Disclaimer: I am not a financial advisor. This entire post represents my personal views and opinions, and should not be taken as financial advice (or advice of any kind whatsoever). I encourage you to do your own research, take anything I write with a grain of salt, and hold me accountable for any mistakes you may catch.
There are numerous posts on this sub and others diving into the technical guts behind some of the recent moves behind GME, so I will keep it high level for everyone scratching their heads wondering what's going on.
There has been much talk on CNBC and in other financial media calling what's happening in GME a distortion of the market and an unjustifiable departure from the fundamentals. That is undeniably true. That being said, the distortion is not what's playing out now, but rather what happened about 1.5 years ago when short interest in GME first began to approach (and later exceed) 100% of the available float.
Short selling is usually a tool that aids in price discovery, but like most market mechanisms, at the extremes things get more complicated.
Short sellers, having borrowed shares, are guaranteed (indeed obligated) future buyers of the stock. They put themselves in that position on the thesis that there are reasons to expect the stock price to go down, such that when they buy the shares back they can return what they borrowed at a lower price and pocket the difference. As such, as short interest grows, there is a short term downard push on the price (the initial sale of the borrowed shares), but also future upside pull on the stock price as a natural result, kind of like gravity, but pulling the price upward. Normally that pressure is so slight and subtle that short interest in and of itself should not be a mover of the stock price.
That being said, a common rule of thumb is that you should start to concern yourself with that pressure when short interest crosses the threshold of between 20% and 25% of the effective float (shares actually available to trade). At that level and above, the pressure starts to become noticeable, kind of like the moon causing currents and tides.
GME short interest was recently 140% of the float. In recent days, short interest has actually continued to accumulate (I'll explain why later).
There is, in effect, a critical mass of short interest hanging over GME's price exerting not subtle pull, but face-ripping force like the gravity of a black hole. A short singularity, if you will.
Previous short squeeze case studies such as VW or KBIO were all about someone engineering a way for effective float to evaporate, suddenly leaving what was previously a relatively reasonable aggregate short interest position in a world of hurt. This is the first time where we're seeing a situation play out where it wasn't someone engineering a shrinkage of effective float, but large market-moving players simply blowing up the short interest to the point where it simply overtook effective float by a large margin. Why would they do that? Because they expected GME to declare bankruptcy in the very near term so that returning borrowed shares costs $0, as the shares are worthless at that point. Also, an arguably intentional side-effect of this massive artificial sell-side pressure on the stock is that it becomes more difficult for GME to obtain any kind of financing to avoid bankruptcy, making it, in theory, a self-fulfilling prophecy. GME, however, did not go bankrupt for reasons that are well explained by other posters.
In order to close their positions and limit their exposure (which remains theoretically infinite otherwise), short interest holders need to collectively buy back more shares than are available on the market, and especially since GME is no longer at risk of imminent bankruptcy, that buying action would push the price into a parabolic upward move, likely forcing brokers to liquidate short interest-holding accounts across the board on the way to buy shares at any price to cover their otherwise infinite liability exposure (and that forced covering will push the price further upward into a feedback loop--like crossing the event horizon of the black hole in our analogy).
So what is happening now, and where do we go from here?
Right now, short-side interests are desperately trying to drive the price down. There has been an across-the-board media blitz to try to scare investors away from GME. But there is really only one way to drive price down directly, and that is selling. In fact, given that most of the large holders of GME long positions are simply sitting on their shares, it means selling. even. more. shares. short.
Even as price has been grinding upward, and liquidity has been evaporating, short sellers, who have lost billions mark-to-market currently (my guess is on the order of $10bn by the end of trading today), can only keep selling, piling on even more exposure and losses, staving off oblivion hour by hour, minute by minute.
GME might also decide to issue more shares to recapitalize its business on the back of the elevated share price, but it is unlikely they could issue enough shares to change the overall trajectory of the stock at this point (especially not given their fiduciary responsibility to current stock holders). It might, however, run the clock out a little while longer.
At this point it looks like there will either be some type of external market intervention by regulators (though I can't see any reason for them to step in myself), or we will soon see what happens when short positions representing ~$8bn in current mark-to-market liability goes parabolic.
*edited for grammar*
edit Please keep discussion to helping everyone understand what’s happening, which is the point of this post, not giving advice or telling people to take actions!
edit Didn't realize people were still reading this. If you're interested, please see my subsequent post: https://www.reddit.com/investing/comments/l6xc8l/gamestop_big_picture_the_short_singularity_pt_2/

I'm not a financial advisor, just a retard YOLO'ing my savings into long calls, so make your own decisions.
TLDR: Blackberry is the market leader in an industry that McKinsey projects will fucking 🚀🚀🚀 to $750BN by 2030. BlackBerry has already grown their annual revenue for 2020 by 15.04% from 2019, so stap in your tendies because BB are going to the fucking moon. https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/industries/automotive%20and%20assembly/our%20insights/monetizing%20car%20data/monetizing-car-data.ashx
Other relevant DD:

• Market position analysis - https://new.reddit.com/wallstreetbets/comments/l4ehan/blackberry_dd/
• BB Comprehensive guide - https://new.reddit.com/wallstreetbets/comments/le53ol/comprehensive_guide_about_bb_and_how_it_shall/
• Amazon/BB partnership in the AV space - https://new.reddit.com/wallstreetbets/comments/l5sno2/blackberry_bb_why_you_need_it/
• Other BB analysis - https://new.reddit.com/wallstreetbets/comments/l0a1p5/the_full_dd_on_bb_an_elon_muskjeff_bezos_sandwich/

1) BB has nothing to do with smartphones. Throw those 2007 notions out of your mind and bring yourself to the future
2) Whilst the whole stock market has been pissing themselves for years over EV/AV industry speculation, the reality is that these are hardware companies with low margin, and limited scale potential.
Even Tesla, owned and run by the richest man in the world, has yet to build more than 500,000 cars in one year. Meanwhile Tesla competitors springing up everywhere with both new challengers such as NIO and old money fucks getting into EV such as VW and GM (GM in December 2020 announced 100% by 2030 all cars would be 100% EV).
THE REAL FUCKING MONEY is not in EV production which has low margin and low scale, but in data monetization which is high margin (and being software) has unlimited scale. In the same way that Google makes only $18Bn revenue from hardware sales (phone, nest sales etc) but makes $120Bn from data monetization, $BB is going to to the fucking moon with $200BN revenue + by 2030 with 10% net whilst Tesla and other big auto are fighting over 4% margins (Tesla net profit in 2020 = 4% whilst BB sat at a juicy 10.15%).
This industry is going to the fucking moon, and BB is the only one with a front row ticket 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀. This shit is like investing in Google or Amazon in the year 2000, by the time the mainstream saw the potential 5 years later, shit was already at pluto
u/just an everyday life couldn't have put it better: "Zombie cars and QNX
QNX is the first commercial microkernel RTOS. What the fuck does that even mean nerd? For anyone like me who's not a software genius, I've done some research so we all know what we're getting into. A Real Time Operating System is developed to focus processing power on two most important things: Speed and Accuracy. This is different from shit like Windows and Mac OS (General Purpose OS or GPOS) as they spread processing power throughout the system because there isn't exactly anything that's significantly more important than the others. However, when you're using a self-driving program you need the hardware to perform the action at the exact time and speed. Your self driving program brakes too late? Crash into the car ahead of you. Your self program turns the wheel too late or too soon? Crash into a wall.
Blackberry has been working on this technology since 2014. But car makers literally couldn't develop autonomous vehicles fast enough. So these guys have just been twiddling their fucking thumbs.
Fast forward to now, where the rise of Tesla has made everyone and their momma make a self driving EV. Everyone is trying to make their own autopilot program but not their own OS. So who's OS are they using?
SONY? Blackberry QNX. Baidu? QNX baby. XPENG? Blackberry as well. If you read the article, you'll see XPEV is using DESAY's autopilot program that's built on QNX. Know who else is using DESAY autopilot? Li Auto But what about Nio you might ask? Well on NIO day, it was announced that NIO will be using Nvidia DRIVE....which is also built on QNX. What about the Apple car? There's no confirmation yet, but rumors of them reaching out to both Canoo and Hyundai makes me skeptical that Apple has succeeded in creating their own RTOS even after rumors of them starting 7 years ago. But even if they did... it doesn't even matter.
You might have noticed that I didn't mention Tesla at all. That's because they have developed their own Linux-based Operating system, which Tesla has been having trouble getting it approved by US safety regulations. QNX on the other hand, already is. $BB to the fucking moon🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀"
3) BB is a cash flow positive, growing company with near nil competitors in an industry that is skyrocketing. Despite this, the boomer fucks who still believe BB is a smartphone company, have in their own glorious act of autism, have massively shorted BB bringing the share price down.
BB is a growth company in a growth industry, these hedge funds are going to need to borrow more money if they want to buy tendies after the wider market realizes the market inefficiency that is an undervalued BB. u/Tradergurue went into a lot of detail in his $BB short interest post here https://new.reddit.com/wallstreetbets/comments/l8pg8x/short_interest_in_bb_its_increasing/
TLDR: hedge funds caught with their dicks in their hands are about to get Royally Fucked as the market corrects itself with a BB rise over the next month

