L.T. File: 004: Tyiilur̀-Veiled Masters

I. The Personal Experience log of Director Sashine of the Experiments done to herself by the Tyiilur̀, K'kull

I remember when I was young, I remember my parents. Not well, but I remember their smiles, and the lilting sound of my mother's laughter. That laugh was the single good thing in the deep. It was incomparable, and there were no words in that dark place to explain it. Now that I've reached the surface, and seen the beauty of the world, I can say that that laugh was like wind through a field of chime-grass, the sound of songbirds, and the soft fall of snow in the silence of a mountain pass. K'kull silenced it with an experiment. She was just another discarded failure to K'kull, but to me she was everything. My father gave up his life, and died six-hundred years later, before i was even taken for my first experiment.

By the standards of experiments, my first few were relatively simple, relatively painless. I was lucky that they were not done by followers of Sh'sildroneth, not done by K'kull the butcher. My first experiments consisted of having my skin peeled off and put back on. It was a psychological experiment. I didn't break like all the others did, they thought that was interesting. Interesting that my mind survived the pain of my skin being peeled off and fused back on. But I had already suffered worse pain than that at the loss of my mother, and the death of my father. My friends had been unmade, and existed only as wandering spirits. This was before the time of the Aulvistones.

The experiments that followed got worse and worse, but I did not break through them either. I had already been broken, but had not yet been put back together, so there was nothing left to break, nothing that they could take except my life in those dark days. They gave me to K'kull, and my true torment began. He took my memories of my mother's laugh, of my father's smile, of the games I had played with my friends. He took every memory from me except the memories of pain. I do not know how long I was there before he discarded me. He had taken my memories, but not the knowledge of their loss. He had made me very aware that he had them in his fourth glowing tendril. He sometimes replayed them for me, just to take them away again.

I would have broken shortly after he discarded me, I likely would have if my mentor had not found me. Old man Dirt. I hated him, and I loved him. He had been filled with a thousand-year curse. He had been made undamagable for one-thousand years, but at the end of that time, all of the damage that he took in that time would be inflicted upon him simultaneously. He acted like he never cared. He was amazing, he counted the seconds in his mind, and always knew, was the only one of us who kept still kept track of time, because he was the only one with a ticking clock.

He taught me how to keep time. He brought me out of my despair. He gave me my life back, and gave me purpose. That constant thinking honed my mind, and like a ceramic shattered and glued together with molten gold, I was reforged. When the Prince and the Jesters began to free the people, I returned to K'kull, who still did not see the danger of our hope. I pinned him to the wall and cut off his fourth tendril. I made him watch as I got my memories back, as I ruined his experiment, then I cut off his other tendrils, memories of his other experiments. But, I gave him my name, and told him what I had done, made him know me before I left with the Prince on the exodus.

Dirt died three years, three months, three days, twelve minutes and three seconds before we made it to the surface. His last moments were spent with friends. I hope that K'kull still hunts for me, because I want to see him again, see how my experiment has gone on. I remember the games I played with my friends. I remember the smile on my father's face. I remember the sound of my mother's laugh. and I will never let anyone make me forget again.

II. Children's Rhyme: The Veil Game

(Commonly sung while children walk in a circle, hands linked, dim lights flickering to mimic the Below. when the line "fall down flat" occurs, the children fall to the ground before singing the rest of the song.)

“Tyiilur̀ creeping in the deep, Whisper-soft they crawl and creep. Hide your dreams and hide your name, Or Veiled Ones play their favorite game.

First they pull, then they pry, Take your laugh and make you cry. Round and round the tendrils wind— Hope is what they cannot find.

Fall down flat, stay still, stay small, Shadows pass, they touch not all. But if you feel the cold below… Run to light, and do not slow.”

III. Philosophical Addendum: Aeosh and the Dread Masters

(By Adder, the wise, excerpt from " of light and darkness" a primer on the philosophies of the void, and of creation.)

Aeosh was born from the same Silence as the Dread Masters, yet diverged from their purpose. Where the Masters unmake, Aeosh shaped. Where they pressed entropy into form, Aeosh pressed possibility. His siblings—those beings who would become Sh’sildroneth, En’tulod, Nn’nn’nl, and the host of unnameable kin—saw creation as a flaw, a weakening of the Void’s stillness. But to Aeosh, the Void was lonely. He believed that meaning could rise only through contrast, that light exists not to banish darkness, reveal what hides within it.

Aeosh is often interpreted by Aulven scholars as the first heretic of his own pantheon—a traitor to the principles of entropy. Yet others argue he was the only one among them who perceived a truth the others could not: creation is not the enemy of nothingness. Creation is the rebellion against inevitability. In shaping the first beings, Aeosh did not oppose his siblings—he challenged the idea that their singular purpose defined the nature of existence itself.

The Dread Masters are entropy with intention. Aeosh is intention given creation. Thus, their conflict is not war—it is disagreement on the fate of possibility.

IV. Recovered Log Fragment: K’kull — Experiment Archives

(Translated from chrono-inscribed glyph-organ patterns. Original structure was non-linear and has been rendered into sequential approximation.)

