I read over my own notes and looked at the evidence taken from Giuseppe’s house. I had a broken tablet of volcanic glass, a cylinder of smoke, a journal and a wicked sharp knife of unknown origin. Honestly, nothing here is of known origin, I thought.

I had spent a lot of my time investigating the disappearance of a man that held an interesting life, but I would not learn of his story until I dove into his journal. After all, it was all I had that was written in his own hand. I will admit it was difficult to read, as the man did not seem to write in the regular sense of English. Words were spelled phonetically and not accurately.

he depth I must have plunged could not be accurately described. I stood upon a precipice overlooking the endless void of space itself. Below me there was nothingness, and it spread in all directions except for the outcropping of unknown white rock I stood on. A whistling breeze tremored through the chasm and moaned in twisting, tortured tones.

I absentmindedly thumbed through the journal, noticing what looked to be a couple pages of simply random words. Not all of them were in English, many in a couple different languages. I recognized German, Latin, and Greek, but the scribbles did not make any sense to me. The strange wedge-shaped symbols clustered together down a page looked little more than geometric rubbish. However, even though I could not make it out as a written language, it must have been code or shorthand, for it had a clear pattern—maybe even the flow that many languages have.