Part 1 of 3: Originary Fragmentslag
As I previously discussed in my postfestival journal for Radiance Inviolate, I have a bunch of ideas for “atmospheric gay demon short fiction” floating around in my head at any given time. It has been one of my dreams to eventually write enough of these to form a collection.
Over the last year and change, interactive fiction has become the primary vehicle for that. I’ve finished more IF projects than anything else, really, so the medium is making my dream feel weirdly achievable.
The sections in this post detail a selection of the core fragments of ideas I had and influences that piled up into Pharos Fidelis, in roughly descending order of relevance.
Ascended (?) Skyrim Fanfiction
This work has a lot of contributing influences. Bizarrely, the most prominent influence is The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011). I played Skyrim, had a lot of thoughts about it, and came up with an idea for a fanfic. But I never wrote it, until suddenly it had its moment, and its elements got swept up into Pharos Fidelis. I’m surprised that of my “atmospheric gay demon fiction” ideas, the Skyrim fanfic one ended up becoming a 14th place IF Comp entry. Sure, why not.
I know that Skyrim is like, a gaming cultural monument, but nonetheless, I guess I should explain what it is? The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is an open-world fantasy RPG by Bethesda. Unlike Morrowind, the only other one in the series I’m familiar with, which feels a lot more distinctive, Skyrim is a pretty straightforward pastiche of fantasy tropes with vaguely Norse aesthetics glossed over it. On one hand, the game presents itself as gritty, realistic, and epic, promising violent duels with dragons and murky moral choices. On the other hand, the game’s notorious glitchiness, unserious and repetitive dialogue, and thoroughly broken combat mechanics transform it quite often into camp. I think it is much more remembered for its wackiness than any of its dramatic beats.
The game world of Skyrim has many strange implications if you spend time thinking about them, a process that the game half-encourages. Sometimes, the player is presented with decisions that are at least posing as moral questions, and the game draws your attention to this. Are you going to choose to be evil, power-hungry, and violent for no reason whatsoever, or try to be a good person? It clearly wants to register as having something to say about morality. Yet, at the same time, it does not wish for you to linger on these thoughts during combat. The game is all too happy to label people anonymously as “bandits” or “forsworn” who will relentlessly attack the player, thereby justifying their slaughter in an RPG-protagonist-power-fantasy-centered morality.
In this vein, the game clearly wants you to do the Dark Brotherhood questline (requiring you to become an assassin and kill random people because a mummy said so), while at the same wanting you to be the ultimate hero of the narrative. To be clear, I absolutely agree that you should do the Dark Brotherhood questline. And the Thieves’ Guild, too. Why else are we even here? And of course you should collect the Daedric artifacts. There’s an achievement for it. I don’t recommend investigating the dragon rumor at the Western Watchtower, though; if you do that quest, it bricks your save file.
This kind of moral compartmentalization is in no way unique to Skyrim whatsoever, but what I’m getting at is that, when you notice and pick at this effect, it results in some (to me) fascinating ways of analyzing the experience of playing it.
One of the schools of magic you can pursue in Skyrim is “conjuration,” a skill that allows you to summon progressively stronger entities from Oblivion (a hell-like dimension) to fight on your behalf for a certain duration of time.
On my most recent playthrough a few years ago, I decided to make this branch of magic my focus. At higher levels, you can eventually summon a “dremora lord,” a tall and kind of grumpy demon guy who will shout the same 4-5 aggressive phrases in combat as he tears down whatever random hostile NPCs you come across in your travels. You can eventually summon two of these guys at once, causing the word “lord” to lose a lot of meaning. What are they lording over, exactly, that there are hundreds if not thousands of completely interchangeable tall and grumpy demon guys wandering around in the void somewhere? Do they each have a little parcel of Oblivion that they get to have their own personal dominion over? Can I visit?
As I played this conjuration class type, I started to think a little too much about it. Like, what’s the vibe here really? Are we chill? Are we friends? After a dremora lord shouts “There you are, weakling!” at a mudcrab or hapless wolf for the fifth time or so, it starts to sound sarcastic to my ear. Is he joking? Am I in on the joke?
The answer seems to be no, not really. Due to my class focus I encountered a somewhat obscure quest called the Conjuration Ritual Spell, which takes place at the College of Winterhold. The conjuration specialist (Phinis) instructs you to summon an unbound (rather than bound) dremora lord. You are required to summon and kill the dremora lord a few times before he will agree under duress to steal a sigil stone from Oblivion for you.
The dialogue during these exchanges (when you summon the unbound dremora) are revealing (quoted from the UESP wiki):
Unbound Dremora: You dare bring me here? You will be punished.
Player: You will do as I say!
Unbound Dremora: I serve no mortal!or
Player: I summoned you. I control you now.
Unbound Dremora: You control nothing, mortal![the player kills him and summons him again]
Unbound Dremora: I am not your plaything, worm!
Player: Are you ready to submit?
Unbound Dremora: Never!or
Player: Admit that I control you.
Unbound Dremora: I’ll tear out your heart first![the player kills him and summons him a third time]
Unbound Dremora: I am not yours to toy with!
Player: Do you submit, or do I need to banish you again?
