Greetings again, friend! It has been some time in study, but I have not been able to ascertain a suitably near next event in the histories. The institution of martial law on Mars was the natural next step, but there are precious few details. My captors warned they intend to share a log from another prisoner with me, though they have yet to do so. RJ4 claims that it will be illuminating for the research I have been doing, but I cannot yet comprehend why nor why they bother to allow these studies at all. I was also informed my dispersion is to be delayed by a short cycle. I cannot say yet whether this is a relief or a deeper curse for me. I was, I thought, somewhat ready to make an end of this light into the endless lightfields where radiance grows immortal.

              Fresh urgency compels me, as the RJ4 says the date is set within a few days in old earth time. I must manage all I can for you. Yet, my frustration cannot be overstated as I have no further information other than the broadest forms of knowledge, martial law, the gathering of survivors, the first sorcerers captured, questioned, and then used as weapons in the gathering storm. These things you know, all know, but without a concrete example I am lost. There is a long delay in the records of Captain Lowan, but I am seeking a lead. Pray I reach it before the last of my light, for your sake if not for mine.

By way of interim, I beg you to let me speak of a dream, as I dreamt again this night, but not of the long-dead captain, nor the erasure of the Crimson Sanctum. The Lord of hidden things has often spoken in dreams in the course of history and revelation – perhaps there is something in it.

—

              I walked an amber lit path between trees of impossible height, deep red bark pulsing with life. Thin leaves of vibrant green danced in the distant sunlight. I heard the laughing of a child, a gleeful rend through the settled silence of the morning.  I continued walking, vaguely in that direction and soon found my cheeks sore with smiling. How many of you remember the scents of your dreams? A faint odor of smoke reached me wrestling its way through the steady air to reach me.

              My nose twitched and my eyes narrowed as the laughter filling the forest stopped. I followed the scent between the towering trees and reached a clearing. In the center was a shining sapling twice my height engulfed in a crackling flame of a strange hue. Around the base of the tree was a cleared field of ashes like powdered silver, and a child of no more than four or five earth years sat entranced, staring at the blazing tree.

              I stood on the edge of the silver-ash looking at my feet, bare and dirty from my trek. I wore robes of a style I had never seen, white but covered in dirt and mud and grime. I carried a small wooden sword and shield, like a child’s playthings. A voice echoed through the forest, “Remove your sandals,” and the flaming tree pulsed in jittering time to the voice as I looked up and then back down to my already bare feet.

              “The place you would stand is a ground of holiness.” The flame flickered, and the child in the ashes, his hair and face silvered by the dust, flinched back, then leaned forward.

              The burning scent continued, but I spoke, almost a whisper, “Who are you?”

              “I am that you are that we are that was and will be and is to ever be past and future. True flame am I, ever burning, come.” The sky emptied of its color as the flame spoke and a compulsion reached my will and sought to chain my fate.

              Some sense of foreboding stayed my step, but then the child reached out to the fire and screamed as it licked hungrily at his hand. My feet moved without my thinking. I sprinted into the silver ash and kicked it up, but with each step it burst outward from me as if by some great magnetic push clearing the ground to fresh earth beneath. Grass and vines and flowers bloomed beneath my steps, one, two, three, four, but the distance between us stretched out of my reach while remaining near to my vision.

              The child held his wrist with one hand and watched in terror as the burning continued to spread through him connecting him to the flaming tree which flickered frightfully and yelled terribly in a language I did not comprehend. The flame spread out from the tree into the monstrous form of a twisted giant, arms wide leaning over the boy ready to smother him I tried to leap but felt my feet sunken as if grasped by mud, movements slowed by the hesitance of dream time.

              I grit my teeth hard and spoke a silent plea, a prayer, and my feet burst free. I raised my wooden shield which pulsed with a flickering radiance and transformed into a repulsion field forcing everything outward. The giant from the tree before me cursed in a vile tongue which crushed light into a dampening dark, then I was between it and the boy and the blows fell. I held the shield over my head and back and knelt over the boy, dropping my wood sword and cradling the boy’s ashen head to my chest. The first blow drove my knee into the earth and beneath us the silver dust fled and vines grew. The boy held his burning hand and wailed with all the persuasiveness of agony. Another blow barreled down and I grunted, my shoulder crunching beneath the weight, and heat seemed the whole of existence, a terrible magmatic surge that threatened my bones. Blows rained like hailstones from the thunderstorms of Jupiter without the relief of coolness. I closed my eyes and held the boy tighter, all my focus bent upon remaining steady beneath the weight of the assault.

Of a sudden pain beyond imagining pierced straight through my heart and my eyes burst open with wide-eyed anguish, breath caught in my throat. The wood sword transformed into a flashing hypercarbon steel with a hilt of dazzling ruby inlays was buried in my chest, held by the burning hand of the youth. I gasped and choked and felt a sense of unsettling, thankful resignation before a flash of white erased my world into waking.

—

              Perhaps you have had such a dream, a twisting betrayal, or was it? I am not yet certain what any of it my mean, but I am sure that was no True Flame – the False Flame’s markers are everywhere upon it, the burning, the ashes, the consumptive madness, the almost beautiful. I have digressed again. I’ve just received a transmission from the RJ4, and the first line of it blooms my heart with wonder, peace… Could it be, the first family? I am sorry friend, but here I must leave you for a time. My heart and head are too full with questions and hopes to be of any use. Until the light connects us again, peace to you.