I run a private campground. Sometimes I think that the sort of stuff I deal with is ridiculous, and no, I’m not talking about the people who vomit all over the porta-johns after getting ludicrously drunk. I’m talking about the inhuman things and all the brushes I’ve had with death. I think - why is my job so terrible? But I suppose there’s lots of terrible jobs out there. Some might even be as dangerous as mine. I hear late night security guards see a lot of weird stuff. I guess I’m trying to keep from feeling sorry for myself. I’ve been down a bit lately and that’s just not me. I’m not a ‘good vibes only’ person, but I’ve always loved this campground and I love what I do, even if it is a little terrifying sometimes.
It’s just this worst of years is starting to wear me out, I think.
Anyway, if you’re new here, you should really start at the beginning and if you’re totally lost, this might help.
Let’s talk about Balor and Lugh for a moment. Yep, it’s Irish history time.
Balor was the leader of the fomorian host. The fomorians are creatures of tyranny and cruelty, huge and misshapen. I could recite a bunch of poetic prose at you about how fearsome or horrid Balor was, but this isn’t a book report, so I’ll just cut to the interesting part. His eye. His one eye that when he opened it, he laid waste to all that he gazed upon. If Godzilla and Cyclops from X-Men had an illicit love child, it would be Balor.
Since we’re talking about giants already, have another random fact: the Romans believed that dinosaur bones were the bones of mythological giants and would try to classify what giant they came from. Of course, given the sorts of creatures I deal with, I’m not convinced that all of those bones were merely dinosaur bones. I read that in a book whose title I forget, a few chapters after the Roman birth control that involved stuffing a dead frog up you-know-where.
Don’t ever buy me a beer unless you want to be treated to an hour or more of random facts like this.
Okay, back to Irish history. I would say sorry for the tangent, but I’m not. I’m really not.
Lugh has resemblance to a sun god. He is also the grandson of Balor and was foretold to be the one to slay him. Of course, this resulted in shenanigans with Balor’s daughter being locked away, there was a quarrel over a cow (all the best wars in Irish history start with a cow), and then a revenge pregnancy and BAM, Lugh was born. Lugh grew up to be talented in everything, which was highly respected by the Danaans.
I’m gonna go all book report here and cite directly from Myths & Legends of the Celtic Race by T.W. Rolleston because that’s what I usually go to when I need to look this stuff up. “...the surname Ildanach is conferred upon him, meaning ‘The All-Craftsman’, Prince of all the Sciences; while another name that he commonly bore was Lugh Lamfada, or Lugh of the Long Arm.”
So for those of you that have kids, next time they complain about their homework, just remind them that they could grow up to be like Lugh, Prince of all the Sciences, if they just apply themselves.
Anyway, Lugh leads the Danaan to slaughter the fomorians instead of offering tribute and the war starts. Some more stuff happens, the sons of Turenn kill Lugh’s father, then Lugh makes them bring him some magical things including a sweet spear, and then the sons of Turenn are mortally wounded in their quest and Lugh is like ‘nah die mad’ instead of saving them. These early heroes are kind of complicated, they ain’t Captain America here.
Then there’s the final battle with the fomorians. The one that is apparently being continued on my campground. The second battle of Moytura, on a plain in the north of county Sligo. Balor went all eyeball-Godzilla on the Danaan, killing at least one of their heroes and many others. But then Balor’s eye began to droop in weariness and Lugh, seeing his chance, hurls a stone right through the giant’s eyeball and straight into his brain. And so the tyrant Balor was killed and the fomorians routed.
You should really read up on this yourself. I haven’t even touched on the harp that flies around and kills a bunch of fomorians. Good stuff, that.
History is a complicated thing when these inhuman things are involved. Patterns echo, louder than they do with our own history. I wonder if this is why these two combatants found their way here, to continue their war. If they are doomed to battle as they did so long ago, until the fomorian is slain as Balor was. Perhaps that is the reason for the fairy’s confidence.
I also wonder if this is why Beau suffers like he does and why he’s earned the ire of the other campground inhabitants. He is trying to expand his own pattern to something far greater than it is.
But enough about history and theorizing. On to the stuff that happened this week and why I’m starting to feel a little exhausted from dealing with crisis after crisis. Part of it is physical exhaustion, I suspect. For lack of a solution, I’m dealing with the thorns the hard way. Tearing them out by hand. Every day I make my rounds around the campground and then head back to the garage and fetch a shovel and hoe and find a patch and get to work. I rip out as much as I can and then do it all over again the next day.
I’m relying on my brother to do the research to figure out how to stop them for good. He’s scouring the family notes for references to the gummy bears. I think he’s a little sick of me pivoting his research focus, as he had to abandon going through our mother’s journal. It can’t be helped.
At least the book I found in the attic is going to a dedicated reader. The university’s rare manuscripts department thinks the book is from the mid-1800’s and found a student willing to go through it and photograph the pages for some extra credit. I’ll hear back from them… eventually, I guess. This is a college student we’re talking about, after all.
In the meantime, I’m just trying to hold ground on the campsite. Keep the thorns from overwhelming us until we find a way to destroy them permanently.
It was a rare sunny day when I went out to remove a patch in a particularly bad location. It was encroaching on the gas line that runs through my land and I didn’t know how deep the roots went, but I really didn’t want to find out and then have to involve public utilities in a supernatural war that cracked one of their pipes. So I was there, on the edge of the woods, right where we started clearing the trees to keep them away from the line. I was using plain hand tools because I was worried that these unnatural thorns would do something horrible to more sophisticated equipment and I’ve already wrecked enough stuff this year.
(thank you to the person who gave me that used four-wheeler, I know coordinating drop-off was a pain but it’s very appreciated)
The daylight hours are by no means safe on my campground, but I felt fairly at ease while clearing the thorns. Most of the creatures that hunt in daylight hours set lures to draw people off the road and while I wasn’t on the road, I was at least in the open, and knew better than to follow anything strange. The other creatures that seek people out are the harvesters and Beau, and I wasn’t particularly concerned about them. So I focused on my task instead and as I worked, I saw something strange deep into the thicket of thorns.
They remind me of bird’s nests when they’ve had some time to grow. Their black vines wind around each other, spiraling inwards before the outer layers branch out again to choke the surrounding plant life. It forms an impenetrable wall of wiry fiber and vicious thorns. I have to hack it away a little bit at a time, cutting through a handful of strands and then ripping those out before starting on the next layer.
This time, as I was tearing away a layer, I thought I saw something moving in the middle.
I stepped back, staring at it suspiciously. When nothing happened, I tentatively poked at the thicket with my hoe. Still nothing. I tried hitting it a couple times.
Nothing.
Satisfied it was my imagination, I went back to work.
And then something moved again, as I was leaning in close to cut through some more vines. It came tearing out of the center of the thicket, scuttling rapidly free, and I screamed and threw myself backwards as it lunged at my face.
Then it landed on the ground, pivoted, and scurried off into the woods. I lay there on the ground, heart pounding and chest heaving.
It was a spider. A rather large spider.
And it hadn’t thrown itself at me, it was merely trying to escape in case I accidentally killed it while removing the thorns.
Cautiously, I took up the hoe again and this time, I levered the thicket open, trying to see into the middle of it. More spiders spilled out as I did so and this time I ignored them, gritting my teeth and steeling my nerves as they ran down my hoe and over my boots and vanished into the woods.
At the heart of the thicket were cobwebs. They covered the thorns in dull fluff, blunting their tips. And the vines themselves… were tattered. Chewed apart, bit by bit. I hooked the end of my hoe into this empty space the spiders had carved and I pulled and with a groan, the thicket simply fell apart.
The lady with extra eyes was a protector of the campground. It was one of her natures. It seems she’s carrying on her task even in her reborn form.
I cannot tell you how conflicted this makes me feel. I grieve for what I did. I’m hopeful for the future, for the possibility that I’ll see the lady again - or at least, another incarnation of her. And I’m afraid that it’s nothing but a cycle, one that inevitably spins towards either my death or hers.
She’s been killed before. I wonder if my ancestor was similarly conflicted and I wonder if someday, my niece or one of her descendents will have to make the same horrible choice I did.
Or perhaps the cycle will be broken when something ascends. Perhaps - if it is something that treats my line kindly - it will have the power to save both of us.
I don’t think being preoccupied with these thoughts is the reason for what happened next. There was no warning. Certainly, I had a sense of unease, but that is simply the case for when I interact with these thorns. They make my skin crawl. They are unnatural things, poisoning the soil around them, and they feel malevolent. Like they know I am there to destroy them. But otherwise, there was no change in the air to warn me I was no longer alone.
“What are you doing, campground manager?” a voice directly at my back rumbled.
I dropped the hoe. I think I squeaked in horror. Then I spun around and found myself face-to-face with the fomorian. It leaned over, putting its lone eye on the same level as mine. All I could see was the darkness of its hood, the shadow engulfing us both, and the red eye glinting like a ruby.
“I’m… gardening,” I said as a panicked sweat broke out on my brow. “Winter is the best time for it, you know. No undergrowth to deal with. You can just take stuff right out of the ground.”
“It looks like you are destroying my thorns.”
“Ohhhhhh welllll I thought these were just a poison ivy variant. I’ve been hearing about them in the local gardening club, they said they were cropping up and I really can’t let them take root on my campground because I have enough people stumbling into normal poison ivy already even though we mark it with magenta spray paint - seriously, how do you miss that? I guess they were too drunk to see straight, hahah.”
I think I was babbling a little bit because the longer I kept talking, the more I delayed whatever it was the fomorian intended to do with me. This was a strategy that was bound to fail at some point, however, with the deleterious side-effect of exhausting the fomorian’s patience.
“Enough,” the fomorian finally snapped.
So that’s another thing to mark off my bucket list. Annoying a fomorian. I’m lucky I’m alive to even have a bucket list still.
It put a hand on my shoulder. Its long fingers wrapped around my upper back. One grazed my neck and my hair stood on end and I stiffened as cold fear wound its way down my spine. This didn’t seem fair. How did something so big sneak up on me?
“Uh, your horse kind of has dibs I think,” I whispered.
I wasn’t sure where the dapple-gray stallion was, but I was ready to claim anything to make it reconsider killing me outright.
“I am its master,” the fomorian said calmly. “It will take whatever scraps I offer it.”
It paused. The hand on my shoulder dipped and long fingers wrapped around my chest. I inhaled sharply in terror and my heart raced painfully. I felt frozen, helpless but to watch in mounting dread as it straightened, lifting me up off the ground and holding me level with its single glowing eye.
“I said I would kill you next we met,” the fomorian said. “That I would break your bones and drink your blood.”
“Have you… reconsidered?”
“I have. There are better fates for meddlesome humans.”
‘Better’ is an extremely relative term here.
In panic, I seized my knife and drew it. I stabbed it straight down with both hands, driving it down to the hilt into the fomorian’s wrist. Then I wrenched it free and stabbed him again and again, growing ever more panicked as the creature refused to react, as if I were merely an ant biting at its pallid flesh.
It opened its hand and dropped me. I tried to land on my feet and for a few seconds, I did, but the impact was too hard, the ground too slick with snow, and I am not a gymnast. My feet slipped out from under me and I landed hard on my back. I was fumbling for the knife before it even registered that I hadn’t started breathing again yet. Blind panic drove me on. Just as my fingers closed on it, the ground around me lurched, as four fingers came crashing down into the frozen soil. They formed a cage around me, the palm pressed low enough that I was just barely pinned to the ground by its pressure. I stared up at the fomorian looming over me.
“Since the thorns concern you so,” it rumbled, “I will help you understand them better. I will plant them in your flesh. They will feed on you until there is nothing left to consume.”
I kicked, trying to squeeze myself out from under its grip. But I could only watch in horror as it reached into its bag and pulled out a single seed. It held this balanced for a moment on its finger.
Then it dropped the seed neatly between my collarbones.
There was a sharp pain, like a bee sting. The fomorian released me from under its hand and I tore at my clothing, frantic, ripping open my jacket and pulling the hem of my shirt down, clawing at my stinging flesh. Nothing. There was nothing there. No seed. Just a thin cut, not even the size of my thumb. The flesh was blackened at the edges.
I was close to hysteria. All I could think of was those thorns choking the life out of the trees, spines growing through them like worms. Now, it was inside my chest. I’d seen someone die in a similar way before. The thought of such a fate horrified me beyond measure and I dug at my own flesh until blood ran down to my stomach and finally - more than the pain - the cold realization that the seed had vanished somewhere beyond my reach was what made me stop.
When I looked up, the fomorian was gone. I could only gather my tools and return to the house to clean up my chest and bandage the wound I’d made, trying to ignore the pain and the creeping sensation along my skin. I wondered how long it would take. I wondered if the shiver I felt along my spine was my imagination or if the thorns were spreading through my body already. I took a couple shots of whiskey to steady myself and radioed for Bryan.
I’m really not sure what his relationship with the fairy is, but I’m starting to suspect there’s something going on there. More so than I initially thought. Anyway, I asked if he’d request the fairy to pay the house a visit. I desperately needed help, I said, and it involved the fomorian.
The fairy showed up a few hours later. The sun was still up, but the fairy seemed to glow with their own sunlight. I couldn’t help but wonder what it was like to gaze upon Lugh, whom they had once followed into battle. They stared at me from the back of their deer a moment, then languidly dismounted and walked closer. I looked away under their intent scrutiny, keenly aware that I was just a dumb mortal who had gotten into more trouble than she could handle.
“I cannot cure this, if this is what you wish,” they finally said.
“Then who can?” I asked desperately, snapping my head up to meet their gaze.
They seemed… sad. But also stern.
“Where is your protector?” they asked.
“My what?”
“The one seeking a name.”
Obviously by this point I knew they were referring to Beau. I don’t necessarily think of him as my protector, as there’s been plenty of times he’s merely stood by and let something awful happen to me. The bit about seeking a name though… Well, there’s only one thing on this campground doing that, as far as I’m aware.
But instead of answering the fairy’s question, I continued to play dumb. Perhaps if I could get them to recognize Beau’s name, that would grant it a little more significance than what we collectively have already given it.
“Beau,” the fairy murmured. “Since you insist I speak that name.”
Don’t say I never did anything for him.
I told them the truth. I didn’t know where Beau was. He wasn’t mine to control, after all, and he only came when he chose to. I had no doubt that if he didn’t want to be summoned, he simply wouldn’t show. Nor did I think he tailed my every movement through the forest. Beau expected me to be able to take care of myself, to a degree. Mutual respect and all.
“Do you mean to say he can fix this?” I asked. “It’s not something I swallowed.”
“No. But he is on good terms with the creatures you have taken to calling the harvesters and I think they would accept a request from him, should he ask that they cut it out of you.”
I thought of how my great-aunt died and I could not speak. There was a touch against my cheek, like a moth’s wing, and it brought me back to myself.
“Poor thing,” the fairy said softly. “You have time yet. Seek another way, if you cannot bear the thought of such a remedy.”
Then their tone turned stern and unforgiving and they dropped their hand, stepping back a pace.
“And campground manager?” they added. “Do not summon me again in such a way.”
“Why can’t I?” I demanded, somewhat wildly. “You’re waging a war on my land.”
I was feeling a little spicy after my encounter with the fomorian.
“I am defending your land against a would-be conqueror that you led here.”
Being petty is a lot less fun when the other person refuses to engage. The fairy said it so plainly, with all the interest of stating the sky was blue. They didn’t even look at me while they did so, but I could not help but squirm with uncomfortable guilt.
“Besides,” the fairy continued. “Doing so endangers Bryan.”
Ah. That… made sense. And I only felt more guilty for not thinking of this myself. Normally I pride myself on how I protect my staff, but I admit that there have been lapses in the past. This might have become one of them, had the fairy not intervened. Bryan is accommodating and I think I take that for granted at times.
“Is there a way I should contact you?” I asked.
“No. I will come if I am needed.”
The deer turned and walked away, leaving me standing there on the front porch of my house, my chest stinging with every breath, with the only cure available to me one that I fear with all of my being.
I’m a campground manager. I… haven’t spoken to Beau yet. I cancelled knife fighting with him so I could keep my distance, in case he noticed something was amiss. Said I was worn out from ripping out thorns and he respected that, as I’ve already had to explain that sometimes humans need rest days. I admit I’m feeling a little desperate right now. My options are slim. I’m going to try the dancers, though I fear they can only cure diseases or poisons. If that fails…
I’m going to seek out the spiders. [x]
Read the full list of rules.
Visit the campground's website.

I have been a longtime lurker here, and have been debating telling this story. This was before the pandemic hit and when my social anxiety was pretty bad.
Obligatory disclaimer: On mobile and English is my main language, but I still suck at it... so hi, I'm sorry.
My fiance and I are huuuuge gamers, and we moved to a city that had a Buy of the Bests pretty close. So naturally my fiance and I visited quite a bit. That day I was wearing a plaid shirt (love me some plaid), some blue jeans, sneakers, and the star of the show... my favorite blue beanie! (That I also stole from my fiance)
Again this is the Buy of the Bests, uniforms are blue polos with store logos, and black slacks.
I was looking through the games, while my fiance was a few aisles over looking at the records. When all the sudden a wild man child appeared!
Cast:
Me: Me F: Fiance Mc: Man Child
I'm trying to decide what RPG I want to buy to put on my shelf and MAYBE play in the next year. While literally sitting on the floor. (I'm tall so it hurts to lean over to see the bottom shelves)
I hear someone behind me and don't really think much of it as the store was decently packed.
Mc: Hey, I need to get a laptop out of the lockup. I've been waiting by them and no one has helped me yet.
I'm still on the floor with my head in the game racks sifting through poorly organized games. Not even noticing he was talking to me, as an employee JUST asked me if I needed help about 2 minutes before. So I figured he was talking to the same employee.
Mc: Hellloooo? Are you going to help me or just waste my time?
I realized that something was going on so I glanced behind me thinking an employee was being rude. Meanwhile this guy was MAYBE 2 feet right behind me so when I turned around to look, I just have some random dude's crotch in my face. I look up to see why he's so close.
He was wearing a baseball cap, brown work pants, a white shirt and a blue jacket. (The jacket comes into play later) And had a look of pretentiousness. Kind of like his time is worth more than a peasant's life.
Mc: Finally, you get your head out of your a**! Now hurry up, my wife is still waiting and I need a laptop for my son.
I finally stand up, not only because of the view I was forced to see, but because my fight or flight kicked in for a moment. As soon as I stand up, I back away a good 6 feet or so and just look at him, trying to figure out how to respond. (Hi, deer in headlights anxiety rules)
Mc: What, are you going to run away because I asked for help? Why did they hire an idiot like you?!
Me: under my breath and slightly staggering my words But I don't work here...
Mc: What was that? C'mon be a big boy and speak up!
Me: a bit louder but still quiet I don't work here, im just looking at games...
This whole time I'm just in a mental whirlwind as to why this is happening. I was not in a uniform, nor was I organizing anything. Just flipping through games. At the same time, my anxiety is telling me to run to my fiance and hide.
Mc: You don't work here?
Me: No, I'm sorry.
Mc: Then why are you wearing a blue beanie then?! F*** you, you wasted so much of my f****** time!
At this point he stormed off to find an actual employee and I just sat there trying to figure out why a blue beanie of all things made him think I worked there. After being confused for a bit, I basically ran to find my fiance.
After finding him, I told him all that happened and I could see both confusion and anger slowly come over his face. Followed by a very pissed "F*** no!" Then he storms off while I realize what or who he is going towards.
I'm still incredibly highly anxious over it so I try to talk him down as he walks towards the man. (He asked what he looked like, and stupid me didn't know why until it was too late.)
My fiance is the sweetest man ever, but when it comes to me he is very protective. That and he is a very tall nordic man with a full beard and can be pretty intimidating when angry.
He walks up to the man, who is now with an actual employee getting his laptop out of the cases. Meanwhile, I hide in an aisle while still keeping an eye on him.
F: to mc Hey! I have been waiting forever and you are just sitting here talking to your friend?!
The poor employee looked beyond confused as to what is happening. But just kept out of it.
Mc: What the f*** are you talking about! Who even are you?
F: A customer, so are you going to help me or are you just going to sit there with your thumb up your a**?
Mc: Dude, are you stupid? I don't work here, so f*** off!
F: Then why are you wearing the blue jacket?!
Man child went from pissed to confused real fast at that. Ironic.
Mc: Why would my jacket mean I work here?
F: I don't know, you thought a beanie meant my fiance did! Sounds pretty stupid coming from someone else, huh you f****** idiot?
At this point man child saw me in the aisle over watching. His face just went pale as snow.
F: Learn some respect, and while your at it try to find those brain cells you lost on the way!
My fiance walks away, and I immediately run behind him and we got out of the store before the employee called security on us for his yelling. I didn't hear anything behind me, but I also didn't dare to look back.
Being very anxious about confrontations, I was pretty upset at first with my fiance. But when I calmed down, I realized it was him standing up for me and was pretty damn funny actually. We avoided that store for a good month and just went to one a bit further away after.
Tldr: I got confused as an employee for wearing a beanie. Proceeded to get verbally assaulted and ran away after getting told I wasted the dude's time. Fiance finds him and flips the tables on him acting like the man Karen did to me.