Unbound Dremora: I… I submit. What is your bidding, master. [sic]or
Player: I can do this all day.
Unbound Dremora: No, I… I submit. No more. What is your bidding?Player: Bring me a Sigil Stone. Now.
Unbound Dremora: Yes, my lord. Summon me again, and I shall have your stone.
Throughout the game, Skyrim and its lore work very hard to convince you that dremora are flatly evil. This doesn’t just apply to dremora, by the way. The treatment of enemies like bandits or forsworn are similarly dehumanizing most of the time. It’s oil that greases the gameplay along, so you can proceed from one combat event to another. Empathy would be grit in the works.
I am really not trying to be a damp rag here, by the way. This is not a moral condemnation of Skyrim or something; it’s part of the fiction. But I suffer from a case of “evil gay DemonApologist brain” which will introduce a certain level of melodrama into my gaming experience from time to time, and I like to lean into it because it makes things more interesting for me. It’s not clear that Skyrim should have (or ever would have) treated its world in a more empathetic or internally consistent way. That would be a fundamentally different game.
But this quest is really interesting. Dremora, whom the world’s characters constantly call “it” and you are repeatedly assured would tear you to pieces if given the chance, whose hearts are a potion/crafting ingredient, are revealed to be disconcertingly human here. The nameless unbound dremora has enough sentience and emotion to be prideful and fearful toward his abuser—the player. This says a lot about what conjuration spells represent in-universe, and the kind of person the player’s character has to be in order to be able to cast those spells without a second thought.
This quest really stuck with me more than anything else in the game plot-wise, and so I had an idea for a Skyrim fanfic following the following sequence of questions/premises:
- What if the dremora aren’t ontologically evil, and their toxic negative relationship with mortals has some kind of historical and cultural roots that could be interrogated?
- What if, instead of roleplaying the power fantasy of abusing a powerful demon and making him do what you want, you could roleplay as a character who objects to the structure of conjuration spells entirely and tries to rewrite magic to make summoning as consensual as possible?
- What if that dremora, when invited rather than forced to appear, thinks that the opportunity to spend time wandering around Skyrim with the player is probably better than the daily grind of Oblivion?
- What if you find the hot springs in Eastmarch and have some very interesting interactions there, the kind that might get you geoblocked in the UK?
- What if you eventually fall in love?
- What if the daedric prince Mehrunes Dagon is furious that you have “stolen” one of his laborers—sorry, lords—and tries to claw him back, and you have to make a deal with the perennially amusing daedric prince of drunken revelry Sanguine to get out of trouble?
- What if you show up at the Temple of Mara a little bit drunk with your arm around your dremora lord fiancé and ask them to bless your marriage?
- What if the Vigilants of Stendarr catch wind of this nonsense and try to assassinate you because of what your unholy union represents, and then you have to enter a fraught alliance with some of the vampires from the Dawnguard DLC?
Now that’s a DemonApologist version of Skyrim if ever there was going to be one. It’s very silly, but also kind of fun and dramatic, which I feel is a good place for a fanfic idea to land. It also has almost nothing to do with Skyrim, really.
But the truth is, there is almost no chance I ever would’ve gotten around to writing a Skyrim fanfic. Though, in hindsight, maybe I should have? I unironically think that would’ve gotten more readers and engagement than Pharos Fidelis has so far. Let me know in the replies if I should just ditch interactive fiction altogether and churn out Skyrim fanfics instead. I promise that I will pretend to want to read the fanwikis for accurate lore. If you insist.
Anyway, I shouldn’t have to spell out all the resonances between what I described above and Pharos Fidelis. While almost all of the Skyrim-specific elements got ditched, you can still see them hanging out here. There’s a magical college fortress (Cairnveld vs. Winterhold), a shady summoning expert (Luminary Raekard vs. Phinis), and even a healing expert (Luminary Jethel vs. Colette). Remember Colette? She’s the one who insists, “Restoration is a perfectly valid school of magic!” Colette did nothing wrong.
There’s probably a bunch of other things I subconsciously lifted from Skyrim that I didn’t even notice or remember. Oh well. Go find them, if that’s fun for you!
Astronomy Picture of the Day
On occasion, I like to look at the Astronomy Picture of the Day. Since it’s run by NASA, as of the time of writing, the most recent APOD is from October 1st, 2025, owing to the ongoing U.S. federal government shutdown. (If you are wondering why the U.S. Federal government is in shutdown, you might want to look into “Fascism - On Topic” for more information.)
Anyway, on December 28th, 2019, the Astronomy Picture of the Day was this photograph taken by Elias Chasiotis of a partial solar eclipse happening at sunrise, colloquially called a “devil horns” eclipse because of the shape created by the crimson bits of the sun still visible.
As someone who likes both demons and astronomy photos, I naturally found this image very inspiring. Total solar eclipses get the most publicity, because of how iconic, weird, rare, and cool they are. And I mean, fair enough. But there are a lot of interesting things that happen like this in partial eclipses as well.
