These texts were originally published as part of Hunt's Tide of Desolation, the live Event that ran from December 13th of 2023 to February 14 of 2024. The excerpts featured here are a continuation of those from Tide of Desolation: Part One. Are they fact, fiction, fable, or fallacy? We may never know for sure, but there's truth to every lie, and a lie to every truth. Read on, and decide for yourself.

Summary: Thanks to the information The Beekeeper was able to gather, the demented followers of The Cowl enter the Graven Path in Kingsnake Mine first, hellbent on achieving ascension in the Land of the Dead. By the time Daughter of Decay and the Drowned enter, desolation has already begun. Past stories of the bayou are made eternal in the form of marble statues around the Land of the Dead. The Drowned learn that they were created by the white-haired witch, Lynch, who reveals that the entire ploy is part of her wager with the Lord of the Dead. An epic gunfight ensues as warring groups rush to get to the massive monster born of the desolation first. In the end, the soul of the Delphine's captain drives the boat's ghost into the monster, destroying it.

Chapter Eight: The Beekeeper

A thousand ship bells peal as the Demented Pact begin their quest for true ascension.

Almanac of the Swarm
Third Comb

The only way to split my soul was to have you. With you, I could feel twice as much. See twice as far. You were to be a queen in a queen-less land. You were to be a miracle of a daughter, not a curse.

***Page Torn, Pasted with Black Honey to 1895 Almanac***

We Demented got to the mine first and uncovered the passage. The Cowl was pleased—he spared me. My Brothers and Sisters had gathered plenty of others to bless the Graven Path for our ceremony.

"Bleed the path wider for us," he commanded.

Deep underground, all sounds were amplified. Five unpledged Hunters were pinned by lances in a circle around the rift passage. Their blood leaked into the Graven Path and made it pulse with waters from the Land of the Dead. We tossed Mr. Chary's equipment in—knives—brackets—jars of organs—more knives and restraints. The hole widened.

"We've worshiped our Targets as devotees, acolytes," the Cowl told us. "But perhaps it is the Targets who worship us. We will seek them out. It is time to give them our blessings."

We forced groups of unpledged through the Graven Path and stormed forth in their wake. A thousand ship bells rang, and through their echoes we sank.

At the Graven Path's end, I slid into a fountain. In the distance, a great Mound loomed, spiraled and kinked and made by giants of insect-kind. Lightning flashed, and monsters hunched and furrowed in the distant mists.

Legends unknown blocked me from this throne. So a legend myself I set to become.

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Chapter Nine: Drowned Rat

The stakes have never been higher as the depths of Kingsnake Mine are plunged a final time. The Drowned return home.

Ink on Papyrus Scroll
Found at (illegible) Collection

Those Demented breached the Graven Path, went through before us. The Drowned and I felt it in our lungs when it happened. We puked. It hurt us. It took everything we had to gather our supplies and lead just a handful of Pact members to Kingsnake Mine. It wasn't much, but it'd have to do.

We put the five Hunters impaled around the Path out of their misery. I asked for their names before we passed through, but the insane ringing of ship bells cleared them from my mind. We got spat out, and the swampland mazes of the Land of the Dead stretched before us. Every gooseneck bend and turn changed, distorted. Each step of the way, some new and horrible sculpture blocked our path.

The first statue was a man making a fire. Then a herd of white bison, followed by a one-legged woman nailed to a cypress tree. In a switchback of reeds, a priest screamed, frozen in white marble flames. A Meathead impaled a man against the beam of some ceiling that wasn't there. Another man with a katana held back, ready to swing.

We stopped at the statue of a train bent over a hill. Marching out of it were stone children holding guns. A moon-white Sheriff Hardin pointed them towards the Mound.

"What are all these statues?" Daughter of Decay asked.

"They're sculptures. Stories. Legends and tales brought here by the Murmurstone," I told her.

"Why?" the Kid asked. "What's the point in having all these stories?"

He placed his hand on one of the children's guns, opened his mouth to swallow the rain.

"They've come here," I told him, "so that the Sculptor can figure out how all of 'em end."

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Chapter Ten: Daughter of Decay

A reckless expedition is undertaken to cross a tide of shadows.

Undated
Tale of Forsaken Soils, Fourth Harvest

Down here, we were fruit that didn't need the sun to grow. No thirst, no hunger. Overhead was a Moon with a rotten black scar like a goat's eye. Ash drifted up from the dead land and gathered there in piles. I heard echoes of Mr. Chary laughing in its soot. It sounded like he was fighting the Moon.

A great Mound rose from the south. When the fog cleared it seemed to be a mountain, a tower, a volcano and insect nest all in one. We climbed up a marsh bank for a better view and came across a ship, or the skeleton of one. It looked brittle, like a dandelion, ready to fall apart if you made a wish and blew on it.

"Welcome to the Delphine's Ghost," the Drowned Rat said.

We boarded. She said this ship began the story we were in. Sculptures were all over the boat. A statue of the captain jumping over the railing. An eyeless man at the ship's wheel. Dead statues grew all over the deck, and in the hold was a Rotjaw statue absorbing a stone woman.