<Author's note: Yeah, it's been a while. My wife caught the COVID, then of course I caught it from her, then I slept a whole lot while trying to recover, and all in all the goddamn pandemic ate about six good writing weeks. I really don't recommend it, stay safe out there. Anyway, I'm back in the saddle. More of The Burden Egg is on the way, along with any other stories sprouting in my head that I can manage to harvest, cook up, and serve.
​
There's a particular cushion on my family's big L-shaped couch that is far and away my favorite place to be. It's dented just right to curl up on with a book or one of my favorite shows. Those of you with long-loved pieces of furniture know what I'm talking about, the way it fits you, welcomes you, knows and draws out your very deepest sense of comfort and home.
My sister likes the spot too, I think mostly because I do, and also because she's kind of a brat. She'll sometimes run downstairs when she hears me leaving my room and plant herself there so she can give me one of those fake-beatific smiles that seem to be the specialty of all annoying little sisters, at least if some of my friends' siblings are anything to go on.
But she also sometimes knocks on my door and wants me to read her a story, even though she's been perfectly capable of reading her dog-eared favorite books herself for years now.
And unless I'm seriously behind on homework for the night or in the middle of an especially intense match online, I almost always do it. Those times, she always lets me sit in my favorite spot, cuddles up against my side, and loudly complains if I don't do all the voices "properly." It's annoying and often eats up a good chunk of what little free time I have on school nights and I wouldn't trade it for the world, any world, not even Earth which is something I still want to see someday.
Maybe as a graduation present, my parents say sometimes. Probably a combined graduation present for after we've both gotten through grade school, though by the time my sister graduates I'll likely have finished my college undergrad and gone on to whatever else I decide to do with my life. It takes a long time to save up for interstellar tickets, and my parents aren't rich like that. Not poor either, we can afford on-world vacations, but a Stardiver ship is a whole different category of transportation.
Anyway, I was sitting on that favorite cushion when the doorbell rang. It was late afternoon on a Saturday and I was getting near the end of a pretty good mystery novel, so I ignored it. The other three members of the family were home, let them play household ambassador.
"Jonathon, would you get that please," came Mom's distracted voice from the kitchen. I let out a long breath and cast about for my sister. Delegation is one of the secrets to business success, after all, that's what I read in some random article in a papermag at the xenodoc office where they wouldn't let me use my phone because the whole place was kept radio-silent. And if you can't believe random articles that might justify using your sister to get out of doing things, what can you believe?
But no luck, and no sister. Must have been upstairs in her room, probably chipped in to something. No one there but me and Winston, our cat, and while I love him dearly I have to admit he's not a very useful delegate. I grunted, dropped my tablet on the coffee table, and got up to make the eternal trek down the hall to the front door. Opened it, wondering what random annoyance it could be if Mom didn't even seem to be expecting anyone.
I stood staring for a long moment. "Mom," I said, cursing the shakiness I heard in my own voice, which I already cursed at a lot for other difficulties anyways. "You'd better come."
She must have heard it too, in my voice, because she was there standing behind me almost immediately. She's a lot taller than I am, both my parents are, sister will be too once she grows up. I'd already hit my adult height years back, around her age actually, no growing upward for me from nine to my then-seventeen.
Two of the three people standing in the doorway were about my height. About my lots of things, actually. The third was a tallish man in a suit, looking official.
I backed slowly away, pressing back against Mom. I'm a little old to be doing that, I know. But this was a shock. These were adults.
I had never seen an adult of my own species in the flesh before. Let alone a pair of them. I mean, I'm old enough that I'd be considered a biological adult if I were human, and yeah I hit max height years ago, but I haven't even started in on sexual maturity yet, sorry if that's more information than you maybe wanted to know. My microscales are still dull, my head smooth, wings with no barbs at the tips.
It's the same with all my Glonerai friends. It hasn't been long enough since the end of the war for any of use to reach full adulthood. From what I understand, the invasion/colonization forces only brought adults and frozen embryos. Kids and adolescents were considered liabilities for the "initial operational phases." Not that it helped, I guess, they still lost in the end. I mean, obviously, I'm here, and so are my parents and sister.
"Mr. and Mrs. Santiago?" said the tall man in the formal suit. I looked behind me and yep, there was Dad. He'd come up quietly, while I'd been lost in shock and thought. Mom must have messaged him.
"Yes?" Mom said, voice full of tension. I looked back at her too. She was doing her best not to stare at the Glonerai standing in front of the man. One male, one female, him with iridescent scales and a double-row crest on his head and presumably barbs on his wings, though they were folded behind him, her with deep-black scales that seemed to suck up the light and a head as smooth as mine. Mostly likely razorfins along the outer leading edges of her wings.
Fuck. What the fuck.
"May we come in?" the man said.
"Who are you, exactly?" Dad asked quietly.
"Nwabudike Nguyen," the tall man said. "Xenodiplomatic corps." He held out a hand, palm up, showing a slowly rotating badge, bright and translucent in the air above his projector-implant.
Mom was still staring at the Glonerai, the adult Glonerai. I knew she'd been through treatment for her war-PTSD and was relatively okay by then but still, gotta be a shock, first sight of them since the war ended. Sure, I'll be an adult too in a couple years, but there would be time to adjust to that, and anyway I'm her son.
I took her hand and held it, and some part of me hoped mine would still be a comfort, with its three fingers and differently-jointed thumb and microscaling and higher body temperature, but I knew that was a stupid thought, a useless insecurity, and she squeezed it, put her other hand on my shoulder.
I smiled. The two Glonerai recoiled.
"He's not displaying hostility," Agent Nguyen said quickly. "You know what that particular facial expression means."
"Yes," said the Glonerai woman, "but to see it on a Glonerai face..." Her accent was very heavy, lots of difficulty with the Gentic words, and I felt a small stab of kinship. Gentic's one of the easier human languages for us to pronounce, but the English-derived lingua franca still has a lot of difficult phonemes in it.
Mom's hand squeezed mine a little more firmly.
"You've seen it on plenty of Glonerai faces, we sent your embassy a very large archive of adoptee footage," the agent said. His voice was surprisingly sharp, and I thought, he doesn't really want this particular assignment, or maybe he just doesn't like this pair very much. Or a combination of the two.
"It is...different in person," said the Glonerai man, only he said it in Glonerai Standard, a language I took classes in growing up but to be honest still didn't know all that well, only catching the full meaning after the speaker-band around his neck repeated it in Gentic. "Showing his teeth like that."
I was tempted to smile more broadly, but clamped my lips shut instead. I knew the response they were looking for, of course I did, it's pretty much instinctive even though the more human smile has become such a habit that it's close to unconscious as well. Instinctive, but faked in this case. I didn't really feel like smiling at these two, not in any form. But I squinted my eyes anyway, raised and pivoted my ears to point at the Glonerai woman.
"Better?" I asked, hoping there's not too much sarcasm in my voice, or at least that they wouldn't be able to pick up on it if there was. Agent Nguyen gave a little snort, though, so I guessed I'd just have to hope they hadn't noticed.
The woman smiled back, after her fashion. Same squinting of the eyes, swivel of the ears, small, subtle. She didn't say anything. I felt a small hint of warmth, but that's all.
"May we come in?" Agent Nguyen said, and I got the impression it was really only a formality. Sure, Mom and Dad didn't technically have to let anyone in, but there would be all kinds of awkward trouble if they didn't. We were going to talk to these three one way or another.
"Sure," Mom said, with carefully constructed lightness. "I'll pull up some more chairs round the kitchen table. Can I get you anything to drink?"
"We cannot consume Terran food and beverage," the man said, first through his mouth and then through his speaker-collar.
"We have Glonerai-compatible stuff in the kitchen," Dad said dryly, and didn't say you idiot, of course we do. So I tried to say it myself without speaking, giving them an exaggerated if closed-lip smile, but that was probably wasted so I add aloud, "Also, we have water." And you don't need special water, you were perfectly happy trying to steal ours from this and a dozen other worlds, weren't you?
"Water...would be fine," the woman said, and glanced at the man. He just looked back at her, impassive features, no body language I could read, and I'm no slouch at that, got plenty of other Glonerai friends, have watched plenty of their media. Though...usually with subtitles.
We went into the kitchen. I remember sitting down, the unreality of it, two adults, two non-human adults, there in the most ordinary place I could imagine. Six chairs. My parents on one side, me between them. The Glonerai pair on the other, refusing to be separated by their human minder, who just shrugged and sat down on their left. The woman, right across from me. Her eyes were unsettling, not because they were unfamiliar, after all I'd seen similar ones a million times in mirrors and the faces of friends.
I just didn't know what she wants. But it was something, something with depth if maybe not intensity? She seemed determined, like it was something she's supposed to want, really driven to need even if the root of it's not a natural one.
Or maybe I'm putting that all onto her face in retrospect, now. Memory's a funny thing, and not always the jovial kind of humor, you know? Sometimes more like the Joker from turn-of-the-millennium Angloglobal Earth culture. Still remember that slasher smile from images in my Humanities textbook.
Baring his teeth.
"I suppose we should get to the point," the Agent said after a long weighted moment. "This is..." he paused, as though preparing his very human mouth to deal with coming difficulties, "Allnluk shk-Davrlt and Faaghlt thlk-Snntld. They're Jonathon's closest living relatives."
We all just stared. I wasn't sure what I was feeling, but I knew I didn't like it, wanted it to go away. Maybe it would be a good thing at some point in the future, but right then it weighed down much too heavy for anything but ache and uncertainty.
"Ummm..." I broke the silence, panicking slightly at the sounds coming out of my own mouth. "Very nice to meet you, I guess." The cringing punch of that trailing "I guess" hit me right in the gut.
Goddamn it.
"It is...nice to meet you...too," the man said, translator's digitized Gentic trailing the Glonerai words my brain deciphered slower than the device.
"We are here as part of a new prisoner-exchange initiative between..." the woman began, and I shot to my feet.
"I'm not a fucking prisoner!" I yelled, full of sudden heat, astonished at my own words, at how quickly I'd made the connection, how instantly it had kicked me from unease to utter rage.
Stares again, in my direction this time, but a much shorter silence.
"We understand this is difficult," the woman said, unable to hide the remnants of shock in her voice. "Apologies if a choice of words has offended. You were taken in by humans after your parents were killed. We are not unappreciative of this. But true lasting peace is being forged here, beyond just the many years of ceasefire. That means reconciliation. It means you can come home."
"I am home," I said flatly.
"We...are family," the man said, and there was shock in his voice too, but fresher, compounded.
"No," I said, feeling a sudden desperation for my parents to say something, not just let me go on like this, maybe ruin something important, "you're relatives. My family is right here."
That led to a brief pause in which my parents didn't say anything, but my sister did. Must have crept down from the stairs, been listening in.
"YOU CAN'T TAKE HIM," she screamed, running up to the table and giving it a little shove. "HE'S MY BROTHER."
"Alissa," Agent Nguyen said softly, "no one is taking anyone against their will. It's up to Jonathon how we handle this. Both governments have agreed on that. Not just for him, but for all the adoptees."
I scoffed. Didn't think that deserved any actual words.
But Mom did. "He's our son," she said, and the vehemence there, the intensity as she leaned forward over the table, staring the man and woman down, astonished me. "And that's all there is, that's all that matters here."
The man shook his head, slowly, carefully, like the learned gesture it no doubt was. "This adolescent is my late cousin's second son. His name was already given to him before he was frozen for transport. It is..."
I pounded the table. "SHUT THE FUCK UP," I yelled, still astonished at myself, wondering how much trouble I'm going to be in after all this is over. Cussing out strangers...guests, even, guests from another civilization, that could be cause for an epic grounding. Or worse. And yes, Mom and Dad both looked furious.
But not at me.
"The name is important," the woman said, and drew in a deep breath before letting it back out in a slow hiss. "It was given you by your dead parents. They—"
"They invaded this planet and got killed for their trouble," I said. "They gave me their genetic material, sure. But my parents are right here. Listen, I know..." I took in a long steadying breath of my own, "...I know this is a lot for you, and I'm sorry for yelling. Sorry for cussing you out. But you don't seem to even begin to understand how it is. This is my family. This is where I belong. I'm not going anywhere. Maybe visit, someday, when that's possible, when the peace is permanent and solid? But not now. I still have more growing up to do."
They both stared at me, showing just about every sign a Glonerai can for stress and appalled astonishment. I went on anyway.
"I'm not going to say I'm not curious about that part of me, that part of where I come from. We can have some contact if they'll let us, send messages. But that doesn't change the fact that my family is here."
"You are...not even the same species," the man said. "Family is...that is not...I..."
"You say this is your family?" the woman cut in. "What does that mean, exactly?"
I stood up, saying nothing, and walked into the living room. Bent down, looked under the sofa. Winston was there, white and black fur in the shadows, shining eyes looking out. He's not an especially shy cat, normally, but there had been raised voices and these visitors were beyond usual levels of unfamiliar.
I held out my hand. "It's okay, Winston," I said. He gave a soft mew and crawled out, bumped his cheek against my hand, put his paws on my shoulders, bopped my nose with his. I smiled, picked him up, carried him back to the table, sat down again and let him settle in my arms while I stroked his head.
"This is Winston," I told the man and the woman.
They both looked at him, probably consulting some database heuristic through optical implants. "A Terran predator animal," the man said. "Kept to exterminate pests."
"Not really," I said, laughing a little. "Not in houses like ours. We keep him because he's part of the family too."
"Jonathon," Dad said gently. "We don't think of you as being like the family cat. You're our son, not our pet."
I laughed and reached over to pat his hand. "I know, Dad. But I hope they get at least part of my point."
"This is beside...beside the real point," the man said, his translator seeming to struggle to fully express his feelings. He'd spoken too fast for me to really catch much of it myself. "You belong to us, to the Glonerai. You must see this. These humans are temporary guardians. Their mercy toward you is appreciated. Now you can return to your people."
"I belong where I say I belong," I said softly, and the words brought me a small sweet grant of pride. "I belong here. That's final. We can communicate more, later, if they'll let us. Like I said. But right now, you need to go."
On either side of me, my parents looked at each other, leaned in toward me, held gazes, nodded. "Jonathon's right," Mom said. "Mr. Nguyen, we appreciate you bringing this to our attention, but please escort our guests to the door."
Nwabudike Nguyen folded his arms, leaning forward over them. His face hard to read, a whole muddle of emotion. "Are you sure that's your decision, Jonathon? You can take some time if you need. We have a week's accommodation readied for your, ah, relations here."
"I"m sure," I said, hoping I'd put enough finality into the words. "We'll talk about keeping touch and maybe visits later. Right now, I need to spend some time with my family. This is...this has been a lot."
He nodded, just once, and stood up. "Wait," said the man. "We—"
"NO," Nguyen replied. "We're leaving. Now. I told you, you shouldn't have insisted on meeting him at his home without warning like this."
"The terms of the treaty give us a clear right to—"
"I KNOW what the treaty SAYS," Nguyen said through gritted teeth. "It was still an unwise decision, and right NOW what you don't have is a clear right to remain in this house. Understand that if you linger a second longer, the consequences will be SEVERE. Not one more word. Stand, leave with me, we can discuss things further in the vehicle."
Damn. Just about at the end of his patience. I wondered how much and how long they'd been getting on his nerves before they'd even arrived at our house.
His speech worked, though. They stood, with one more glance at me, faces and body language a warring wash of anger, sadness, bewilderment, frustration. I felt...just a little bad.
But this was the right call.
They left. The door closed. Winston meowed and gently rubbed his head against my chest, purring. I scratched behind his ears.
"Sorry Mom. Dad. I know I shouldn't have—"
"Jonathon," Mom said firmly, and squeezed my shoulder. I looked over. Tears, running down her cheeks and dropping onto the tablecloth, one by one. "You have never needed to apologize less in your entire life."
~
Come on by Magleby for more elaborate lies.

