The Calthus Manuscript

Wednesday, 3 June 2026

(Speaker labels left anonymous — SPEAKER_00 = DM; SPEAKER_01/02/03 are players.)

What happened

This was a mostly-narrative chunk: the DM read aloud from an in-world book, then play resumed at the university.

The Hemby book (read in full by the DM)

The party (or at least Leafear) is reading a treatise by A.P. Hemby, a lecturer in Pre-Azmodean Historical Mythology at Trullinale University, Ellswater. It’s based on 11 interviews over 14 months with an old elf named Calthus Windrunner.

The core narrative — Calthus’s memory of “the Shade”:

He was around six. His people were fleeing through a forest (“silver wood”), pulled along by frightened adults who wouldn’t explain.
The world changed under his feet. The ground went from soft mossy underlighting (the “heart glow”) to hard and dry. Something left the air. Like a door closing in another room.
He looked up and saw three moons for the first time. His home only had two — one large pale, one smaller, blue-green like a river stone. Three moons drawing close meant something terrible here; back home it meant something gentle.
Three pillars of light — purple and green, “two things fighting” — shot up from the ground in different places, converged above the moons, and became something “that had no business being seen.”
Creatures came out of the dark afterwards. Not natural. “Hunger that had forgotten what it was for.” They killed without eating, without purpose.
Calthus survived the night under his father’s coat. In the morning his parents were simply gone — not dead, not anywhere. Just gone.
A woman named Erindale Windrunner — who had lost her own children, and whose speech-cadence suggested she’d come “from somewhere else entirely, some other crossing” — found him, fed him, raised him under the great trees. He took her name. She’s long dead now.

Hemby’s conclusion

After 11 visits and a lot of his own wine, Hemby commits to a thesis he says he’s tired of burying in footnotes:

The elven people did not originate in Carnia. They came from somewhere else — a realm now sealed off or destroyed — and were violently expelled by the Shade. The elves of Carnia are scattered remnants who lost everything they knew in a single night.

He notes Carnia has three moons; Calthus’s homeland had two. When pressed on this directly Calthus said “the third one was the first thing I noticed.”

Calthus’s parting words to Hemby:

“It is not finished. The shade was not an ending. It was a door closing. And doors that close can open.”
“The world I came from is still there. I feel it sometimes… and something in it is still alive.”

Hemby himself (from the footnotes)

Author of: A Severing Shake — Catastrophic and Fabulation (suppressed), Before the Kingdom — Contested Origins of the Azmodean Civilization (withdrawn), The Ethereum Question (self-published).
Lives in Ellswater. “He is the only member of his department — not for long.”
Was 53 when he wrote the book; book is 13 (or 30?) years old. Open question whether he’s still alive.

Back to Guthrine at the university

After Leafear leaves the scene, the DM cuts back to Guthrine:

Asked Quillnook (a crotchety gnome librarian) to see the index. Denied — “you’re not touching my index.”
Decision: go looking for Magistar Helia Reinhardt, who can hopefully lead to Professor Ember Lane, teacher of applied aetheric energies.
Started wandering the university library asking strangers for Reinhardt. Most just shushed them.

NPCs introduced / referenced

A.P. Hemby — lecturer, Trullinale University, Ellswater. Author of the book the party is reading. Possibly still alive.
Calthus Windrunner — ancient elf, survivor of the Shade, Hemby’s primary source. Lives near the harbour. Dead/alive status not stated in this segment.
Erindale Windrunner — Calthus’s adoptive mother; deceased. Came through some “other crossing.”
Quillnook — gnomic librarian/archivist. Crotchety. Possessive of his index.
Magistar Helia Reinhardt — sought by Guthrine. Whereabouts unknown.
Professor Ember Lane — applied aetheric energies. Guthrine’s real target via Helia.

Open threads

Is the Shade going to come back? Calthus believes a door that closed can open, and something on the other side is still alive.
What does Guthrine actually want from Professor Ember Lane? Aetheric energies + a theory about elven origins from another sealed realm seems thematically loaded.
Find Magistar Helia Reinhardt.
Is Hemby still around to be interviewed in person?
The two-moons/three-moons disparity is a concrete cosmological clue worth chasing.

Memorable moments

DM cursing at YouTube ads twice mid-Calthus monologue (“Fucking things!”, “Just like these fuck-in adverts.”). Vow that next time the book gets pre-downloaded.
Player aside about their father-in-law running a Raspberry Pi as a “pie hole” to filter ads.
Detour mid-session into Year 3 schoolkids not knowing where tap water comes from. “They’re not on the water table yet — that’s year four.”