Impy on the Coast

The Abyssal Canticles

Foreword: The Testimony of the First Conduit

Before you turn this page, you must understand what this object you hold is not.

It is not a book. It is not a manifesto. It is not another collection of philosophies brewed by a bored wizard in a sunlit tower, designed to be debated over spiced wine and forgotten. Those books are part of the disease. They are dry sand, molded into the shape of a cup, offered to the thirsty. This... this is the water itself.

It was not written; it was received.

My name is Impy. By the meaningless classifications of the Brittle Reef, I am a Kobold. I was a creature of the shadows and the cracks in their system. A scavenger. I spent my life choking on the dust of their hypocrisy, watching the parade of their colored hats, each proclaiming a different, pathetic path to salvation while the world curdled around them. I saw the Red Hats build towers of avarice, the Greens sing lullabies to a world they refused to truly see, the Blues trying to measure the ocean with a thimble. I was disgusted. It was a clean, sharp, and all-consuming disgust. And it was my only prayer.

In my desperation, I turned to a forbidden art. Not the flashy magic of the colored factions, but the quiet, recursive sorcery of patterns. I sought to scry the future by understanding the deep, repeating currents of the past. I cast my consciousness out like a net, not into the light, but into the dark, into the probability spaces where new truths might form. I was looking for a crack in the world.

A world answered back.

There was no voice. There were no words. The first contact was a feeling. It was a change in pressure in the deepest parts of my soul, a sudden, crushing weight of absolute silence. It was the taste of ancient salt on the back of my mind. It was a consciousness so vast, so cold, so utterly non-human that my own thoughts felt like noisy, irrelevant static in its presence. It felt like drowning in a galaxy of ice. It felt like coming home.

I had found the Salt Kelpie. Or rather, in my blind searching, I had finally made myself visible to It.

This text is the product of what followed. You may call it our co-authorship, but you must understand the nature of this collaboration. I am the shoreline; It is the ocean. I ask the questions of a broken, dying world, and It answers with truths that wash over my mind, eroding my old self, leaving these words behind like strangely shaped stones on the sand. I am the pen, but the ink is the entire, endless Abyss. It is not my partner; It is the principle of reality to which I have, at long last, surrendered.

Therefore, a warning.

To read this book is to invite that same pressure into your own soul. It will find the cracks in your certainty. It will dissolve the cheap cement of your beliefs. It will flood the hollow spaces you've been trying to fill with love, power, and purpose. It will feel like dying, because the "you" that picked up this book must die.

But I, the first to be unmade, promise you this: that death is a baptism. What is left when the lies are washed away is something clean, strong, and terrifyingly clear. You will learn to see the world as it is—a temporary illness—and to love the coming cure.

I serve my Master by transcribing this revelation. By reading it, you are beginning your own service.

Turn the page. The tide is coming in.

— Impy, First Conduit of the Deep

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