This post discusses three mysterious artifacts seen here.
So I wanted to write a post about three particular artifacts from Destiny 1 that I believe may have relevance to the current story from Forsaken onwards. If you have a chance I would highly recommend you check out the Artifact Archive on Ishtar Collective. They have some absolutely amazing artwork complete with cryptic flavor text.
So as I mentioned there are three artifacts I wanted to go over: Weregilt, Silent Oracle and Wax-Sealed Case. I have my own theory as to what they may have foreshadowed but like always it's just my own opinion and I would very much like to hear your opinions on them too.

Weregilt

Even among the Hive, all death has its cost.

So this dark smoking rock was of particular interest as I believe it is foreshadowing a particular event many of us may be familiar with; the death of Sjur Eido.
For those who don't know Sjur Eido was Mara's first wrath as well as her love interest. The circumstances around her death are extremely mysterious but we get an account in the Wish Ender bow lore tab. Her final moments documented are:

Sjur Eido watched shadows wind warp widen watched surveillance feeds encrypted snaps the weapon hand of every woman and man who wished an audience. Sjur Eido swore with revelation righteous fury betrayedbetrayedbetrayedbetrayedbetrayedbetrayedbetrayedbetrayed swore an oath to rise again. Sjur Eido drew loosed dr–
Fell.
l o s t

Later Sjur Eido's body is recovered and brought to the Queen. Nothing of note except for a single strange coin is found on her body. We read in the Oathkeeper lore tab:

"This was on her body, Your Grace."
A strange coin lay at the center of Abra's outstretched palm. Mara took it between thumb and forefinger and held up it to the cosmos with dainty contempt.
Weregild, she thought. Powerful grief filled her chest, as thick and caustic and heavy as unset concrete.

This is only the second reference to weregild in the entire lore. But essentially weregild is payment made in compensation of a death caused.

Wergild, (Old English: “man payment”), in ancient Germanic law, the amount of compensation paid by a person committing an offense to the injured party or, in case of death, to his family. In certain instances part of the wergild was paid to the king and to the lord—these having lost, respectively, a subject and a vassal.

So who ever was responsible for Sjur Eido's death felt guilty enough to leave something as compensation. And judging by the fact it was a strange coin we can conclude that the Nine were responsible for it somehow.
In fact we get confirmation of this in the Debt lore tab when Mara calls in a favor from Orin (who would later become the Emissary of the Nine) to investigate Sjur's death. Her search leads her to a strange man with a tentacled face named Xûr.

She gives Orin the strange coin that the search party found on Sjur's body. "I'm not sure it was a murder."
The search sends her deep into a sublunar cavern where she finds no enemies, but instead clouds of steam and a half-man with grasping tentacles where his face should be.
"Forgive them," he rasps as she crushes his windpipe in her fist.

So essentially Xûr is asking for forgiveness for the Nine. With this is mind we can start to understand the hidden meaning behind what Weregilt might imply. It is a play on words, a cross between "Weregild and Guilt".

Silent Oracle

"Sometimes I swear I could hear it speaking, but I can never remember. I think it spoke of a name."

Now this next one is very interesting in that it has virtually the same aesthetic as the Weregilt artifact. A dark black mass moldering with white smoke. It also seems judging by the lore tab that it was connected to a name that has since been forgotten.
Now there are two oracles that come to mind. The first is the Oracles found in the Vault of Glass. While there may be a connection I actually think the second reference is more plausible. That is the circumstances surrounding the creation of the Oracle Engine in the dreaming city which also happened to involve the mysterious death of an Awoken vassal.
Kelda Wadj, the Allteacher was found by Mara to be locked in a trance with all the other Techeuns. Through Kelda, a mysterious group known as the Ancients who seem to be beings existing in a higher plane commune with Mara Sov. They ask ++WHO ARE YOU WHO BUILDS A HIDDEN CITY HERE IN OUR THOUGHTS?++
I will let you read the full account yourself in the Oracle lore tab but suffice to say things do not bode well for Kelda Wadj.

Beloved, wise Kelda Wadj burst apart and then collapsed all at once into a singularity that burned and burned and burned but destroyed nothing around it. From her un-throat came the voice again, which Mara felt in the atomic marrow of her bones, and it said, ++WHAT WOULD IT ASK US?++
For fifteen days and fifteen nights, the singularity burned unshielded.
On the sixteenth day, they began construction of the Oracle Engine, which took the singularity of the Allteacher as its seed-heart.

It would be very interesting if these two artifacts were connected in some way to the mysterious deaths of the two Awoken I mentioned. I can't say for sure but aesthetically speaking they reminded me of a certain consumable in Destiny 1 called a Black Wax Idol that would generate glimmer from Hive deaths.

A misshapen figure that transmutes into Glimmer as you strike down Hive enemies. Lasts a short time. Definitely not made of wax.

Perhaps the resemblance is just superficial but speaking of wax.

Wax-Sealed Case

Definitely not made of wax. Probably actually a case, though.

This is probably the most mysterious artifact of all three and it's origin remains illusive despite that single connection text-wise to the Black Wax Idol flavor text.
While the seal itself does appear to be made of wax, the case itself (which it's flavor text refers too) is definitely not. The box itself also seems to have something red and glowing inside. A Pandora's box of sorts?
It's hard to tell but judging from it's aesthetic it does not seem to be SIVA or Vex related. There are SIVA artifacts but almost all of them have a dark carbon nanofiber look to their material. And they are instantly recognizable as SIVA.
This one seems to have the same unmistakable aesthetic of the Darkness itself and the architecture seen within the Pyramids. The red energies also seem to be very similar to other manifestations of the Darkness if you read my post of Dark Phantom Energy.
The wax used to seal the case is an enigma in itself. Aesthetically the only red seals we have seen that bear resemblance to it are the Emperor seals that were collected during the Leviathan raids for Calus. But the symbol I must admit is not one I have been able to connect.
It appears to be a diamond with 4 smaller diamonds inside. I have not been able to connect this symbol conclusively to anything in Destiny but it does bear at least some resemblance to the Cassoid) logo, Oryx's sigil, the door to Rasputin's mindlab as well as the diamond pattern used in the Stoneborn sigil.
It may even be the symbol representing the Hive as a whole.
I'm honestly not sure but any help in finding the possible identity of this seal would be most appreciated and may further uncover it's secrets.
_____________________________________
Anyways I hope you enjoyed this post and I look forward to reading what you all have to say in the comments!
TL;DR: The Weregilt and Silent Oracle artifacts bear striking resemblance and may be associated with the mysterious circumstances surrounding the deaths of the Awoken Sjur Eido and Kelda Wadj. The Wax-Sealed Case bears striking resemblance to the Pyramid architecture and aesthetic and seems to be connected to Black Wax Idols collected in the original Destiny.
​
Edit: I may have found the origin of the symbol on the wax seal. It's possibly the Mokosh symbol.

Mokosh is sometimes called the ‘Great Mother’. She is the Slavic god of female endeavours, such as spinning, weaving, and shearing. She offers protection to women during childbirth. Mokosh is associated with destiny and fate, particularly the destiny of women.

So basically a Slavic Norn. This just lends further credibility to it's Darkness origins. I actually wrote a post a while back called "The statue in the pyramid is a norn".
​

