A bright, sensitive student at Rozenport’s Sincomakti School of Sciences, Ulver Zandalus applied himself to learning the mysteries of the world. He was a talented writer, researcher, and artist, and bent his fascination and talent toward studying the ancient empires of Osirion, Kelesh, and Ninshabur. Despite his relative inexperience, his enthusiasm and faithful, detailed renderings of those civilizations’ most sacred places won him a spot on an expedition led by the famed scholar Doctor Henri Meirtmane. Along with Meirtmane and several veteran researchers, Zandalus journeyed to Katheer, capital of Qadira. But the Zandalus who left Rozenport never returned. During the expedition—one aimed at exploring freshly unearthed ruins outside of Katheer—Doctor Meirtmane discovered the location of a copy of a fantastically rare tome called The Chain of Nights. Because he was seen publicly helping the doctor, Zandalus was targeted and captured by the book’s owners, a drug cult sworn to a mysterious entity they called the King in Yellow. Although held for only 3 days, Zandalus was exposed to both potent hallucinogens and intense psychological torture. The cultists dragged him along with them on their dream travels, and what he witnessed infected his mind and shut down his ability to speak. Even after his rescue, yellow-tinged visions haunted Zandalus, and empty cities and crumbling skies plagued his nightmares. Upon returning to Rozenport, Zandalus received considerable counseling, but he never recovered his speech. Unable to study, he abandoned his classes and, for a time, joined the beggars and unfortunates inhabiting the local Pharasmin lamentation, a type of religious hospice. When Meirtmane learned of this, he saw to Zandalus’s placement in a true asylum, entirely at the expense of the Sincomakti School. For several years Zandalus passed between institutes before finally arriving at Briarstone Asylum.
AT BRIARSTONE
In 4687, Ulver Zandalus became a patient at Briarstone. Mute and generally harmless, Zandalus was a calm but largely unresponsive patient. Even under the care of the asylum’s head doctor; Eliege Losandro; he showed no improvement, endlessly suffering dramatic night terrors. While Losandro’s addition of art therapy to Zandalus’s schedule helped to calm and distract him during the day, he turned skittish every evening, and whenever exhaustion forced him to slip into sleep, he woke screaming unintelligibly. Although Zandalus’s art was nothing like a cure to his affliction, he produced thousands of remarkable coal and chalk illustrations over the years, nearly all depicting the harsh cityscapes and tortured faces common to his dreams. His art even gained some limited notoriety, and was exhibited in Rozenport where it happened to
catch the eye of the local count, Haserton Lowls. For his own obsessive reasons, Lowls began visiting Zandalus at Briarstone. In private conference with the man, Lowls vacillated between watching him work and relentlessly interrogating him about his dreams, the city that appeared therein, and a realm he called the Dreamlands. While Zandalus never answered a single question, Lowls read much in the tormented man’s eyes. From Zandalus’s art and his one-sided interviews, Lowls became convinced of some secret connection between the Star Stelae of Thrushmoor and the lost city of Neruzavin—a secret trapped in Zandalus’s dreams, whether he knew it or not. Convinced of his own theories, Lowls set one last experiment in motion. He presented to Administrator Losandro a cure for Zandalus’s condition. Claiming it was the only way to finally excise her longsuffering patient’s nightmares, Lowls gave her his own copy of The Chain of Nights. With that, he departed, curious to learn what might transpire, though knowing that the results would be
quite dramatic and dangerous. In the following days, Losandro discovered and performed the release nightmare occult ritual, which she hoped would liberate Zandalus from his nightly torments. Yet she’d always assumed that Zandalus’s dreams were natural, the scars of trauma. Rather, Zandalus’s brush with the Dimension of Dreams had made him the victim of a terrible sort of virus, one that had grown strong over the years. As Zandalus dreamed, his mind sang out to the denizens of the un-waking realm, drawing curious and ever more terrible things to follow his nocturnal journeys. Since coming to Briarstone, one in particular, a being as much of legend as of nightmare, had become Zandalus’s nightly tormentor: the Tatterman.
Losandro’s ritual seemed to free Zandalus from his nightmares, enabling to speak again and sleep peacefully for the first time in decades. However, it also did something far worse. No longer restrained to dreams,
the Tatterman took hold of Zandalus’s mind and, by night, slipped into the real world to sow fear and cause terrible transformations throughout Briarstone. Now Zandalus struggles to keep hold of his own mind and
body, knowing that every time he falls asleep, the Tatterman speaks and acts through him, building a terrible cult to the mind twisting faith of Hastur. Yet, while he manages to stay awake, the monster haunts
the fringes of dreams, killing victims in their sleep and turning them into monstrous servants.
