something underneath Cascade City is learning.
[Remaining pages are either blank or too damaged to read. Chemical analysis of the blank pages revealed trace amounts of a substance not present on the periodic table. Further analysis has been suspended after the spectrometer returned results described by the attending technician as “a word.” The technician has requested leave. Request granted.]