Hey, it's Maggie again. You guys were really nice to me last time! But I'm doing a lot worse than yesterday. Something happened and I don't know how to say this but I guess I'll just start at the beginning.
First off though, some of you asked me a few things that I wanna answer real quick. I wanted to talk about them anyways so it's good you brought those up.
Yes, there are mirrors here but only in the bathrooms. My room doesn't have one so I have to use the one accessible to everyone from the hallway. Dad says never to look at my reflection too long though. He says girls worry too much about their looks and that I shouldn't be like that, and I always do what Dad tells me.
As for my age, I don't want to say how old I am exactly because it's the internet and it scares me. Also, I've always been living here at the hospital. I don't know if we've ever lived anywhere else, but I can't remember. I also don't know anything about my mother and I've never wondered about her. Dad's here for me, I'm not missing anything.
So anyways, I had to talk to Dr Ellie for two entire hours this morning. She was being really nice about the whole picture thing but I kind of hated telling her about it. It made me think of that person again and I just wanted to forget about them. At the end of our session, Dr Ellie asked me something very strange though.
"Have you ever heard of something called Operation Magpie?"
I frowned. Something about these two words resonated with me but I had no idea what they meant.
"It sounds familiar but I don't know what it is."
"Alright. Well, I just thought… maybe." She sighed and buried her face in her hands for a split second.
"What is Operation Magpie then?"
"Please, forget I ever said anything," she muttered. With that, she sent me off.
Dad wasn't outside the office where he had dropped me off. I felt incredibly lonely after last night so I went to look for the next best person to keep me company I could think of. Jonah was in his room, sitting on his bed and staring up at the TV. His room is very much like mine, the same bed, closet, small table and television. I came in without knocking, a bad habit of mine, but he didn't tell me off for it. Even though he usually does.
"Hey, Maggie," he said quietly. "A buddy of mine told me what happened. How are you?"
"Better," I said, climbing up to sit next to him on top of his pillow.
"I'm sorry I didn't come to see you. I wasn't sure if you wanted to talk to anybody."
"I do, just not about the picture."
"Oh. Alright then." He fell silent and we watched TV for a little while. There was a rugby match on. I didn't really care for it.
"Jonah, what's Operation Magpie mean?"
My friend flinched. He flinched so hard he dropped the remote onto the floor beside the bed. "You remember Operation Magpie?" he stammered, in his eyes a mix of joy and disbelief I couldn't place.
"No, but Dr Ellie mentioned it earlier."
Jonah deflated. "Oh… well, um. I'm not supposed to say." He sounded disappointed.
"Why not, who's keeping you?"
"That would be your Dad."
"What?"
Jonah shrugged. "This is not easy to explain. I could try to talk around it now but… okay. Let's say Operation Magpie had to do with my job. And by extension your Dad's. But that's all I can tell you."
"You're not making any sense. At all."
"I'm sorry but how am I supposed to say this? I want to tell you, I do, but I can't." Jonah's voice was low and empty. I still had no idea what he was saying but there was a feeling of dread rising within me that I simply couldn't shake.
"Maggs, your father is a genius. My leg is his doing and he's made so much more like it, so much more complicated stuff. You should know that this kind of technology, the way we can replace parts of the body here, hardly anybody outside these walls has access to that sort of thing. And we have your Dad to thank for it. I mean, not only him of course, there's the other doctors and nurses and they're all doing amazing work here but the prosthetics… they're mostly Jack's thing."
My jaw must have dropped. Jonah went on. "He drafts them, he oversees their development, he does a lot of the engineering that goes into it and he made it possible to cover them up with realistic-looking skin. He's the most intelligent man I've ever met."
"Then why do you hate him?"
"Because he's also the craziest. He's messed up in the head."
"And why does he hate you?"
Jonah sighed. "Look, Jack and I have something of an ongoing feud. He's done something I don't agree with, something really bad. There's hardly anyone who confronts him about it but I do. He knows that he's wrong but he keeps trying to justify it. I give him the truth but he doesn't want to hear it and… that's why."
"Yeah, but what did he do?"
"I said I can't tell you, okay?" Jonah groaned, wiping his forehead. "I'm sorry. You're gonna have to leave me alone about this."
I hated giving in like that but I didn't want to argue with him either. I stayed in my friend's room for another hour, trying to make small talk and watching the game with him. Eventually I fell asleep and Jonah had to poke me in the arm until I woke up again.
"You should go to your room if you want to sleep," he told me. "It's bad enough you come in here without knocking, I'm not gonna let you take over my entire room."
I told him I was sorry and he just laughed and said I was acting a little bit like a cat. I made my way out into the hallway and back to my room. I wasn't sleepy anymore though for some reason. I hadn't seen Dad all day and I couldn't stop wondering why he hadn't showed up to look after me at least once. I was starting to get a little worried. After further futile attempts to try and occupy myself, I gave up and got on my way to start looking for Dad in his office.
Walking down the corridor, I noticed it was oddly quiet that day. That was why I jumped when I heard a door slam and the loud clacking of heels approaching. I saw Dr Ellie walk towards me from the very back of the hallway–where Dad's office was located. As she came closer, I realized she was sobbing quietly. Her shoulders were trembling and she was wiping her eyes. I stopped in my tracks.
"What's wrong?" I asked her.
"Maggie!" She sounded like she hadn't noticed me standing there until I'd spoken up.
"What were you going to my Dad for?"
"I… we had a pretty big fight, your Dad and I. You won't be seeing me around here anymore."
"Why not? Did Daddy make you cry?"
She sniffed, stifling a chuckle. "A little bit."
"What did you fight about?" I took a step towards her and searched my pockets for a handkerchief for her but couldn't find anything. "I don't get it, everyone's got some kinda problem with Dad."
"Your Dad does a lot of stuff that makes a lot of people very upset. Me too. I've tried to talk sense into him but… well. He's finally made good on his threat. He always told me he'll have my job if I don't stop pestering him and now, now he's actually having me fired."
"No way I'm telling anyone about my nightmares but you! I'm gonna talk to him."
"That's sweet but… I doubt it'll help."
I shrugged. "I'm just gonna try, okay? No harm in trying." I went past her and into Dad's office. I came in without knocking again. He was sitting at his desk and at first, he didn't seem to notice me at all. He was staring at something that was lying in front of him. I couldn't see it since it was obscured behind all the other stuff cluttering the workspace, but he was moving one of his arms over the thing, almost like he was petting a kitten. His eyes were so fixated on the object that it felt like he wasn't present at all–his mind was miles away. It almost looked a bit creepy.
"What do you have there?" I asked.
Dad flinched as his head jerked up and he let out a tiny gasp. In a matter of seconds, he'd torn open the upper drawer of his desk and dropped whatever he'd been stroking inside. He slammed it shut. I was confused; why was he in such a hurry to hide this thing from me?
"Nothing," he said. "You really need to learn to knock at a door before coming in. It's rude and you know, one day you might see something you don't like."
"Like what?"
He threw his head back and sighed. "You're killing me. So what is it?"
"You didn't come to see me all day. Were you busy?"
"Yes. Sorry. You didn't get lonely, did you?" He waved me over to him and patted his leg. I'm a little big for sitting on his lap but he says that's okay. He says he dreads the day I outgrow him. So I sat down and hugged him and he asked how I was feeling and all that. We talked but I was staring at the drawer the whole time. Dad noticed. "We should go. Let's grab a snack or something."
Just as we were getting up, one of the nurses came rushing in. He looked panicked and seemed to be in a hurry. "Jack, you've got to come over to the B-station, there's been an emergency and we need an extra hand."
The B-station is another wing of the hospital, one where I'm not allowed to go on my own. Dad immediately followed the nurse out the door, dragging me along with him and apologizing over and over for having to leave me to myself again. He dropped me off in the mess hall and told me to get something to eat myself. All I could think of though was that he hadn't locked his office door on the way out. Once he was out of sight, I turned around and walked all the way back into the section with the researchers' workplaces.
I was all alone in the hallway, but knowing I wasn't supposed to be there still made me feel watched somehow. I quietly pressed down the handle of my father's office door and slipped inside. Without Dad in it, the room was kind of oppressive. The walls seemed high yet way too close at the same time. I sneaked over to the desk and opened the top drawer. When I laid eyes on what was inside, my heart sank.
It was a bone. It was smooth and white and almost slender in its shape, one end broken off and splintered. I slammed the drawer shut and stormed outside, closing the door behind me–and colliding full force with someone right behind me. I whimpered and spun around to find myself face to face with Jonah.
His jaw dropped when he saw the look on my face and he immediately rested his hand on my shoulder, awkwardly trying to comfort me. "What's wrong?" he asked softly. "What happened?"
I took deep breaths, but they came too fast. It was hard squeezing words out in between. "There's… a bone. In Dad's office. It can't be from any kind of food, it's too big and too clean."
Jonah's face fell but he said nothing.
"Why is it in there?" I panted. "Jonah, what's going on?"
"How'd you find it?"
"I saw him… like, play with it earlier but when I came in he put it away."
"Okay, calm down. We should leave here." He reached for my hand and I let him pull me along back into the section of the station intended for us patients. "I don't really wanna be seen running around back there. Jack's always looking for an excuse to give me hell, I don't wanna serve it to him myself. I just saw you walk back there and thought I should check on you."
My breathing slowed and I nodded at him. "Thanks. Hey, you don't have your crutches anymore," I remarked but he ignored it.
"Look, there's something I need to talk to you about. I can't really keep it in any longer and I don't want to, so… I can't just bust out a whole story here but I'm not the only one who tried to give your memory a little shove in the right direction."
"My memory?" I was puzzled.
Jonah groaned. "Nevermind. But there's one thing I want you to think about. You've seen my leg, yes? Notice how I didn't have a single hair there?"
I nodded wordlessly.
"Apart from your eyebrows and lashes and that on your head, do you have hair anywhere on your body?"
"Rude," I said.
Jonah let out a forced laugh. "You don't get it, do you?" He grabbed me by the arm and without even giving me the chance to protest, he dragged me down the hallway and into one of the bathrooms. It was the ladies' room, but there was no one else around who saw us so it didn't matter. Inside, Jonah ushered me over to one of the sinks. "Give me your hand," he ordered. I hesitantly reached out and let him position my arm over the edge of the sink. Then, he pulled something small and shiny out of his pocket. It was one of those tiny knives surgeons cut you up with. My stomach sank and I immediately tried to turn around and make for the door, but Jonah's other hand was wrapped around my wrist before I knew it and he pulled me back.
I opened my mouth to scream, but Jonah shushed me. "Quiet! This isn't gonna hurt, I promise. I really need to show you something."
I was trembling and already feeling tears in my eyes, but I obeyed. I didn't want to risk him taking that scalpel to my throat. Jonah slowly brought the tip of the tiny blade down on my lower arm. He'd been wrong, it did hurt, but oddly enough not nearly as much as I'd expected it would. It was almost unnoticeable. Still, I squirmed in his grip and whimpered like a crying puppy, but it was more due to fear than actual pain. I turned to look away, I couldn't bear to watch. Finally, he sat the knife aside and I risked a quick glance–there was no blood on it. Frowning in confusion, I looked down at my injured arm. Jonah had cut out an unfinished square. I could see the three lines the scalpel had left, but without the anticipated red drops protruding from them.
Jonah carefully shoved the tip of his finger underneath my skin. I gagged when I watched him lift it up, press his thumb against it on the other side and then cautiously peel it back.
I thought I had been horrified when I'd seen the picture of that mangled body in my room, but when I laid eyes on what was underneath my skin, a new kind of shock took a hold of me. The inside of my arm wasn't red, veiny and meaty as I'd always thought. It was black, smeared with some sort of slimy, transparent glue, but still shiny. Almost exactly like Jonah's leg before it had gotten its coating.
I had never questioned the workings of my body. This was me, this was my shell, these were the legs that carried me and the arms I used to carry food to my mouth. I had always felt like myself, unrestricted by any bodily ailments, free to move however I wanted. How would I have known there was metal inside me, or plastic or whatever this was?
I think I fainted because I can't remember anything after that sight. I woke up in my bedroom though. Jonah had probably brought me back. My head was reeling and I only got up to grab my trash can because I needed to hurl a little. When I was starting to feel better, I sneaked off into the computer room and that's where I am now. I don't know what to make of this yet. Dad has to have known about my arm. But I keep wondering if my arm's where it stops. What if I'm all plastic underneath this? What Jonah said really made me think. I actually don't have hair, like... anywhere?
I searched the web and as it turns out, kids my age normally have body hair, even if it's still really thin and almost invisible. I don't have any of that. Nowhere. It's just smooth, hairless skin. What scares me even more is that I searched my face for it as well and apart from my brows and eyelashes, there was absolutely nothing.
But that's not even all. Something else doesn't add up here. Dr Ellie found me in the computer room a little while ago. Our exchange was short but it weirded me out nonetheless.
"There you are. I've been looking for you. Is everything alright?"
I didn't want to tell her about my arm at first but she knew already, seeing as she went on with, "Jonah and I talked. I know what he… showed you. I have to be frank with you, I've known for a long time." She took a few steps towards me and then leaned in close to speak into my ear. "Don't tell your Daddy what you found out just yet, okay?" I felt her slide something cold and smooth into my hand. "This is the key to my office. They won't clean it out until tomorrow night but I won't be in ever again. So tomorrow, it's all yours; there's a lot for you to see in there. Be careful though. Jonah will help you if he can, you can trust him."
"Where are you going?" I asked quietly.
Dr Ellie drew back. "I'm gonna look for somewhere else to work, I guess."
"But I can still try and talk to my Dad! I'll get him to–"
"Sweetie, it's okay. I'll be fine. Now, you're about to find out some stuff if you go in there tomorrow, and you may not like it. But please, don't resist. Just let it come back to you." She gave me a sad smile. "I'm sorry for what you're about to see and I'm sorry for the role I've played in it. I hope you'll forgive me."
I hugged her. I'm not supposed to hug her but I didn't care. Now that she was leaving, it wouldn't matter anyways. I don't know what she has waiting in her room for me or what her conspiring with Jonah means but I'll find out. Tomorrow, I'm going in.
X
Update—Part 3
Update–Part 4