"Get on, Laffite," the Drowned Kid said, and pulled him in. The captain's arm burst into black fire when he crossed the threshold. The boat didn't want him on board. He stood ashamed on the shore and watched us leave.

The paddle wheel groaned on its own, and the rudder twitched like a horse tail. This boat needed no captain. It steered itself toward the Mound and steamed ahead. Sculptures were everywhere: an old soldier with his legs sawn off and a bird on his shoulder, someone trapped underwater in a rope nest weighed down by cannonballs. We almost sunk the ship on the statue of a woman split open from giving birth to a Meathead.

I knew somewhere out there was a sculpture of me. I felt myself growing there in stone. I felt shadows stalking me. They were waiting for me to find myself.

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Chapter Eleven: The Beekeeper

The Demented Pact embrace their Corruption like never before as they surge through a storm of violence.

Almanac of the Swarm
Fourth Comb

The first time I was stung, I cried with joy. The blessing of the stinger is holy. The spreading of venom in blood makes openings in your soul. From there our Lord's thoughts emerge. But some thoughts you must be wary of, child. Some thoughts must be killed before they kill you.

***Page Torn, Pasted with Black Honey to 1895 Almanac***

We pushed groups of unpledged Hunters in front of us, blindfolded and tied to ropes. We shot them if they slowed. The landscape reacted to our swarm—Armoreds hulked from the fog—sheared limbs—the air filled with Hive screeches—and we fired and impaled and reveled in the mud and bile we spilled.

Statues of monsters forgotten by books and time blocked our way: herds of decayed horses frozen mid-gallop, fleeing a skeletal giant—a tree-high horse to rule all horses, its ribs split open and sucking in old soldiers and the equine alike to mash them with its bones.

The closer we came to the Mound, the more deranged the fights became. Our crusade pushed through herds of leeches and waves of Grunts that set off old ship mines buried in the mud. Every hunk of shell lodged in our flesh only affirmed our vows. Bite wounds and poisoned spines became the language of our story.

We were chosen to rule over this endless place—chosen—we had to be chosen. We would prove it at the Mound under a dying Moon.

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Chapter Twelve: Drowned Rat

The long-lost white-haired witch reveals herself. The truth of the Drowned is told in undying fables.

Ink on Papyrus Scroll
Found at (illegible) Collection

—Myths and curses from Desolation's past roam under an injured Moon. Fables cannot die. Fables can only seek the blood of those who made them.—

Got pinned in a ravine. Something huge came for the Delphine's Ghost, seemed to give everyone a different vision.

Felis called it a landslide full of bones. Kid thought it was a giant serpent. That Worm Bite fella saw it to be a legion of knights with tombstones for heads.

I called it something to shoot, and shoot it to sunken hell we did.

Each time some new horror struck at the ship, the landscape closed up and trapped us. We shot and stabbed our way through it all. And at the ever-wandering center of the Land of the Dead, we found her: the creator of us four Drowned.

That white-haired witch who calls herself Lynch.

She sat on a sculpture of Rotjaw. In the gator's mouth, that Gar woman was nestled with a little girl on the tongue. They held a bundle of wilted lilies between 'em and laid fast asleep in the cradle of teeth.

"Strange sitting place you got there," I told her.

"—It's a promise I've kept,—" Lynch said. Her voice still spoke only in my head, just as always.

"Great," I told her, jumping off the bow. "You promised a plan if we brought the Pacts. Give it now."

"—The Lord of the Dead is anxious. He knows I am to win our wager.—"

A walkway of pillars and columns stretched away from us. There stood the Lord of the Dead. Was hard to make out its shape. Something like a man stabbed with a thousand knives. Maybe just some unnamed thing you miss every time you blink.

"Let's hear it. The bet, the plan."

"—Erase the bayou's history. Wash clean its transgressions and sins. I've channeled all I could manage into you four. Drain the rest from the Mound, and your Drowning will end.—"

"Sounds like a trap. What'll you gain from it?"

Lynch looked to the sky. Flicked a knife at the Moon.

"—I will have a mouth as wide as the Sculptor. I will learn to hunt as it hunts, and take what it cannot.—"

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Chapter Thirteen: Daughter of Decay

A showdown at the final threshold of the Demented's ascendance.

Undated
Tale of Forsaken Soils, Fifth Harvest

I made the ship stop, in a pale glade where a statue of myself stood. It was of me as a little girl, sowing seeds into my mother's fingers. Sculpted bits of my cousins, siblings, aunts and uncles stuck through the soil too. I stood a minute, a year, ten dozen seasons of fog.

"I came all this way," I finally said, "to share my harvest with you."

I shot a hole in my statue. It bled over the garden. If I had tasted of them, it was only fair for them to taste of me. My life was theirs too. The shadows following me bowed in respect.

Weeds must be pulled with a cold heart, and so we pushed onward to the Mound.

We crept up on the Demented horde as they crashed upon the Mound's slope in horrible shrieks and waves. The entrance to the Mound's center was barred by a goliath gate of beetle wings. We wouldn't be able to pass through the elytra shells sunk into the rock. The Demented pounded upon the barricade and fought off every terror the bayou has ever known as rows of Meatheads pushed them into the channel, piled upon them to drown.