EXPERIMENT 884120. Subject displays resistance to dermal separation. Skin removed, reapplied, removed again. Psychological collapse expected but not observed. Notable anomaly: continued coherence. Hypothesis: structural imperfection in subject consciousness architecture allows flexibility. Further removal cycles scheduled.

EXPERIMENT 884121. Memory extraction. Target recollection cluster detached. Subject displays agitation correlated with loss but retains awareness of absence. Unexpected adaptive response. Retaining extracted cluster for later reintroduction to test recursive trauma loop.

EXPERIMENT 884121-B. Reintroduction of recollection cluster produced heightened neurological instability. Removal again produced inverse effect—subject stabilized upon the second extraction. This contradicts previous recursion-loop behaviors observed in lesser organisms. Hypothesis: Subject psyche may be attempting to “reject” external anchoring structures, treating its own memories as intrusive stimuli. Noted as useful deviation. Preparing for tier-three loop cycling.

EXPERIMENT 884122. Introduction of counterfactual memory strata. Artificial recollection: birth beneath the continental mantle, kinship with lithic leviathans. Subject accepted false cluster with minimal resistance. However, within 37 pulses, the subject began generating spontaneous elaborations—fabricated mythic extensions not present in seeded content. Organism demonstrates capacity for ideation unbound from experiential substrates. Dangerous trait. Worth cultivating.

EXPERIMENT 884122-C. Counterfactual strata removed. Subject experiences conceptual vacuum: expresses attempt to “lean” on missing fabrication. Behavior resembles withdrawal from sensory deprivation protocols. Not psychologically productive. Next iteration to include nested falsehoods with contradictory emotional anchors.

EXPERIMENT 884123. Neural retuning via tri-lobed resonance blade. The blade’s oscillatory frequency destabilized long-term memory pathways but unexpectedly strengthened short-term reflex loops. Subject’s reaction times improved by 34%, despite partial disintegration of linguistic recall. Organism relies increasingly on pattern recognition over semantic reasoning. Preliminary analysis: Consciousness attempting to re-optimize around inflicted damage. Commendable improvisation.

EXPERIMENT 884124. Induced environmental hallucination: constructed perception of flooding chamber with abyssal fluid. Subject reacted with measured panic, not full collapse. Hallucinatory stimuli were absorbed into dream-mirror layer unusually fast—subject converted terror into internal narrative structure. This is atypical among bipedal surface species. Subject may possess primitive mythopoeic defense reflex.

EXPERIMENT 884124-E. Attempted to overwrite hallucination layer with null-state monotony. Failure. Subject retained remnants of the abyssal imagery inside the imposed blank environment, generating hybrid perception: “an empty room filled with invisible water.” Creativity under duress noted. Possibly an emergent mutation or inherited quirk. Will dissect later for genomic architecture.

EXPERIMENT 884125. Pain thresholds tested using alternating thermal and telepathic stimuli. Rather than escalating screams, subject began producing rhythmic vocalizations. Hypothesis: self-generated harmonic patterns used to localize identity under sensory fragmentation. Veiled Master consensus: rhythm may inhibit deeper restructuring. Countermeasure: disrupt rhythm with anti-harmonic pulses next cycle.

EXPERIMENT 884126. Application of anti-harmonic pulses successful. Subject’s rhythm collapsed. Identity lattice faltered but reconstituted at a different alignment—seemingly more rigid. Unexpected. Identity should degrade with each assault, not consolidate. Potential explanation: subject derives stability from opposition, forming a counter-structure to resist manipulation. This is inefficient for assimilation but of high research value.

EXPERIMENT 884127. Attempted split-consciousness trial. Divided subject’s cognition into two parallel streams using mirrored neuroglyph splicing. Anticipated result: mutual interference and collapse. Actual result: both branches cooperated, exchanging information through non-glyph channels. Suggests endogenous communication mechanism within psyche. Veiled Master theorists contest possibility; decision: repeat with harsher division parameters.

EXPERIMENT 884128. Dual-stream cognition resisted harsher division. One stream sacrificed itself—deteriorated deliberately to maintain integrity of the other. This indicates strategic self-editing. Alarm raised. Creature is not merely resilient—it is learning the experimenter.

EXPERIMENT 884129. Subject isolated. No sensory input for eight cycles. Expected drift into formless self. Actual outcome: subject reconstructed hallucination of experimenter—approximate silhouette of K’kull—suggesting attempt to anticipate next procedure. This indicates predictive modeling. Very dangerous. Must begin termination protocol soon.

EXPERIMENT 884130. Initiated termination. Subject resisted beyond projected thresholds and attempted psychic inversion—tried to read the experimenter. Minimal success but statistically significant. Entire chamber flooded with cleansing ichor. Subject dissolved physically, but neural pattern did not fully collapse. Residual psychic imprint remains within substrate.

Awaiting master directive on whether to contain the imprint or incorporate it into future composite consciousness trials. Recommendation: Do not discard. The fragment dreams.

- Director's note. This appears to be notes on an aulvi who's psionic powers were improved by K'kull to a point that even after death, a psionic imprint remained. This may be part of the origination of the Aulvistones. This could be historically important for the song of our people. - Sashine