Menagoles Mine Journal

An eight-page journal of the Menagoles mine's records, kept in the era before the fire. Three of the eight pages are now known — and they are not one man's diary. Each page is a different hand at a different level of the same operation: page 5 is Vara'nak Gar-Galdar's dying testimony, hidden as he wrote it; page 6 is the crystal survey of the mine's mage, Dillbert; page 7 is the minutes of the mine's labour union, BAWMU. Read together they narrate the disaster from the committee room, the office and the pit at once.

What this document is

The three known pages overlap heavily with paper the party has physically handled, which suggests the journal is a compilation of the mine's records rather than a single continuous book:

• Page 5 and the body in the pit. The journal Magra recovered from Vara'nak Gar-Galdar's corpse in Session 50 held five entries, the latest naming a "banshee machine that barely fit in the tunnels." Page 5 says the machine "barely even fit its individual parts down the second shaft," and closes "I must hide this after I write it" — the parcel he died shielding. Whether page 5 is one of those five entries or a separate sheet in the same hand is open, but they are describing the same day and the same machine.
• Page 6 and the ghost's logbook. Fenric decoded Dilbert the Mage's spectral writing in Session 51 and read Laewendas's pursuit of the "Godkiller Shard" out of it. Page 6 is the same man's research record, and states the same goal in more detail.
• Page 7 has no in-play counterpart. The union minutes are known only from the handout — no session has touched them.

Who assembled the eight pages, where the compilation now sits, and what the remaining five pages are, is all unknown.

Pages

Page 5 — Vara'nak Gar-Galdar

Written by a man who knew he was about to die, addressed to whoever would eventually find it. It is the most consequential page the vault holds: it clears Vara'nak Gar-Galdar of the massacre and names his murderer.

"I, Vara'nak Gar-Galder, write this as Foreman Brent Pallwath, Sergeant of Laewendas' Army, Born of Lambert's Crossing, of Pallid Complexion and Tiny Cock is a fucking idiot beyond understanding. He has murdered me for saving us all."

• The plea. "If you read this, please clear mine name." Answered a decade late, in Session 50 and Session 52.
• The warning, from the floor. "'Never dig too deep' is the forewarning of ANY dig op. The idiots." This is page 7's committee line — "the adages of digging too deep are but myth" — answered directly, by a man with forty-five years underground on that same site, inside the same document.
• The machine. "Fuck knows where or how they got it," but it "barely even fit its individual parts down the second shaft," and once assembled was "churning through stone like butter." "Down, down, down they said. They didn't stop for veins, they dug deep for something." — a veteran miner's professional judgement that the operation was a search, not an extraction. Page 7 supplies the reason: the Queen's bounty on finding "something of note."
• What woke. "Whatever they found it screamed an unholy noise."
• What he actually burned. "I ran and broke the lift after myself. I burned the bridges." — containment, not massacre. This is the lift the party found deliberately stripped of both drive pins in Session 51, and the bridges burned ten miles up in Session 52.
• The murder. "Brent put us in this hole and let a fire of his own. I must hide this after I write it." The pit, and the fire that killed the workforce, belong to Brent Pallwath — Foreman of the mine and a serving sergeant in the Queen's army.

Net: the official story is inverted. The orc executed for burning the mine is the man who tried to seal it, and the fire that killed everyone was lit by a Laewendas officer on top of him. See Vara'nak Gar-Galdar and Brent Pallwath for the full reading.

Page 6 — Dillbert

The mine's mage kept the crystal survey, and page 6 is his working record: logs, readings and proportions of crystals found at various depths, layers and sediments. Then, at the end, the last thing he ever wrote. (The handout spells him "Dillbert"; the vault's note, from the GM's spoken name in play, is Dilbert.)

The geology — two findings, and they are the mine's whole strategy.

• Crystals are found more often the deeper you go.
• Small pockets appear anywhere in the mountains at times.

The first is the technical case for sinking a shaft rather than chasing a vein — the case BAWMU's committee sold to the diggers and Vara'nak Gar-Galdar read from the floor as digging "for something." The second is worse news than it sounds: the crystal is not confined to the Middle Tor. Any of the tors or mountains around Menagoles may hold a pocket, which makes this dig the best site rather than the only one — and means losing it does not end Laewendas's supply. Which crystal these logs track (the red explosive fuel, the blue magical vein, or the refined green "panache" of The Foredweller Research Facility) is not stated.

Why he did it. "Dillbert takes great effort to separate themselves from their work. For the benefit of Laewendas, and her efforts to better Rivalon, Dillbert is glad and excited to partake in such research." He was not a conscript like the kidnapped alchemist Snuffles. He was a willing, enthusiastic collaborator who understood the work as service to the Queen and improvement of the province.

The purpose, written down. "If it is possible to reproduce the material known as 'Shards of the Autarch' it is theoretically possible to emulate the power of a woman who killed a god that hunted gods."

That one sentence does three things:

1. The goal is reproduction, not recovery. Shards are meant to fall from the sky and merely be found; this project intends to manufacture one — the same problem Dr. Provostinalkov has been failing to crack in the Gwyndinas Sewers.
2. The motive is stated outright. Not a weapon for its own sake, but to emulate The Autarch herself. Laewendas does not simply want a knife that kills gods; she wants the power of the woman who used one. That puts her and the party after the same prize — compare the GM's standing offer in Steal Power from the Autarch.
3. It describes the God-Emperor as "a god that hunted gods." A contemporary in-world phrasing for the being the Autarch killed, and a sharper verb than the vault's usual "killed every god": hunted.

