British Royal Military Records

Intellect is a ludicrous defense mechanism. When primal terror exceeds the heart’s capacity to endure, a man instinctively retreats into clinical structures of language, leveraging the cold objectivity of history to build a fortress around his fracturing reason. Yet he forgets that history is never a heap of cold ash—it is a smoldering ember, waiting for the gentlest breeze to incinerate anyone who carelessly uncovers it.

Leaving Dale Hollis’s laboratory, Mark did not immediately drive back toward Arak-Val. A thick, suffocating revulsion gripped his mind, mingling with an agonizing two-day wait that stretched ahead like a century.

The town of Wexley lay submerged in a murky gray dusk. The county library sat at the far end of Main Street—an antique red-brick landmark erected in the late nineteenth century, its masonry swallowed under dead, frost-bitten ivy vines.

When Mark pushed the heavy wooden door open, the brass chime overhead issued a dull, muffled gong.

The interior air was thick with the scent of moldering paper, stale ink, and old oak deeply imbued into the bookshelves. Behind the circulation desk, an elderly librarian wearing reading glasses perched low on her nose dozed beside a stone-cold cup of chamomile tea. The rhythmic hum of a space heater in the corner accentuated the dead quiet of the hall.

Mark removed his snow-damp parka and walked straight toward the terminal workstation designated for digitized New York State historical archives.

He took a seat on the hard wooden chair, pulling the keyboard close. His right hand—following the violent spasm inside the Audi—had returned to a state of cold numbness. Clenching his fingers tightly, Mark launched the military records software covering the French and Indian War period (1754–1763).

As an academic, he deliberately deployed high-level scholarly search strings to construct a safe psychological distance from the mounting dread within: "Siege of Arak-Val Valley", "1758 Winter Campaign", "Royal American Regiment Logistics".

He told himself he was merely executing an objective historical research query, no different from the hundreds of papers he had compiled at Harvard. By reducing past atrocities to index codes and archived records, he hoped to quell the chaotic unraveling of his own perception.

After an hour of sifting through thousands of high-resolution scans of yellowed documents, the screen halted at a specific directory: [Field Journal of Captain Richard Vance – Commander of the Arak-Val Siege Garrison (1757–1760)].

The scan displayed dark brown parchment leaves filled with elegant, unyielding calligraphy in dark ink—the hallmark penmanship of an eighteenth-century British Royal officer.

Mark dragged the mouse, his gaze flinching as he read the opening pages.

Captain Richard Vance’s prose bore a composure and coldness that was thoroughly terrifying. The officer had logged the siege against the Arak-Na people with the purely clinical detachment of a military machine:

“12th of November, 1757... Temperature hath dropped beneath freezing. Scorched-earth operations proceed according to schedule. The advance element hath set fire to the western pine ridge and poisoned the primary stream feeding the valley. Blockade perimeters are fully secured. Not a single Arak-Na native shall escape this trap through three winters to come...”

Mark read each line, his chest tightening.

He was stunned by the absolute nonchalance of a man logging the systematic starvation of an entire people. In Captain Vance’s ledger, reducing hundreds of Arak-Na women, children, and elders to walking skeletons amidst the snow was a simple military equation—a sequence of supply ratios, blockade lines, and enemy decay rates.

This is the nature of warfare, Mark insisted to himself, striving to preserve the posture of a detached observer. What occurred in Arak-Val was a classic colonial genocide. There are no supernatural elements or curses here.

Yet as Mark turned to the journal entries from the winter of 1758, the icy composure of Captain Vance’s handwriting began to fracture.

The strokes lost their initial precision. The ink lines became heavy, rushed, and pressed deep into the parchment, reflecting a quiet psychological tremor taking root within the British camp.

“4th of December, 1758... Patrol Unit No. 1, comprising 8 enlisted men under Sergeant Miller, ventured into the valley to gather intelligence. Over 48 hours have elapsed with no return. No gunfire reported; no smoke signals. The fog within the valley floor is exceedingly thick...”

“18th of December, 1758... Contact lost with Patrol Unit No. 2. Search parties dispatched found only long drag marks in the snow leading toward the dark stone vault beneath the mountain. Not a single drop of blood upon the snow. No signs of struggle. As though the very earth of Arak-Val had opened its maw to swallow them whole...”