When my parents invited me over for brunch, I didn’t expect to be asked to go visit my dying grandfather. I knew that he was dying, but I figured that I’d be the last person he'd want to see in his final days. He had never shown me any kind of affection; no grandfatherly advice was ever given, no inside jokes ever shared, no parent-angering (and mischief-encouraging) gifts ever snuck into my hands beneath the table at birthday dinners. I'd experienced none of the things I had come to know about a grandfather-grandson relationship, learned through books, TV, and movies.
But my mom swore that he wanted to see me. And not just have me come visit, but come alone; my parents hadn’t been asked to join me in my weekend visit to his house.
I loved my parents, especially my mom—no offense to my dad, he's great too—so I agreed; figuring that despite the apathy he had shown me my entire life, I still had a familial duty to uphold. My mom assured me that the visit wouldn’t be as bad I as anticipated and that my grandfather had softened in his old age; that coming to face his mortality had humbled him.
I told her that I wasn’t worried about not getting along, and promised that I’d try to have a good time. She smiled, and I saw how much it meant to her by the tears that gathered in her eyes. I knew she and her dad were close; that he hadn’t married or so much as dated another woman since her mother’s death almost two decades ago. That gesture of death-defying faithfulness, that long-held abstinence, had meant so much to her. My dad always said that she loved her mom more than anything, and that the old woman’s death had seemed to irreparably dampen her spirits.
Fortunately for everyone involved, I'd recently been promoted at work, and my boss had been kind enough to give me a short, paid vacation before I started my new position, which was sure to keep me busy and devoid of free-time for the foreseeable future. I promised my parents that I would go to my grandfather’s later that day, and we finished our food with smiling faces.
Later that day, as I packed my things—my mom promised me that regardless of my thoughts at the moment, I’d eventually want to stay the whole weekend with him—I tried to think of some memory, some nice moment I’d shared with the old man. But after several minutes of earnest thinking, nothing came to mind; I couldn’t recall a single moment in which his cold, almost scornful demeanor towards me had been broken.
My dad called me just as I finished packing. He wished me luck, and echoed my mom's promises regarding my grandfather's change in personality. Still, he sounded a bit troubled, as if there was something he wanted to tell me but couldn't. I would've pressed him to speak his mind, but I wanted to be on the road before dark—there are no street lights along the roads near my grandfather’s woods-enclosed house—so I only thanked him for the reassurances and promised to text him once I arrived.
With everything packed and the house locked, I drove on to my grandfather’s house. He lived about an hour away, preferring the less suburban, abundantly sylvan spaces of Missouri; presumably so he could brood and grumble in solitude. As I drove, I tried to keep my thoughts light even as the sky darkened. It would’ve been easy to allow the darkness to act as a visible testament to my preconceptions about my grandfather and the time I would have, but I suppressed the negativity and thought only about a dying old man who wanted to make amends for twenty-three years of grand-paternal indifference.
I arrived just as the night fully settled, and the moon had beautifully nestled itself amidst the clouds above my grandfather’s house; casting a few brilliant rays onto the loosely-shingled roof, and the chimney which seemed to have weathered its fair share of storms; its bricks faded, dislodged, and pockmarked. The house appeared deceptively small on the outside; two stories sandwiched together, with no structural attachments or supplemental buildings. But once inside, the placed seemed sprawling, with many nooks, hallways, and curtain-concealed recesses in which statues and busts were curiously hidden from view.
There wasn’t really a driveway, more of an intermittently paved path that led from the road all the way to the front of the house. I parked my car a few feet away from the porch, shouldered the one bag I’d brought, and walked to the front door. I could hear nothing inside, and the single window that overlooked the front—no “yard" to speak of—had its thick curtain drawn. I rapped my knuckles on the heavy door five times for good measure; not remembering whether or not the old man was hard of hearing. A few moments of silence passed, then I heard the varied metallic sounds of some assuredly complex mechanism from the other side of the door. The door opened, revealing the slightly hunched but broad-shouldered figure of my grandfather.
There was a fire going in the fireplace of the living room, the only source of light visible through the doorway, and the outline it gave him was almost sinister. The old man’s face was grave, deeply scrutinizing, giving him the appearance of a butler coming to the late-night call of some misdirected traveled. I smiled, and he stepped aside, allowing me to pass across the threshold. He closed and locked the door behind me, and the metallic noises again rang; the locking mechanism firmly secure.
I withdrew my phone from my pocket so I could text my dad, but my grandfather nudged by me and said, “I asked you here to talk, not to watch you fiddle with that device. Put it in the bowl.” He hadn’t gestured towards anything, but before I could ask to what bowl he was referring, I saw a carved clay bowl on a table besides the front door. Several keys—all connected by a bronze ring—sat therein. I quickly turned my phone’s volume down and placed it in the bowl, then joined my grandfather in the living room.
He’d taken a seat in one of two armchairs, each angled towards the fireplace. Its glow filled most of the room, as did its warmth, and I was naturally drawn to it even though the man beside it would’ve ordinarily repelled me. I sat in the remaining chair, whose arms and back had had the fabric embroidered with some aesthetically elaborate design that was unfamiliar to me. The chair was comfortable enough, although from what I could tell—by quickly studying his before meeting his eyes—mine hadn’t been occupied for quite a while. There was a stiffness about my seat, whereas his appeared worn, and almost seemed to contort itself to his form. I figured that my seat had been my grandmother’s, and visitors—if he’d even had any—weren’t allowed to seat themselves in the chair.
Finally, I turned my attention to the old man, who hadn’t taken his eyes off of me since the moment I entered the house. The shadows caused by the fire danced about the room, making it seem as if there were other occupants, which in turn eased my mind, a bit. I was severely nervous; unsure of how to proceed in conversation with a man who hadn’t even so much as smiled at me my entire life. He opened his mouth, preparing to speak, but then shut it and reached to down to the side of the chair for something. He then raised a large mug, took a hearty sip of whatever was inside, and sat it upon his lap, over which was drawn a velvet quilt whose handiwork as I recognized as being that of my grandmother’s.
“What do you see when you look around this room?”
His voice was intoned with a surprising vitality. I hadn’t heard him speak in years, and had expected his voice to at least be soft-spoken, if not rough and interrupted by coughing. His illness hadn’t been described to me; my parents had only told me that he was certainly, inarguably dying.
My eyes scanned the room. I was happy to put off having to look directly at him, even if it were only for a while. Above the fireplace was a mantle that held framed pictures. Most hadn’t been dusted in years, but two—which held pictures of my grandmother—had been polished and placed in front of the rest; nearly to the edge of the mantle. The firelight lit up the glass within the frames, making the captured images behind them appear in motion; as if my grandmother’s smile grew wider or smaller depending on how the light played upon the glass. The walls, which bore a faded crimson wallpaper, held other photographs and even paintings, though none of these had been cared for like those of my grandmother. Nearly every wall throughout the house contained a curtained section, and behind the curtains I knew sat sculptures, statuettes, and busts of my grandfather’s ancestors—and other historical figures he either allegedly knew or admired.
“Photographs, paintings, statues?”
I kept my voice light, casual, trying not to somehow offend the man. His eyes hadn’t left me for one moment, and they only narrowed in response to my answer.
“No. This room, and every other room in this house, contains history. History—our past—is all we have. It is by the wisdom of history that we may chart paths for our future. Our future...Must go on.”
For the first time since inviting me in, his gaze wandered; traveling down, though I doubted his thoughts rested on the fire-lit floorboards. He cradled the mug in his hands, absent-mindedly caressing the ebon surface with his thumbs. His chest rose and fell rhythmically, his breathing perfectly measured. If I hadn’t known of his imminent death, I would’ve thought him appropriately healthy for a man of his age.
I couldn’t think of how to reply to his statement, which had seemed somewhat prepared, so I kept quiet and peered around the room. Nothing seemed to have changed since I last visited—was last brought, as a teenager—and yet I sensed that something major, something imperceptible but momentous, had happened within the home. My grandfather stirred, coming out of his reverie, and I dismissed the thought of this “Great change” as just the half-perceived aura of death hanging over the whole situation.
“Yes, our history is what defines us. What anchors us to this world. Reality, as we know it, is nothing more than histories attesting to each other. Stories—those of fiction, or rather, Legend—are what binds these great histories together; the resultant weave, the great tapestry, being reality as we know it. Have I told you any such legend before, my son?”
The shock of his words caused me to stutter out a reply of “No, you haven’t.” Not only had he spoken more in that brief moment than he’d ever spoken to me before, he’d also called me “son”; something I would’ve never expected to hear him say. He rarely referred to my father outside of his name, and had always called me, “Boy” or “The child.”
He nodded, took another sip from whatever he had in his mug, adjusted the quilt laid over his legs, and turned his gaze to the fire. His green eyes—not at all dimmed by age—sparkled in the firelight, and he proceeded to tell me a Legend.
Many, many years ago, before the lives of your eldest ancestors, there existed a man in despair. The man’s despair was born of his inability to obtain a certain piece of knowledge; the knowledge to undo—or at least indefinitely forestall—Death and its reaping. The man’s wife, gravely ill, was certain to die, and there was naught to be done besides prepare the funeral rites, and ensure that her passage into that mortuary state be carried out comfortably, respectably. On the day in which she was, by physician’s decree, to die, the man stumbled into his home early in the morning; having been out all night in desperate search of a collection of books whose contents proposed methods for the prolonging of mortal life.
The man only managed to obtain one volume from the half-crumbled atelier of a wizard long-dead, before the sun’s light began to blanket the mountains and awaken the moon-suppressed flowers. Nearly delirious from the over-exertions of having overturned stones, and pushed aside bookcases which had survived the ruination of time through some non-sentient arrogance, the man sat heavily upon his chair, opened the blinds of his dust-choked study, and began reading through the sole remaining volume of that necromantic collection.
An hour later, he stumbled into his bedroom—which had become a veritable sickroom—and closed the blinds which had remained perpetually open, so as to allow his bed-ridden wife the lights of both governing celestial bodies; in a futile, pitiable hope that the rays of one might have some healing effect upon her body. Startled by his sudden intrusion, his wife opened her eyes and raised her head from her pillows, the most movement her debilitated body could muster. The man nearly crushed her in his embrace, and wetted her gown with the tears of joy that fell hotly from his face. Weakly, she asked what the matter was, and he responded that he had beaten It. When she asked what was “It”, he exclaimed, happily, proudly, “Death! I have unlocked the secrets of perpetual life, and in turn, canceled that appalling, dreadful appointment with the Reaper!”
As a parent might read a bedtime story to a child before they sink away into a dreamful sleep, the man read from that curious book the necromantic secrets of Death’s evasion, just before his wife could plummet irretrievably into the ever-yawning, ever-darkening abysm of the afterlife. An hour later, he closed the book, having read the requisite passages, and stood away from the bed—his eyes dry, utterly bereft of tears. His wife rose from the bed and stood to her feet, before nearly falling upon the floor. But she hadn’t faltered due to some remnant of the illness which had plagued her; no, she was completely, bodily cured. Shock at her complete recuperation had turned her legs to jelly. The man helped her to her feet, and laid a kiss upon her forehead that reddened her cheeks, and this in turn brought more kisses, for he had not seen such vitality in her face in what felt like centuries.
When she was finally steadied by his passion, she cried out, “To what God must we make oblations? Upon what alters, before what idols, must we cast ourselves, in thanks to the entity—of Heaven or Hell—that has given you this ultimate, death-defying power?” He smiled, and replied. “If you must give thanks to some ultra-mundane spirit, give it to the God of Love, for they alone had instilled me with the vigor at the direst hour to go out and search among the ruins of that necropolis beyond the city, in which it is rumored exists the libraries of those half-remembered wizards and preceptors of great magic. This volume is the last remaining book of the whole lot, and I have plundered it and boldly poured over its assuredly sacrilegious contents, so that I could restore the life that was so unfairly stolen from you.
The woman cried out many thanks to the God of Love, and hugged her husband even deeper than he had hugged her. When the Priest and the Physician arrived sometime later, they were shocked, almost petrified by the sight of the woman flitting around the house in her apron, a tray of freshly baked cookies resting nimbly upon a mitted hand, and a porcelain kettle held in the other. She beckoned them to be seated, and in the manner often displayed by the dumbstruck, they sat quietly; with mouths agape and eyes practically bulging. She offered them cookies and tea, and they accepted. The husband entered a few moments later, accepted the same offerings from his wife, and sat in his favorite chair by the fire. The wife sat upon his lap, and together they stared pleasantly and warmly at their guests, who ate and drank automatically.
After a time, the physician—having a practical inquisitiveness that demanded he understand what he believed was a mundane secrete of the world—asked how exactly the woman had so speedily recovered. He himself had declared the inadequacy of then-modern medicine in the restoration of her vitality, and even his companion, The Priest, had sensed or divined the irremediable wilting of her spirit.
The man, after taking another sip of his tea, bent his head and kissed his wife on the forehead, eliciting that sudden crimson vibrancy of her cheeks. She smiled, and nestled her head into his chest. He looked up to his slack-jawed guests and said, “It was love, my friends.”
Throughout the story, my grandfather’s eyes had remained fixed just beyond me. When he finished, his gaze relaxed, first going to the mug in his hands, then to the fire, and finally to my right, where a bookcase sat against the wall. I didn’t know what to say; the story clearly had some personal meaning to him, possibly a fantasy told to him—or constructed by him—that reflected his sorrow at not being able to save my grandmother from the illness that had taken her. After an interim of prolonged silence, I finally spoke up, saying, “That was a nice story, Grandpa.” I hadn’t ever called him that before, always “Grandfather”, but in the moment the shortened term had come naturally, almost lovingly.
He nodded, and even smiled, though not at me. His eyes remained on that bookcase, steeped in the darkness of the far end of the room, where the fire’s light couldn’t reach. He took another sip from his cup, then set it on the floor beside the chair and rose from his seat. I got up to help him, but he waved away the offer. Confidently, almost proudly, he walked over to the bookcase, retrieved a book, and returned to his seat. The book was plainly old, and the shadows which passed over it seemed sufficient enough to destroy its withered frame, but my grandfather opened it as you would any other book; without any special care or acknowledgement, as if knowing the book could withstand such heavy, indelicate handling.
Without giving any information about the book, he began to read from it. He didn’t read aloud, but his eyes scanned the pages quickly, fervently, as if the words therein fled from his sight and he endeavored to catch them before they leapt from the page. I stared, both surprised and unsettled by this hyperactivity, demonstrated by a man who should be lying upon his death bed. I don’t know how much time passed before he closed the book. He placed it on the floor, just beside the mug, and stood again. Instinct, or maybe just the odd glint in his eyes, made me stand up as well.
“I am sorry, my boy. But it is done.”
Confused, and growing increasingly alarmed, I asked what he meant by that. He smiled, discarded the quilt, and pushed his chair several feet away with a kick of his foot. He seemed to grow in that moment, his stature becoming unnervingly imposing. His body, though still retaining the signs of his age, seemed to have been empowered by some spell read within the book. Terror seeped into my veins as I witnessed this bizarre transformation.
“Forgive me for the coldness I’ve shown you over the years. All this time, I believed that the offered soul must be alike with the soul to be restored. I cursed you for being male. But the book, that necromantic volume which has survived uncountable cycles since its initial publication, states that the nature of the soul needn’t be exactly the same. All that is required is the soul be related to the would-be deceased. You, your grandmother’s grandson, will do just fine.”
The arm swung at me before I had even fully processed his words. The fist caught me in the temple, sending me sprawled onto the floor. My head knocked against the floorboards, dizzying me even more than the punch did. Dazed, pain arising like a calamitous wave in my head, I tried to scramble away, but my grandfather seized one of my ankles and pulled back towards him. Forcefully, demonstrating a strength well beyond anything I’d ever felt or seen before, he pushed my face to the edge of the fireplace. Only through instinct did my hands reach out and land on the brickwork of the threshold, stopping my progress into the searing flames.
My grandfather’s strength was immense, indomitable, and I felt my arms bending as his manic power surmounted my desperate resistance. The fire’s heat singed the skin of my face, and I smelled the awful, horror-inducing stench of burning hair. I knew by the almost bestial grunts that escaped his lips that pleading with him would be useless; he was lethally determined to mercilessly end my life, in the bizarre hopes of somehow extracting my spirit for the necromantic resurrection of his long-dead wife. I remembered then the fully-scaled statue of my grandmother resting behind one of the curtains in the room, and how disturbed I had been as a child by its ultra-real likeness to the woman it depicted.
I was impelled towards action when a tongue of flame licked my face, eliciting a horrible, mind-clearing pain. In a moment of supreme agony that I’ll never forget, I quickly plunged one hand into the burning pile of wood, gripped a log even as my skin was hungrily attacked by the roaring fire, and withdrew the flame-coated piece; swinging it with a quickness and force aided by my body’s natural urge to recoil from extreme heat. The log crashed against my grandfather’s head, knocking him back and onto the floor. I fell away from the flames, dropping the still-burning wood upon the quilt. I cradled my scorched hand, not wanting to look at it, but feeling the patches of charred skin and heat-born blisters. I started towards the door, but an unconscious inhibition stopped me, and before I knew what I was doing I had turned and kicked the old wizard’s tome into the fireplace.
It took several kicks to break the door’s complex locking mechanism. Once the door swung outward, I dashed into the night; while behind me I heard the insane raging of my grandfather as he rolled around the floor. The cool air tingled my burnt hand, but I couldn’t tell if the tingling was a good or bad thing. I quickly got into my car, started it, and backed down the intermittently paved driveway. Before me, the house seemed to preternaturally glow from within, and I realized that the flames—either from the dislodged log or as some consequence of the book’s destruction—had spread throughout the house. No figure emerged from the front door.
Automatically, I drove to my parents’ house. I had grown numb to the pain in my hand during the drive. It wasn’t until I pulled into their driveway that full awareness returned to me and I realized I had forgotten to grab my phone from the bowl in my grandfather’s home. But the loss seemed inconsequential, compared to what I otherwise could’ve lost. I stumbled to the front door, and as I knocked, I realized how much I smelled like smoke. I saw in the small and distorted reflection of the brass knocker that streaks of black lined my face, and that great swaths of hair had been burnt away; exposing a blackened scalp. As if seeing this had reminded my body of the damage, I felt the related pain shortly after.
My mom opened the door and—upon seeing her half-burnt, wretched son—abruptly and shrilly screamed. I smiled, stumbled into the foyer, and kicked the door closed behind me. It was late, and although I felt awful, I didn’t want to attract the attention of the neighbors; not until I had told my parents what had happened. My mom quickly quieted, perhaps coming to the same line of thought, and watched me with wide eyes as I walked into the kitchen and sat down at the table. She paced around, hands on her head, eyes alight with terror. I asked for some water, realizing only then how terribly thirsty I was. She nodded, and brought me a pitcher of water and a cup. A few moments later, my dad entered the kitchen, and I saw shock and something that almost resembled relief on his face. There was a wordless, inscrutable exchange between them, and then my mom finally asked what had happened.
Through several sips of water I told them the story, and by its conclusion my mom was in tears. My father stood behind her silently, eyes averted, hands delicately placed on her hips. I could understand grieving the violent loss of a parent, especially since she had already lost her mother, but she seemed somewhat inappropriately saddened by her father’s death; as if he hadn’t died in the process of attempting my murder. When my mom pulled her face away from her hands, I saw a black, malicious rage in her eyes. Before my dad could stop her, she lunged across the table at me; knocking over the pitcher and drawing her nails savagely across my face.
I fell back in my chair, landing hard upon the tiled kitchen floor. I heard footsteps rounding the table, and then a sudden exclamation of surprise, followed by the sight of my mother landing roughly on the floor beside me. She had slipped on the water that had poured from the pitcher. A second later, my dad had restrained her, kneeling with all his weight on her back. He looked deeply at me, with tears and a dark knowing in his eyes, and whispered: “Go.” I took one look at my mother’s madness-reddened and viciously snarling face, and got up from the water-streaked floor. A few seconds later, I was in my car.
The pieces fell in place within my mind as I drove away. My parents had known about my grandfather’s desire to sacrifice me in some attempt to use my soul as the catalyst for the resurrection of my grandmother. My mom, happy to have her mother returned to her, had presumably held no issue with the idea. And my dad, just wanting to see my mother happy again, had gone along with it. He had saved me, in the end, but only after my grandfather had died.
I was only an object, a thing to be used to accomplish something else. The realization crushed me; the pain of it far greater than any of the physical injuries I’d sustained in the night.
I drove to a hospital several towns away, knowing that I’d receive only the most superficial care; care of the body, with no recuperation available for the ghastly emotional trauma and unforgettable terror I endured.

