Menrim’s Journal – Uldum

I am Menrim, a scribe of the Neferset. Or at least, formerly of the Neferset. I served my tribe for fifteen years when Al’Akir’s elementals appeared to us and offered us a deal – to join Al’Akir, his master Deathwing and his masters – the Old Gods. I was among the few among the Neferset who saw the folly of such a deal. And in the end, my people payed dearly for aligning themselves with these creatures. The Neferset tribe has been nearly destroyed, and among the dead was my own brother Bathet. I am still alive because I defected. Some would call me a traitor, who changed allegiances to save his own life, but is it not them who are greater traitors? The ones who would seek to align themselves with enemies of all life and all existence just to pursue a long-lost origin of our people? I did what I had to do to do no evil. If only Bathet and others had seen what this “deal” was going to cost them, everything would look differently.

Whatever happened, I will not dwell on the past for too long. After I aligned myself with Ramkahen and King Phaoris, I was sent to help with the paperwork in the royal court. It was not a very exciting job, but it changed when agents in the service of Ramkahen reclaimed our Lost City in the delta. I was told many powerful and evil tol’vir dwelt within the city walls, but when I reached it, they were all dead. The Ramkahen tol’vir were occupying the city and attempting to reclaim it for future usage by our uncorrupted people. It is interesting that our fleshy forms are now considered the uncorrupted ones. My brethren always held the flesh to be a curse. But it is the way Neferset deal with the world – we saw change as something bad and we desperately wanted to return to our stone forms. At least, the others did. I never felt this alienation with my own flesh most of my tribe did. I never wanted to return to stone, and especially not when ancient and powerful evil offers the “restoration”.

My job in the Lost City was to help in restoring the ancient library left from the time of the Titans. My Neferset brethren apparently discovered the library but they weren’t very interested in its contents. It’s amusing, really. They who would so desperately seek to return to stone, our primordial form, would abandon our actual purpose as given to us by the Titans. We were the record keepers, the librarians, the archivists of the Titans’ forces. Why would they want to return to the original form if the original essence had no importance to them? It is truly baffling. Nevertheless, I was tasked with restoring some of the ancient scrolls and disks which we could use in the Halls of Origination to recover the Titans’ own recordings. Unfortunately, most scrolls were beyond repair. Although being isolated from external conditions preserved them well, they dried out and became very brittle. After the Neferset so rashly swept through the place in search of powerful magic, majority of these scrolls became so brittle only very careful handling could keep them relatively undamaged.

Although the knowledge I could recover from these ancient scrolls proved invaluable to Ramkahen, the work was very tedious most of the time. We simply removed, with great care, every scroll in the library and then carefully analyzed the ancient glyphs inscribed on them. After some time of working on those glyphs, they all started to blend together. Not in the literal meaning, no, I still made no mistakes in deciphering the writings, but I was simply writing down the transcriptions without thinking of the meaning for a moment. I wonder if this is what became of the Neferset in the end – my people would become so obsessed with adhering to the form, that they lost the essence.

Yesterday, I was notified that an alien from the world of Draenor who took residence on Azeroth asked for an employee from our people. I was told that your boss, Verroak Krasha, needed an archivist to help him sort through his libraries of magical knowledge and sought the tol’vir for our expertise with this discipline. After giving it some thought, I decided to volunteer for this job. As fascinating as recovering the ancient tol’vir scrolls originally was, I needed some change in my life. This morning I prepared my boat and went on my way through the South Seas. Hopefully, I will be with you in a few days. Please pardon me for not using portals to quickly get around, but if there is one thing I’m conservative about, it’s travel. I would rather feel the wind and salt in my fur then just zip around like a gnome.

To be continued