The Private Notes of Lefran Dimitriv Page 1

Appended to the private journals of Lefran Dimitriv, on loose pages tucked inside the rear cover

Undated — late SA 1610

My search into the ancient Danemar faith has led me somewhere unexpected. In the great library of Gondolin I have found three texts that reference a place called the Temple of Sophia — a sacred site of the old Gaeatoic faith, the religion of the Danemar before they dispersed across Annûn and their faith faded from memory. This temple was located far to the west in what is now called Arnor near the great Sea. 

The first is a fragment of Danemar genealogical record — a partial copy of what appears to be a much larger text. The fragment refers to the twelve noble Houses of the Danemar, among them the House of Marach and the House of Runeth, and mentions that the Temple of Sophia was the spiritual seat of the entire Danemar people before their dispersal. It refers to a book called the Gospel of Marach as the primary genealogical record of the twelve Houses — I have not been able to find this book anywhere in the library, though it is referenced in two other places. Either it was never held here, or it has been removed.

The second text is a geographic survey of the western territories of Ustalav, dating to the early Second Age. Its author mentions the temple only in passing, noting that a Danemar elder had told him of ruins lying "in the deep wood east of the Ustalavic border, some days travel into the Firwood from the hills of Canterwall." This is an apparent reference to the Fangwood Forest, in a time when it was called the Firwood Forest. This is before evil overtook it.

The third is a damaged theological treatise catalogued simply as Of the Aeons, of uncertain authorship and uncertain date. It is the most interesting of the three, and the most troubling. It describes the original Temple of Sophia, I'm assuming the temple in the lands of Arnor, as a repository of the faith — texts, relics, and artifacts of the Gaeatoic tradition, sealed away for preservation. The author writes with reverence bordering on awe. He references two texts I have not been able to locate anywhere: the Apocryphon of Sophia, and something called the Book of Ezekiah, described as a prophetic work attributed to a priest of the Aeon Sophia. Both are apparently held — or were held — within the temple itself. 

I would very much like to read those books. I suspect I will not get the chance.

I have surmised that the temple ruins in the Fangwood are a rebuilt, but smaller, temple of Sophia after the disbursement and migration of the Danemar peoples. The Houses of Belor, Marach, and Haladan, and other less noble houses, settled in the lands of what is now called Henneth Annun. These are my ancestors and the ancestors of many of the people of Gondolin. 

Undated — late SA 1610, a later entry

The Fangwood. Of all the places in Annûn, of course it is the Fangwood.

The geographic survey places the temple ruins deep in that forest — perhaps thirty or forty miles west of the hills of Canterwall where the old mine shafts sit at the forest's edge. Forty miles into a wood that no sensible traveler enters willingly.

I asked the head librarian whether any expedition had sought the ruins. He said he only remembered one expedition party ever entering the Fangwood with that intention over the past two centuries. None returned.

He mentioned, as an afterthought, that the forest itself seems to resist those who enter it — paths that double back, mists without weather to cause them, sounds with no apparent source. He said the oldest texts describe it this way, that it has been so for several centuries, long before the vampires claimed it as their territory.

The vampires. Aliriel, daughter of Galdyce, maintains her court in the eastern Fangwood. If the temple ruins lie forty miles into that forest, they lie well within whatever she considers her domain.

Two of the texts I read also mention giant spiders in the deeper reaches of the Fangwood — creatures of unusual size described with enough consistency across sources that I do not think the authors were exaggerating. One simply writes: carry fire, and do not enter after dark.

I have no intention of going there. I am a priest, not an adventurer, and I am old enough to know the difference.

But I find myself thinking about those sealed texts. The Apocryphon of Sophia. The Book of Ezekiah. Whatever the author of Of the Aeons meant when he wrote that the temple held "those things appointed for the age of reckoning." I do not know what that phrase means. I find I am afraid to know.

— L.D.