His final entry — and the end of the Mage-Man rumour. The record breaks mid-work:

• He hears screams from below.
• "One scream, unlike the others, was made by no lungs of flesh."
• Smoke billows from the lower, lower shaft.
• He will go down and try to save as many as he can — because "it is his purpose as a spellcaster to put his often unspent potential into saving lives."

He went toward it. The hermit Pentuckle told the party the fire was "the last thing the Mage-Man did" (Session 50), and the vault has carried that as an unproven rumour ever since. Page 6 kills it. Dillbert did not set the fire; he heard people burning far below him and walked down the shaft to reach them, and he never came back up. The ghost the party found in Session 51, still miming the act of writing a logbook that no longer exists, is the man who kept these logs.

Two witnesses to the same inhuman scream. Vara'nak, in the deep: "Whatever they found it screamed an unholy noise." Dillbert, above him: "one scream, unlike the others, was made by no lungs of flesh." Two men on different levels, writing separately, both recorded a cry that was not a person. The vault's standing reading is that the five Foredweller Alarm-sirens the party destroyed in Session 52 — the ones that psychically beam "leave, leave, leave" — are what drove the mine to burn itself; these pages confirm the sound carried well above the deep dig on the day, but do not identify it.

Page 7 — BAWMU Meeting

The Bi-Monthly Assorted Workers of Mining Union in session. In substance:

• A rebuke to the workers. "Many of us have shown too little backbone and lack the weight in our strikes needed to dig." Strike action was live and the leadership was against it.
• The machines came from the Queen. Workers had raised concerns about "the digging machines our right and honourable Queen has sent us from her finest machinists."
• The warning, dismissed in as many words. "The adages of digging too deep are but myth."
• The bribe. Strikers and quitters would be paid off for their time — but "we who dig until we find something of note will be made nobles, and each a manor and land. The Queen wills it and she always pays well for those in her services."
• Three resignations, same day. Javosi, Aedeldor and Liliana resigned from the committee; their posts to be filled by vote another day.
• Closes: "Now, snacks and tea."

(Pages 1–4 and 8: not yet transcribed.)

Why page 7 matters

It is the mine's disaster in miniature, written by the people it killed. Three things land at once:

1. The warning was on the record and was overruled. Ulda Golgain died ~570 years earlier charging that something lies beneath the tors and must never be dug up (Session 47). Here the union leadership answers him directly — "but myth" — and votes to keep digging. Everything the party found in Session 51 and Session 52 (the sealed deep, the alarm room's leave, leave, leave, the thing in the pit) is what was under that vote.
2. The boring machine has a named source. The great drill of the deep dig — the likely "banshee machine" of Vara'nak's journal, the thing the axolotl key was made to operate — was sent by the Queen, built by her own machinists. This is the mine's tooling traced to the crown rather than to the mining company. (Compare the Cathalon-made lantern dated ~5 years old, found at the fire's origin in Session 52 — Cathalon being the Queen's seat.)
3. The incentive explains the depth. Nobody dug six-plus miles for wages. They dug for a title, a manor and land, promised personally by the Queen to whoever found "something of note." That is a mine bribed into finding exactly the thing that killed it — and it reframes the operation as a search, not an extraction, from the start. Page 5, from the pit floor, is the same judgement in a miner's words: "They didn't stop for veins, they dug deep for something."

The three pages together

• Three levels, one operation. The committee room sold the depth (p.7). The mage's office supplied the data that made depth look profitable (p.6). The pit paid for it (p.5).
• The safety argument runs across the pages almost verbatim. Committee: "The adages of digging too deep are but myth." Vara'nak: "'Never dig too deep' is the forewarning of ANY dig op. The idiots." The mine argued about this in writing and lost.
• Neither of the men the world blamed did it. The orc executed for burning the mine broke the lift and burned the bridges to seal what the dig woke. The mage rumoured to have set the fire walked down into it to pull people out. The man who lit the killing fire was the foreman — and a Sergeant of Laewendas' Army.
• The Queen is named inside the document. Page 7 says only "Queen"; page 6 names Laewendas outright as the beneficiary of the research. Same journal, same operation.

Threads

• Five missing pages. Pages 1–4 and 8 are unaccounted for. Page 8 is the last entry in the book; given page 7's content and pages 5–6's timing, it is the final record before — or of — the disaster.
• The three who walked. Javosi, Aedeldor and Liliana resigned the same day the leadership dismissed the digging-too-deep warning and dangled nobility. Whether they quit over that vote, whether they left the mine, and whether any of them survived, are open. They would be the only known people to walk away before the end.
• Where do the promised nobles fit? Montague Fitzburg, the many-titled noble running the mine in Session 50, holds exactly the kind of title page 7 promises. Unproven and worth asking.
• Pockets elsewhere in the mountains. Page 6's survey says the crystal turns up in small pockets anywhere in the range. If Laewendas knows that — and her own mage wrote it — the Middle Tor may not be her only dig.
• Clearing the mage's name too. Vara'nak Gar-Galdar asked to have his name cleared and the party did it. Dillbert never asked, and Pentuckle is still telling anyone who comes down there that the Mage-Man burned the mine.