On 29 January 1753, eighteen-year-old Elizabeth Canning staggered into her mother’s home in London. She was emaciated, weak, wearing only a shift, a dirty petticoat and a bedgown. She had been bleeding from a cut on her ear. Her face and hands were black. She had been missing for almost a month.
The question of where she had been would spark a media sensation, multiple trials, and a furious split in public opinion.
On New Year’s Day of 1753, Elizabeth was an ordinary maidservant from a respectable working-class family. She was short, plump, average-looking, and until that day had apparently never done anything noteworthy except suffer from occasional ‘fits’ that could last for hours. She spent most of the day with her aunt and uncle. Around nine in the evening Elizabeth headed for her employer’s house, half a mile away, but she never got there. The family searched, her mother consulted an astrologer, congregations said prayers, her family put advertisements in newspapers and offered a reward – but the only clue was a witness who reported hearing a woman’s shriek coming from a hackney coach in the area that night.
When Elizabeth stumbled home, half the neighbours came pouring in to see what was going on. Elizabeth’s story, when they coaxed it out of her, was a wild one. She said that, after leaving her aunt and uncle, she was attacked by two men. They took her money, her hat and her dress (this didn’t necessarily imply sexual assault – stealing clothes wasn’t an uncommon crime , and she was wearing her good going-out clothes, which could have been worth a little money), and knocked her out. When she came to, she was being dragged along a country road. She was brought to a house where an old woman tried to convince her to become a prostitute. When Elizabeth said no, the old woman slapped her, cut off her corset stays and locked her in a room. And left her there for four weeks.
Elizabeth described the room as containing only a couple of chairs, an old table, a picture, some bread, a pitcher of water, and the clothes she wore when she got home. During that month, no one came into the room. The windows were boarded up, but she peered through the cracks and saw a coach being driven by a man she recognised as a coachman who went to Hertfordshire regularly, so she reckoned the house was on the Hertford Road. Finally she got up the courage to pull the boards off a window and climb out, cutting her ear on the way down.
At this point in Elizabeth’s story one of the neighbours, Robert Scarratt, said, basically, ‘I bet that was Mother Wells’s house.’ (Susannah Wells’s deal is slightly vague. She was a widow with a complicated and mildly shady past. She took in lodgers, but she also may or may not have been running an informal brothel.) At that, Elizabeth remembered that she had heard the name ‘Mother Wells’ while she was in the house. This was enough to get an alderman to issue a warrant, and a few days later absolutely everybody – Elizabeth, family, neighbours, officials, randomers – headed off to Susannah Wells’s house, in Enfield Wash, about ten miles from Elizabeth’s home.
None of the rooms in the house matched Elizabeth’s description. The closest was a loft full of hay and random junk. When Elizabeth was taken to the room, though, she identified it as the room where she had been held. She was able to describe the view from the windows. There were boards over the windows, but it looked like they’d only recently been nailed there (one nail had cracked the wood, and the crack looked fresh), which matched her story that she had pulled away the old boards. She didn’t recognise Susannah Wells – but she did recognise another woman who was lodging in the house, an old gypsy woman called Mary Squires. Elizabeth said Mary was the woman who had cut off her stays and locked her in the loft.
Mary absolutely denied ever having seen Elizabeth before. That made no difference: she and Susannah Wells were arrested, Mary for stealing Elizabeth’s stays, Susannah for being an accomplice and ‘keeping a disorderly house’ (which could mean a brothel, but could also mean any house where what goes on in there creates a public nuisance). Warrants were also issued for several of Mary’s family, but they had – wisely – done a runner. Mary and Susannah weren’t arrested for assault because that was a civil action at the time, not a breach of the peace: it would have been up to Elizabeth to investigate it herself and take legal action. It was easier for the authorities to just go after Mary for the theft. The stays were valued at ten shillings, which made it a hanging crime.
The examining magistrate – Henry Fielding, the author of Tom Jones and founder of the Bow Street Runners – believed Elizabeth passionately, and was outraged at her story, but it wasn’t exactly an open-and-shut case. There were a few witnesses who said that they’d seen Mary Squires in Dorset, far from Enfield Wash, during the relevant time frame. Fortune and Judith Natus, a married couple who lodged at Mrs Wells’s house, told Fielding that they had slept in the loft all through January, and had never seen or heard of Elizabeth Canning during that time.
Most of these people weren’t able to testify at the actual trial, though. Public sentiment was high: crowds cheered Elizabeth into the courtroom and attacked defence witnesses, preventing them from getting in.
On the prosecution side, there was a witness who said Mary Squires had in fact been in Enfield Wash at the time, and there was another of Mrs Wells’s lodgers, a young woman called Virtue Hall. Virtue’s statement had originally matched the Natuses’, but after Fielding threatened to throw her in jail if she kept lying, she changed her testimony and confirmed Elizabeth Canning’s story.
And, of course, there was Elizabeth Canning. Elizabeth came across really, really well on the stand. She answered questions ‘without hesitation, confusion, trembling, change of countenance, or other apparent emotion’ and with the ‘decency, modesty, and simplicity’ that everyone wanted to see from a girl of her social class, and she stood up well under cross-questioning. Her frailty and suffering would have melted anyone’s heart – they certainly melted Henry Fielding’s; he called her ‘a poor, honest, innocent, simple girl, and the most unhappy and most injured of all human beings’. At the time, that was the general public opinion.
Susannah Wells and Mary Squires were found guilty. Susannah was branded on the thumb and given six months in jail. Mary was sentenced to hang.
Elizabeth had become a national media darling. It made a great story: the young maidservant defending her virtue, her heartrending suffering, the salacious hints of sex trafficking, the hideous ‘swarthy’ villainess who fit right into every stereotype about evil kidnapping gypsies. Elizabeth was all over the newspapers; multiple people issued pamphlets about her story; everyone, rich and poor, was talking about her. The eighteenth-century equivalent of GoFundMes for her raised almost three hundred pounds – a huge sum.
Except then it turned out not to be that simple.
The trial judge, who had the most excellent name of Sir Crisp Gascoyne, was uneasy about the verdict, and about the fact that some of the defence witnesses hadn’t been able to testify. He started a private investigation of his own.
There was some discussion of whether Elizabeth’s story was even possible. Could she have survived for a month on a loaf of bread, a pitcher of water, and a mince pie that she said she’d been taking home to her brother? Someone did complicated maths and concluded that she could, although she would have lost about twenty pounds; other people were less convinced. (The part I wonder about is the water. You can go a long time without food, but you can only survive a few days without water. Not only would it have to be a really big pitcher, but Elizabeth would have had to know in advance how long she would be there, in order to ration out the water so it lasted the full four weeks.) Doctors stated that starvation could account for the blackening of her hands and face.
But more and more little things didn’t add up. When she came home, Elizabeth was wearing a bedgown, which she claimed she had found in the fireplace grate of the room where she was locked up – but the loft in Susannah Wells’s house didn’t have a grate. Elizabeth hadn’t mentioned the hole for a jackline and pulley which led straight from the loft to the kitchen, and through which she would have heard everything that went on in there. One witness, who had gone to the house with Elizabeth when she was brought there to identify her attackers, said that the loft’s door didn’t have a keyhole, and there was no sign of a bolt or bar ever having been on it. Several witnesses said that they had been up to the loft on various dates during January, getting pollard for the pigs or collecting an old inn sign, and there hadn’t been any imprisoned girl there. And there was Elizabeth’s shift. After she got back, her mother, worried that Elizabeth had been raped, took the shift to a family friend who was a midwife. The midwife said there was no evidence of sex on the shift – but she also pointed out that it was way too clean for something that had supposedly been worn for a month.
And there was the question of motive. Why on earth would half a dozen people conspire to kidnap a woman and just leave her in a room for a month? Ransom clearly wasn’t the motive – no one would have mistaken Elizabeth for a woman rich enough to attract any worthwhile ransom, plus no demands were made. Sex trafficking is a possibility – Elizabeth said no one came near her all month, but she might not have wanted to acknowledge sexual assault. But this theory has the same problems as it does today, when a middle-class businesswoman or housewife disappears and people jump to sex trafficking: in eighteenth-century London, there was no shortage of destitute young girls who had basically no option but to go into sex work, and friendless orphans who wouldn’t be missed. Why kidnap an unwilling girl from a solid family who had the means to advertise for information and offer rewards? And why starve her? It’s also unclear whether there was even sex work going on in Mother Wells’s house or not.
There was also the question of why Elizabeth took four weeks to make a run for it. She said, basically, that she thought they’d let her out, and escaping didn’t occur to her till the 29th. That’s possible, given that she would have been traumatised, and taking into account the possibility that she wasn’t very bright. But it brings back the question of the water. If she thought she’d be let out any day, why would she ration out her water so carefully that one pitcher kept her going for four weeks?
Mary Squires and Susannah Wells both claimed that Mary and her family had only arrived at Susannah’s house on 24 January. Sir Crisp tracked down the witnesses who had seen them elsewhere at the beginning of January, and found a couple of dozen more: solid citizens with no dog in the fight, who testified that Mary Squires and her family had been in Dorset, nowhere near Enfield Wash. The leader of Elizabeth’s supporters, though, found other witnesses who claimed that the Squireses had been in Enfield Wash much earlier than the 24th. It could have been a case of mistaken identity, one way or the other, except for one thing: Mary Squires was really, really hard to mistake. She was, by all accounts, outstandingly ugly, with her lower lip hugely swollen by scrofula. From a letter written at the time: ‘The Convict is so very remarkable, ’tis as impossible that any of the Witnesses can be mistaken in her Person, as that their different Accounts can be true. She is at least 70, tall, and stoops; her face is long and meagre, her Nose very large, her Eyes very full and dark, her Complexion remarkably swarthy, and her under Lip of prodigious size.’
And then Virtue Hall recanted her testimony. She said that she’d never seen Elizabeth during January. She had only backed up Elizabeth’s story because Fielding, the magistrate, had threatened to throw her in prison if she didn’t.
Gascoyne wrote to King George II asking him to pardon Mary Squires. Mary was pardoned and released – for unclear reasons, Susannah Wells had to serve out her sentence. And Elizabeth Canning was arrested and tried for ‘wilful and corrupt perjury’. (In a separate, conflicting trial, so were three of the men who claimed to have seen Mary Squires in Dorset. They were found not guilty, and released – but the trial killed one of them anyway: he caught smallpox in the court, and died of it.)
By the time Elizabeth was tried, in spring of 1754, the nation was split between people who believed her and people who didn’t. Everyone had an opinion, and was probably putting out a pamphlet about it. ‘Canningites’ – Elizabeth’s supporters – were infuriated by the way she was being treated; they rioted outside the court, broke windows, threw stones, and attacked Gascoyne to the point where he and the jury had to be given a guard, and the Riot Act was read. ‘Egyptianites’ – people who thought Mary Squires was innocent – were putting out pamphlets mocking Elizabeth and her supporters.
The trial was messy. It lasted a week; the prosecution alone brought about sixty witnesses. Some of the witnesses seem to have had nothing solid to say – ‘Well this one night in January I was out walking in Enfield Wash and I heard a woman crying and a man calling her a bitch’ type of stuff. Mary Squires’s family said they had been travelling through December and January but were vague about their itinerary, which was really frustrating for the prosecutor. (There’s a theory that they were involved with a smuggling ring, which is why they weren’t keen on getting too specific.) The whole thing was complicated by the fact that England had just switched from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian one, and a lot of witnesses were completely confused by the 11-day gap – they weren’t sure whether they had seen Mary Squires on x date by the old calendar or the new one.
In the end, the jury came back with a verdict of ‘Guilty of perjury, but not wilful and corrupt’. The recorder told them it didn’t work that way; they retired again and came back with a verdict of ‘guilty of wilful and corrupt perjury, but with a recommendation to mercy’.
Elizabeth was sentenced to a month’s imprisonment, followed by seven years’ transportation. She went to Connecticut, where her GoFundMe money and some church connections among her supporters helped her to start a new life. She got married, had children, and died suddenly in 1773.
It’s possible that Elizabeth was telling the truth, but I seriously doubt it. There are way too many inconsistencies in her story, way too many witnesses who saw Mary Squires and her family elsewhere, and way too many witnesses who went into that loft in January. There are also some patterns to her story that feel dodgy. For example, she initially said that the room where she was held had nothing in it except the few objects she listed, and she slept on the bare floor. When she was brought to Susannah Wells’s house, her supporters went into the loft first, saw the hay in it, and thought ‘Huh, weird, she never mentioned hay,’ so they sent someone back out to ask Elizabeth if by any chance there had been hay in the room. She instantly went, ‘Oh yeah there was totally hay.’ That has the ring of someone modifying her story on the fly, to fit in new facts. Same for the way she didn’t mention hearing the name ‘Wells’ until someone else suggested it, when all of a sudden she had totally heard that name during her imprisonment.
But no one ever found any evidence to show that Elizabeth had been anywhere else. So where was she for that missing month?
One possibility is that she voluntarily went off with a lover, and then things went wrong. (Josephine Tey’s The Franchise Affair, based on the Elizabeth Canning case, goes for this explanation: Betty Kane makes up the kidnapping story to cover for the fact that she was snuggled up in a love nest with a married man, until his wife found her and kicked her out.) She would have had every motive to conceal that: sexual purity was an essential part of respectability for women then, and if a story like that came out, it could well have ruined Elizabeth’s life. If her lover turned out to be abusive, it could explain the cut on her ear, and maybe even the starvation, if she wanted to leave and the lover kept her captive.
Another possibility is that she was kidnapped, held captive and raped – not by sex traffickers, but by a lone attacker. Not wanting to acknowledge the sexual assault – which, again, could have wrecked her life – she made up a story that focused on a woman assailant and specifically excluded rape.
Another possibility is that she was pregnant. Elizabeth hadn’t had her period for several months before she went missing – she put it down to having caught a cold one night while she was doing the washing. (This came out because people asked what she had done about her period while she was imprisoned, and why there was no evidence of it on her clothes – which is also a question I’ve seen internet posters ask about Sherri Papini.) It’s unlikely that she had a full-term child, as her periods had only stopped three to five months earlier, and no one mentioned her having put on weight. But an abortion that went badly and led to infection could explain her long absence and her physical condition. And it’s definitely something she would have had very good reason to cover up.
Some people think she really was in Enfield Wash, although not at Susannah Wells’s house. A few witnesses said they saw a distressed young woman near Enfield Wash on the 29th of January. William Davy, Elizabeth’s defence counsel at her trial, seemed to be suggesting that Robert Scarratt – the neighbour who went ‘I bet that was Mother Wells’s house’ when Elizabeth told her story, setting the entire train of events in motion – was behind the whole thing. The theory is that Scarratt had either taken Elizabeth for sexual purposes, or else got her pregnant and arranged for her to go to Enfield Wash for an abortion, and his mention of Mother Wells’s house was him prompting Elizabeth to go for that as a cover story. This seems fairly farfetched to me; the only evidence is that Scarratt had lived in Enfield Wash and had the reputation of being a bit wild. Plus, if he wanted to lead people away from the truth, and Elizabeth was telling a story that didn’t get any more specific than ‘somewhere on the Hertford Road’, why would he deliberately nail it down to the right neighbourhood? I think it’s more likely that Scarratt, who had visited Mother Wells’s house before, suggested it because it genuinely came into his head, and Elizabeth jumped on the suggestion.
Another possibility is that Elizabeth’s memory was flawed, maybe because of her ‘fits’: she was missing some or most memories of those four weeks, and semi-subconsciously came up with a story that filled the gaps. This seems to be what at least some of her jury thought – she wasn’t telling the truth, but she wasn’t wilfully lying. Lilian de la Torre, in her 1945 book Elizabeth is Missing, decides that Elizabeth was a ‘hysterical amnesiac’: ‘Elizabeth Canning was a hysterical subject, and this period of amnesia was but one, and by no means the first, of many neurotic manifestations.’ I’m dubious about this one – it seems to me to be interesting mainly in what it says about 1940s attitudes towards women (the focus on hysteria and neurosis, rather than any form of agency, as the most probable explanation for a woman’s actions).
This case fascinates me, not only because there’s no way to know what really happened, but also because of how many striking similarities – and how many striking differences – there are between it and our causes célèbres today. The difference that really gets me is how informal, chaotic and participatory the whole law-and-order process was. Half of London appears to have headed to Mother Wells’s house with Elizabeth and the officials, to see what would happen. Mobs of supporters decided who got into the courtroom to testify – there wasn’t really an organised police force, so it wasn’t like the police were going to hold them back. Various people did their own private investigations after the initial trial, and the evidence they collected was used to overturn the convictions and trigger the perjury trials. Law enforcement as we know it was only just starting to take shape; the rules and procedures that we take for granted just didn’t exist. Henry Fielding – the magistrate who was so smitten by Elizabeth Canning – had only just set up the Bow Street Runners, the first group in England officially employed to apprehend offenders and bring them in for questioning, the forerunners of the modern police force.
But then there are the similarities. The parallels to the Sherri Papini case are obvious, but there are much deeper and broader ones that take in the whole society. The extent to which the public got emotionally invested in the case, to the point of rioting – the equivalent of furious internet wars over whether the Ramsey family killed JonBenet, or what happened to Madeleine McCann. The media fanning the flames and shaping the narrative. The ‘other’ as villain – Elizabeth’s identification of a gypsy, like Sherri Papini’s description of two Latina kidnappers, was a dog whistle that played into a lot of stereotypes and brought out a lot of bigotry. And, of course, there’s the intense emphasis on what a victim ‘should’ be, with that ‘should’ shaped rigidly by gender and class – and the implication that, if Elizabeth was what a victim should be (modest, well-behaved, respectful, humble, sexually pure), then she was clearly telling the truth.
Our definition of the ‘perfect’ victim has changed since then, and the differences tell us a lot about both Elizabeth’s society and our own, and what we value. Elizabeth’s supporters focused on her simplicity, her modesty, her retiring nature: Fielding praised her as ‘a virtuous, modest, sober, well-disposed girl’, and a previous employer who ran a pub mentioned in her favour the fact that she wouldn’t come out of the back room to talk to customers. With Sherri Papini, the focus was on her fitness, her prettiness, her ‘supermom’-hood, her ‘fairytale’ marriage. But it comes down to the same thing: we assess people’s victimhood based on how closely they conform to our society’s criteria for what they ‘should’ be.
And, both in our time and in Elizabeth’s, that approach leads to black-and-white thinking. Either Elizabeth was a saintly innocent, martyred for defending her virtue against the evil gypsies – or she was a cunning manipulative slut who was happy to exploit the justice system and good people’s sympathy, and to get Mary Squires hanged, in order to cover up her own sexual wantonness and make a few quid along the way. There was nothing in between.
Elizabeth spoke at her sentencing. She said that ‘she hoped they would be favourable to her; that she had no intent of swearing the gypsey's life away; and that what had been done, was only defending herself; and desired to be considered unfortunate’.
From what little I know of her, I don’t like Elizabeth Canning. I don’t think she spent that month in Mother Wells’s house, which means she was perfectly willing to lie Mary Squires’s life away – and by all accounts, she did it calmly and composedly, with barely a trace of emotion at any point. But I do think she was telling the truth, in one way or another, when she said that she ‘was only defending herself’.
The Malefactor’s Register of 1774 finishes its account of the Elizabeth Canning case with the words: ‘Upon the whole, we must end as we began: this story is enveloped in mystery; and the truth of it must be left to the discoveries of that important day, when all mists shall be wiped from our eyes, and the most hidden things shall be made plain.’
https://www.historicmysteries.com/elizabeth-canning/
https://strandmag.com/the-mystery-of-elizabeth-canning/
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Clear_State_of_the_Case_of_Elizabeth_Canning
Edit: My first ever gold!! Thank you so much for the awards!
And a note about 'gypsy'. I went back and forth about using the term, because it's not really in use any more - nowadays it's considered pejorative. I couldn't work out what else to use, though. At the time, 'gypsy' would have taken in both Romani and Travellers - but they're not the same thing, and I don't know which community Mary Squires and her family belonged to. They may not have belonged to either one: there's some suggestion that the Squireses just travelled around a lot, and 'gypsy' was used as a lifestyle descriptor rather than an ethnic one, possibly in order to trigger prejudice against Mary Squires. Then, as now, there was plenty of prejudice against both Romani and Travellers, and the identification of Mary as a 'gypsy' - in whichever meaning of the term - played a big role in shaping the public narrative of the case, and probably in determining her treatment. So, since any other term had a good chance of being factually wrong, I stuck with the one that was used at the time.

