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Artifact 1

A faded, yet legible letter from the ruins of ancient Guangdong, in China.

>When we saw the Stranger, I thought it was the beginning our salvation. A weapon that could change the fate of the world, to take back the world for the living from the rotten jaws of Undeath.

>The way the Stranger danced through the horde - yes that’s dance - was almost an art form in itself. Maybe because we saw beauty in salvation, watching the Stranger easily cut through the undead like a hot knife through butter. Within a few minutes, about a half of the massed zombies are either dead or incapacitated enough not to pose any danger. After so many years of despair, we finally felt hope. And it felt good, we were all ecstatic! But it was only for a short fleeting moment, and never again will we feel such a sensation perhaps, for several lifetimes to come.

>The Stranger made their way to the barricades and with eloquence, they finally spoke. I couldn’t hear the whole conversation myself but I was able to get snippets of it from the people who were there. Something about being from a very old royal family or an unknown ancient clan, offering safety and security in exchange for food, and the word blood.

>I have never seen the Teacher, who has led all the survivors for a few score years now, look pale and defeated. Maybe it was the burden of leadership for all these years trying to hold us all together and instructing us about the ways of the world he lived in that is now gone, or the age that has weakened the mind and body. I don’t know.

>I did not realize the full extent of the Teacher’s mental burden until some people, and almost all the zombies surrounding our complex, started disappearing. It’s always the infirm and the elderly who are taken away by the same individual called the Courier. Rarely does a child disappear but when that does happen we never see the same Courier again, replaced by another being of a cold demeanor and deathless facade who also goes by the same name.

>It did not take us long to realize that these beings are not humans, but denizens of the night that the Teacher had told us about through tales around the campfire. Creatures who we thought of as mere myths and legends, have now made their arrival known to what remains of the living. They stayed in the shadows since time immemorial biding their time and hiding in the safety of the dark, away from the prying eyes of their cattle who almost hunted them to extinction in ancient times.

>Our hubris brought our own undoing, thinking we could tamper with the unseen designs of God and His creations without adverse results. If the light of hope still flickers in hidden places, I pray they use it well and to remember not to commit the same mistake our generation did. Because our fatal mistake created the zombies, who decimated the world’s population in a few months. They became the heralds of our downfall, who made way for the Nobles of the Night to finally take the primacy they have long sought of.

>They did not come for our salvation. They came to preserve what remains of us, breeding and increasing our numbers like animals in a corral. While there are more humans now than there were before, our freedoms have been severely curtailed. When a person unknowingly wanders off the confines of our prison, the Stranger’s kin will gently prod them back. When they commit the same mistake even if they did not intend to, they never return. There are no second chances. It was a cruel fact of our lives that we now have to live with. One day a loved one is there by your side, and the next day they’re gone. Gone forever.

>Sometimes, I wish I fell during the early attempts to fight the hordes. In other days, I wished the wounds I suffered during those battles festered so that I could go out in a feverish delirium seeing images of the world that was. At least I’ll certainly die in a sweet dream, instead of living in a nightmare where everything is uncertain. But I was unfortunate to live, long enough to witness how the Era of the Living has long ended, and the Hour of Midnight has begun.