Category: Field Notes / The Archive
Character Perspective: Elian Vost
The room is small, and the air is always stale. It has that flat, metallic taste of recycled oxygen from the Citadel scrubbers, mixed with the faint scent of ozone. It’s a dry heat that stays in your throat long after the shift ends. My candles don't do much against the dark; they just flicker enough to make the lines on the map look like they’re shifting.
My fingers are black again. It isn’t the soot from the furnaces—it’s the ink. This 4th Century blend is stubborn. It gets into the cracks of your skin and stays there, no matter how hard you scrub with lye. It’s reached a point where my hands look like they belong to a much older man.
Today, I spent six hours on the Vrail Crossing.
The Doctrine of Continuity is clear: I have to draw the bridge exactly as it stood seven hundred years ago. So, I spent my afternoon sketching white stone arches, reinforced iron railings, and the statues of the Founders. I even added the paved roads leading out to the Horn borders, just like the old records say.
But the logistics reports tell a different story.
I see the discrepancies in the supply line coordinates—the ones that don’t align with the geography I’m forced to draw. I’ve seen the stray memos, the ones not meant for the official archives, describing a Vrail Valley that bears no resemblance to my sketches. I know that bridge was shelled into gravel before my grandfather was born, and the river has been a dead vein of chemical runoff and oil for decades. The map on my table is a ghost of a world that ended long ago.
Why bother with the drawings? The Ordnance Board calls it the "Spirit of the Front." They say if we change the maps, we’re admitting the war has a direction—that we’re losing or winning ground. And the Ministry doesn't want direction. It wants continuity.
My eyes are starting to ache from the constant squinting. Sometimes, when the light hits the paper at the right angle, I feel like I can see the real world hiding under my ink—the craters, the dead soil, and the things moving in the dark that the Ministry doesn't want us to name.
Tomorrow, I start on Sector 4. They’ve labeled them the "Orchards."
There hasn’t been a tree in Sector 4 for three hundred years.