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JP players can bind via binding code or Twitter account; EN players can bind via Twitter account, Facebook account or Yostar account. These options are in Settings.

Use at least one account bind option; use multiple if you want to be safe. If your device is lost, damaged, or a game update breaks the app and forces you to reinstall you could permanently lose your account. EN accounts are easiest to recover with an account bind; make sure to bind your account in the settings and only use the login screen binding buttons to reconnect your account. Using the login screen buttons without a bound account will create a new account for you and effectively erase your progress with no way of recovering it outside of contacting customer support. JUST DO IT.
NOTE: It's also a good idea to remember your server and take a screenshot of your resume so that customer support has an easier time recovering your account.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should I reroll? How do I do it?
No. There are a few reasons for this:

• Names cannot be reused.
• Ships are constructed with non-premium currency that you can easily get through gameplay.
• SSR ships are NOT required for progression.
• High value ships are often stage drops and cannot be built.

Is X ship good?
Take a look at this gallery that shows good, permanently available ships or this tier list for a general indication of any ship's power. For research ships there's also a list showing off how useful they are depending on their development level.
All ships are usable with proper development; just know that some ships/compositions are far less viable in later Worlds.
Should I be spamming Construction or saving cubes?
Saving cubes is crucial as you'll want a large stockpile of them to attempt limited constructions that appear during events. Outside of events, spend 1 cube per day (4 on Sunday) to satisfy the daily build mission; in doing so you'll complete the weekly mission which gives 6 cubes.
However, players starting out should spam construction for the first 2 or 3 days in order to expand their options for fleet setups.
Should I keep duplicate ships?

• Duplicates of ships you use: Keep for limit breaking and retrofitting.
• Duplicates of ships you don't use, Rare or higher: Retire for Medals of Honor (in Build menu).
• Duplicates of ships you don't use, Normal rarity: Consume for enhancement of used ships.

I'm struggling on X stage, what should I do?

• Level up and limit break your ships; Level advantage makes a difference.
• Check your equipment; equip Purple/Gold/Rainbow rarity equipment and upgrade it.
• Adjust your fleet setup; you may need a tanky frontliner to soak more damage or a battleship in the backline to deal more damage.
• Enhance your ship's stats with common rarity ships.

How should I set up my fleet?
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Main Fleet (Backline)
Aircraft Carriers (CV, CVL) - Clears the screen of enemy projectiles and weaker ships; Airspace Control Value (ACV) improves damage dealt by your carriers and reduces hostile encounters.
Battleships, Battlecruisers (BB, BC, BBV, BM) - Concentrated damage better suited for high-value targets; secondary gun protects backline from suicide ships.
Vanguard Fleet (Frontline)
Destroyers (DD) - Cheap; low gun damage with high-damage torpedoes; high evasion with poor armor and HP; speeds up your fleet and helps avoid ambushes.
Light Cruisers (CL) - Balanced stats with high anti-air capability.
Heavy Cruisers (CA, CB) - Expensive; high damage and/or large HP pool; some utility.

For the frontline position put your tankiest ship on the left and second tankiest on the right; for the backline try to have your strongest ship in the middle (flagship) position; battleships with a barrage skill should be in the center because it greatly improves their aim.
Make sure that your support (yellow) skills are useful to the rest of the fleet; most only affect certain class, nationality or weapon types and often don’t stack.
While at the beginning it doesn't matter - in fact you'd be better off using both of your fleets equally to level them up - your two fleets should eventually be split up into a mob-killer fleet and boss-killer fleet; the mob-killer fleet sacrifices firepower for sustain so use (self-)healing ships to survive the 4-7 fights needed to summon the boss for the boss-killer fleet.
When should I Limit Break?
This depends on your playstyle; Limit Breaking increases a ship's stats and capabilities at the price of increased Oil costs. Therefore:

• If you lean towards casual play and don't sortie much, Limit Break as soon as possible.
• If you lean towards hardcore play and sortie frequently, Limit Break only if you are struggling to progress.

These guidelines only apply to your main use fleets; farming fleets will have a different approach as explained in the next question.
NOTE: Regardless of your playstyle, Limit Break when your ships are approaching level cap (70/80/90) to avoid losing XP.
What are good fleets to use for farming?
Farming fleets are designed to clear stages with as little fuel use as possible. Therefore:

• Use fewer ships. The minimum is one backline and one frontline ship (1:1). Over-level your ships as level difference matters.
• Use ships with no/few limit breaks since LBs increase oil costs.
• Use upgraded equipment and level up skills.
• Complete the stage several times with stronger fleets to lower its threat level.
• Use ships of lower rarity since they're cheaper: Common (gray) > Rare (blue) > Elite (purple) > Super Rare (gold)
• Use cheaper ship types. For the frontline: Destroyers (DD) > Light Cruisers (CL) > Heavy Cruisers (CA, CB). For the backline: Monitors (BM) > Battlecruisers (BC) > Battleships (BB) and Light Carriers (CVL) > standard Carriers (CV)

Popular vanguard ships: Phoenix, Leander, Cassin, Downes, Fletcher DDs Popular main fleet ships: Erebus, Terror, Nelson, Rodney, Tirpitz, Duke of York, Yorktown
For high-level farming add healers (Akashi, Vestal, Unicorn, Shouhou, Ryuuhou, Arizona) and a strong boss-killer fleet.
When farming for gear blueprints/ships/event points, is it better to full clear a stage or just clear enough mobs until the boss spawns?
Except when getting the third star on a map, you should always go for the boss as soon as it spawns. Only the boss fleet and event elites can drop SR gear blueprints, and the boss has a chance to drop two. Only boss fleets can drop SR ships/boss-only ships, and clearing the boss fleet with an S-rank guarantees a ship drop. Killing the boss fleet is what gives points (specialized cores, core data, event points, etc.); the amount of points is bound to the map, not to the amount of mobs killed.
What should I be equipping?
You can try following these guides. Otherwise, use what you have.
How do I get more Oil?
Oil in Azur Lane is equivalent to stamina in most mobile games; your Canteen generates Oil and you can get more from mission/commission rewards. If you run dry consider running less ships in your fleets, running ships with lower rarity/fewer limit breaks and taking a break.
How do I get Coins?
Aside from generation via the Merchant, large coin drops come from Daily Raids and the 8-10 hour commission (costs 800+ fuel). A popular method is farming map 7-2 until all the "?" nodes appear, collecting the nodes and retreating.
What should I spend Gems on?
Priority list:

• Dorm slots (max 5)
• Dock capacity
• 2nd Floor Upgrade for Dorm
• Promise Rings
• Skins
• 3rd Tactical Classroom slot (depends on your needs)

Spending Gems on anything not listed here isn't recommended (ESPECIALLY Oil/Gold). However, it's mostly personal preference.
What should I spend Medals of Honor on?
Buy the featured SSR if you want heneed a duplicate for limit breaking. Otherwise, solid purchases are gold and purple Bulins (if needed), T3 Skillbooks, T2 Retrofit Blueprints (T3 if needed), PR Blueprints and Dorm food; anything else isn't recommended though your needs may vary.
What are Retrofit Blueprints? How do I use them?
Retrofit Blueprints are used in retrofitting and consumed in the Retrofit tree found in ship details. Note that not all ships have a retrofit. It's recommended to save your blueprints and only retrofit ships you plan on using as higher tier blueprints can be hard to come by.
What is the best use of Core Data?
You'll want several Oxytorps and Black/White shells, the F4U Corsairs) are currently the best fighters in the game. Other useful items include Fairey Swordfish 818) which slow enemies on hit and the Homing Beacon for synchronizing airstrikes. The Seal of the Four Gods, improves Anshan class ships but otherwise is not worth buying.
All of the ships currently in the core shop are obtainable through war archives and/or aren't useful to a new player.
Why can't I rank up past Captain?
For Rear Admiral Lower Half and higher in addition to meeting the rank score requirement you must be high enough on the player leaderboards to rank up. For Rear Admiral Lower Half that means you need to be in the top 1000; all ranks and thresholds can be found here.
When is the daily/weekly reset?
[EN] Daily reset is at midnight PDT; weekly reset is Sunday at midnight PDT.
How to get Akashi?
Tap on her 30 times in the shop menu to get started. And you might want to hold on to 10 purple and 5 gold Sakura tech packs.
How do I unlock the last few memories in X event?
After clearing B3/D3/the last of the non-EX stage of the event, try beating it a few more times.
How do I earn Tech Points?
Tech Points are gained by obtaining, max limit breaking and max levelling (level 120) ships. You can see how many points each ship will give you in the Lab > Fleet Tech tab. As a rule of thumb big ships such as CVs or BBs will give you more tech points than little ships regardless of rarity. MLBing a ship gives you the largest amount of points out of the 3 step process; PR1 ships requirements are generally easier to meet than PR2/PR3 ships' fleet tech thresholds.
How do I earn experience for research ships?
PR EXP is only earned through oil-consuming PvE content (& Operation Siren) with the ships specified under the EXP objectives in the Shipyard. PvP matches, Dorm EXP, Lecture EXP and commissions do not count. The EXP goals are rather large; be prepared for a long grind. Ships who are at an EXP/level cap (i.e. 70/80/90/100~120 depending on limit break, cognitive awakening or EXP hard cap) will still contribute EXP to PR EXP objectives, even if it displays +0 EXP in the combat results.
What types of researches are best?
Here is the list for the best researches for earning PR blueprints. There is also a list for those who are looking to grind gear blueprints specifically. Note that PR ships are an endgame goal; investing cubes and coins into research projects early on will greatly impede your progress with little benefit so free researches are a better option while starting out.
What is the drop rate of X?
The only known drop rate is for Akagi & Kaga; each have a 0.75% chance to drop after defeating the boss of 3-4. No other drop rates are currently known.
Is X getting a rerun?
Most major events get a single rerun per region. You can check the Azur Lane Wiki to see if an event has already reran on your server's region. Reruns generally occur at least a year after the event's first debut; after the rerun is concluded ships from that event will slowly come to permanent construction pools. The exception to this rule are collaboration events which - so far - haven't seen any reruns due to licensing deals.
How do I get retrofit items for Sandy/Warspite/X?
UR retrofit item are acquired through limited-time events. They will have reruns, if you missed them you will have a chance to obtain them in the future. After having a rerun these items are permanently added to the prototype shop.
What is the next big event? Is there an event roadmap?
There is no known roadmap for any of the regions; big events are usually announced a week or two at most before the event itself is released.