Everyone but the Drowned jumped ship and left to fight off the monsters and Demented, but the shadows which had followed me drew in close. I crept in their shade as they guided me through body piles and rows of traps. I ducked, waited. Shot who and what I could. The shadows pointed to a gathering of Immolators at the gate. One bullet was all I needed. They erupted in a chain-inferno and set the gate aflame, revealing it to be alive. Pus and insect blood hissed from cracks in the wings, and the Delphine's Ghost churned ahead and rammed the injured gate. The entry tore open, and a tremor shook the Mound. Hosts of shadows escaped from within the gate, free to roam whatever land they chose. But my shadows stayed with me. For there was still a season of harvest my family wished to guide me through.

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Chapter Fourteen: The Beekeeper

The Delphine washes upon its final shore. The end of the tide is sighted, but who will live to reach it?

Almanac of the Swarm
Fifth Comb

Little one, I've seen the hive where all souls converge. Sky high and stretched with star larvae. Lords quivered from those constellations and combs. Their eyes wept with all the love we waste, and there—in the black rain—I tasted all I've wasted on you.

When I recall the flavor and spice of it, I almost remember how to forgive you for leaving me.

***Page Torn, Pasted with Black Honey to 1895 Almanac***

Cracks from the steamship's impact broke open the slope of the Mound. Inside were layers upon layers of the Targets' pupae. They spilled out—goo slick—tarnished and black in the fertilizer of banishment. My Demented guzzled in their rawness. They slurped and burrowed into the pulsing nursery until they were out of sight.

I didn't join them. They ignored the Delphine's Ghost, but the ship's journey had not ended. It struggled against wind and the ichor gushing out the gate, so I boarded in secret. I knew there was a greater miracle to behold beyond these gestating Targets, and so I left my kin behind to journey into the Mound.

Only the Drowned were left aboard the ship, dead quiet and still.

The paddle churned for years, decades.

Sculpted combs spiraled along the walls into the sky. Each glowed with stars—eggs—larvae—promises from beyond.

After an eternity, we beached onto an island at the core. Every altar ever made was stacked in a maddening pile. To see it in Dark Sight was to stare at the sun. At the pile's peak was a platform for a statue, but it was empty.

I abandoned ship, dodging gunfire from the Drowned until at last I climbed upon the platform and made myself a legend above all others. A black rain poured from the high combs. I opened my mouth to taste it.

As the first drop touched my tongue, I felt the rumbling of a queen about to descend.

Energy flowed from the altars and swirled overhead. The walls burst and caved. An egg spiracle winded down from the center of the rift storm and the fools fired their guns, their lances, tossed flaming jars and explosives that lit the cavern. All useless.

I was to witness the molting of our Desolation's Lord. I was to be a child to it, the kind of child my daughter was never brave enough to be.

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Chapter Fifteen: Drowned Rat

A Tale of Desolation ends. A final sacrifice must be made so the bayou's history can march on.

Ink on Papyrus Scroll
Found at (illegible) Collection

Lynch lied. Figured as much. She meant to feed us to this thing being hatched, this monster born of Desolation. I fired all my rounds anyhow, tossed some Depth Markers for fun. Then I smelled a life bursting into flames.

Laffite finally made it to us. Came on an old rowboat. Rowed so hard one of his hands fell off.

He flopped aboard and the Delphine's Ghost blew its whistle in disgust. Whatever long-sowed punishment he earned scorched him with blue heat, orange embers. He looked ashamed and at peace at the same time.

This is what atonement must be, I thought. Don't think I'll ever seek it out myself.

He burned and crawled into the engine room to open the boiler. Inside was a navigator's hell no artist could describe. Whatever its shape, he accepted it. Hugged it, even.

Lightning and smoke roared from the smokestack. We abandoned ship as the Delphine's Ghost said goodbye to the Land of the Dead and the Land of the Living, and banished as a summer thundercloud rising around the madness that throbbed from above. Her bow crashed upon the hatchling and tore open its gulping throat. Black steam ballooned its gut and burst. Rest of our dynamite went off, and if this thing had a mind, it was blown apart with the force of a volcano.

—Your sins may be forgiven, though you will carry them always. May their scars live on forever. May you live to feel the unfeelable.—

Storm bolts struck the altars, and we heard every statue across the land shatter. The Graven Path flooded in on a surge of light. Brain chunks glowed in constellations upon the walls, thinking some last thought. The Path spread a cover between us and Desolation and splashed over the cave. It drank us in. Spat us out all across the bayou, in trees, creeks, and on roofs and walkways.

Wherever our stories end, it wasn't down there.

Lynch said we four Drowned hold all the bayou's sins now. I don't feel much different than before though. Rain feels cool. Bullets cause pain, and pain reminds me I'm alive, or alive enough. A mosquito finds the sunlight warm on my cheek and drinks. I wonder what desolate plain it feels itself upon as the shadow of my hand covers it.

I wonder if I'll be fast enough to pull my gun when that shadow comes for me.

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