The passage that followed caused the hand holding Mark’s mouse to freeze solid.

Captain Vance wrote with a panicked cadence, dripping with primal revulsion:

“The most bizarre and unnatural aspect is not the disappearance of the men... But rather, with every patrol that fails to return, on the very next night, a haze rises from the valley basin bearing a sweet, heavy reek, suffocating as rendered fat. The vapor drifts over our ramparts upon the mountain wind, leaving a slick, sweet film on the back of every soldier's throat that induces violent vomiting throughout the camp...”

Mark leaned back hard against the wooden chair.

The blood drained completely from his face. A sweet, heavy reek... A rising haze of rendered fat... Every detail in Captain Vance’s two-hundred-year-old journal aligned with terrifying precision against the scent presently saturating Great-Grandfather Kaelen’s cabin.

He hastily skipped to the final page of the field file.

Here, Captain Vance had compiled a detailed roster of missing personnel to be dispatched to the High Command in London. The table was ruled in faded red ink, listing full names, ranks, and service numbers:

Mark pulled out his personal notebook, using his marker to transcribe each name and service number of those thirty-two men.

As his finger inked the final number—32—a loud, piercing ring hummed inside Mark's ears, like a high-voltage current surging across both temples.

Thirty-two soldiers.

Four patrol units.

That figure of thirty-two matched the number circled in red, alongside the annotation "4 parties" in Arak-Na glyphs, inside Kaelen's salt and beeswax expense ledger found the previous day.

The fluorescent lights overhead flickered erratically—click... click...—casting a cold, blue-gray glow across the room. The faint, rhythmic clatter of the librarian’s keyboard in the distance struck Mark’s eardrums like the countdown to an execution.

The thirty-two-year-old psychiatrist's reason made one last desperate attempt to claw its way back.

"No... This is merely a numerical coincidence," Mark muttered under his breath, his glasses fogging from a thin layer of cold sweat. "These thirty-two soldiers deserted. Yes, under severe campaign stress, they fled. Or they froze to death in the snowstorms and were scavenged by wild beasts... The drag marks were simply men slipping down the rocky gorge."

He rapidly jotted down logical hypotheses across the notepad, attempting to cross out every link connecting the records to the subterranean kitchen beneath Kaelen’s cabin.

Yet every logical bridge he constructed was crushed by the cold, unyielding number 32 written in both ledgers. This alignment had breached the realm of statistical probability—it was an ancestral chain wrapping tightly around his throat, dragging him down into the reality before him.

"Son?"

A raspy voice spoke right beside Mark’s ear, making him jump violently, nearly dropping his marker onto the floorboards.

The elderly librarian stood beside his desk. Her aged eyes narrowed behind her spectacles, staring intently at the Arak-Val transcriptions and the number 32 displayed on the monitor screen.

"Ma'am... can I help you?" Mark asked hastily, closing his notebook with trembling hands.

The old woman let out a soft sigh, the scent of dried chamomile lingering in the air between them. "I've watched you sit here sifting through those files for three hours straight. Are you... researching what happened in the Arak-Val valley?"

Mark paused for a moment before giving a slow nod.

The librarian shook her head, the lines on her face deepening into a somber contour. "Over the years, a few folks from out of town have come here, pulling up those exact scans of the British military logs..."

"Who were they?" Mark asked urgently.

The old woman turned her back, walking slowly toward her desk, leaving behind a casual statement that chilled him to the bone:

"They all carried the surname Kaelen... And not one of them ever returned to this library a second time."

Mark sat motionless in the quiet of the archive.

Slowly, he scrolled his mouse down to the final entry of Captain Richard Vance’s 1758 field journal. The handwriting here was faint, blurred as if scribbled during a frantic retreat before the British garrison abandoned their fort:

“We have lost all contact with four patrol units... A total of thirty-two souls vanished without a trace amidst this brutal winter. Not a scrap of armor, not a drop of blood, not a single cry for help. It is as though the valley of Arak-Val is not merely a stretch of land... but a living entity, silently swallowing men one by one to feed its own bloodline.”