Later, in May 2024, when I was looking to expand my roster of demon OCs for that year’s ArtFight event, I remembered this photo, and designed the character Vosaphar around the theme of “solar distortion demon.” For a little bit of context, ArtFight is an annual art trading event taking place in July where you can sign up to have your original characters drawn/depicted, and do that in turn for others.
I’m not the strongest artist in a technical sense, since I haven’t had much training and haven’t prioritized developing it as a skill in a serious way. I feel vulnerable sharing art. But even if I feel a bit disappointed in my artistry, I still took ArtFight as an invitation to try designing /developing new characters that are specific and visually interesting. I wanted anyone interested in drawing Vosaphar to get a sense for who he was, so I wrote up a few paragraphs of lore explaining what kind of story he might appear in.
In this lore outline, generations had failed to complete a lighthouse, and everyone eventually gave up on building it, except one last sorcerer who was still convinced he could get it to work. It was kind of like, the Hearst Castle of lighthouses, a monument to ostentatious failure, and The Tower in a major arcana tarot sense.
The last sorcerer decided to summon a demon from a cold, dark backwater of the hells—Vosaphar—and bound him by contract to steal a drop of sunlight to power the lighthouse’s lens. Given this Promethean conscription, Vosaphar was obligated to make the theft, and used the cover of an eclipse—when the sun and its guardians are most distracted by the moon—to make the attempt.
The stolen sunlight caused the lens to undergo a supercritical meltdown and shattering, killing the summoner and lodging lens fragments in Vosaphar’s body. An agent of the sun—in this version, I imagined the sunspot as a terrifying and slightly lovecraftian solar paladin who had broken off from the collective consciousness singularity of the sun and wielded a nasty spear—tracked down where he washed ashore. She was going to smite him, but he begged to be spared in light of the contract the sorcerer bound to him without his consent. In light of this, she stayed her hand, but nonetheless cursed him with the powers of solar distortion: fata morgana, mirages, green flashes, and so on.
Ever since, Vosaphar became a kind of cryptid for seafarers, drifting the seas near the unfinished lighthouse. Pirates would occasionally find him and take him aboard, coveting the powers of illusion Vosaphar now commanded. Eventually, though, Vosaphar’s distortive influence would instigate enough paranoia that he would be set adrift again and start the cycle anew. Maybe he would eventually connect with a friendly crew member and find his way out of it through the power of being gay and horny and consenting, a state known in some fell circles as “love”.
Really, that was it. Just some paragraphs of random lore that I threw together in 45 minutes or whatever. Not to diminish it, I think there were good ideas in there. But the important thing is, I had some characters, and a setting, and some plot events all based on a random astronomy photo. He ended up being one of the more popular demons in my ArtFight crew—and who can blame them, uwu—and that was that.
When I came across the IF community later that summer/fall, and did my IFComp 2024 responses to learn more about the genre, I started thinking about what project I would want to write for EctoComp 2024. I decided I wanted to write Vosaphar’s story. But I had a moment of revelation. I realized that I could combine the interesting elements from my Skyrim fanfic idea into Vosaphar’s ArtFight lore to create a third, maybe better thing: Pharos Fidelis.
Alfred Schnittke Visits the Dreg Heap
Alfred Schnittke is a late Russian composer of classical music. One of his best known compositions is Concerto Grosso No. 1 (1977).
This is a fascinating—if challenging—piece of music to listen to. I’m not going to pretend I absolutely love it, or love all of it. In particular, I find the fourth movement (“Cadenza”) almost unlistenable, and I usually skip it to get to the good parts (the “Toccata,” “Rondo,” and “Postludio”). How heretical, I know.
Concerto Grosso No. 1 is, essentially, a postmodern reinterpretation of a Baroque form. The instrumentation for this piece includes two solo violins, a small string orchestra, a prepared piano (this means that chunks of metal are put inside the piano on its strings to cause it to sound distorted and haunted), and a harpsichord. If you’re unfamiliar, a harpsichord is a baroque instrument that to me is a kind of proto-piano. It sounds a bit percussive and out of tune and can’t sustain notes well. (Musicologists/music historians, do not interact about this description. Especially do not interact about “equal temperament” or “just intonation” and how what I’m calling “out of tune” is actually more in tune than a modern piano because of the “pythagorean commas,” whatever those are, I’m so tired, please, let me rest.)
What Schnittke asks this ensemble to perform is, to my ears, what the history of Western classical music would sound like if you set it on the hot pavement on a sweltering day until it all melts together into slag.
If you try listening to one part of this piece, definitely listen to the fifth movement (“Rondo”). I’ll provide it here, in fact, like I did in the private author’s forum.
What you’ll hear at first is a somewhat traditional baroque volley between the violin soloists before it gets progressively weirder and more dissonant. At around 2:26 in the linked performance, the contrapuntal melody fades to make way for a bizarre tango led by the harpsichord, and the violins are just like, “Sure, we can do that now, I guess?” The tango folds into the pastiche, getting ever louder, and more dissonant and unpleasant, until finally arriving at an amazingly satisfying unified dramatic climactic melody (at 5:56) that shatters its own arrival at a cadence by cutting off (at around 6:11) to make way for the prepared piano to bang out its version of the lullaby from the opening of the piece.
When first listening to Concerto Grosso No. 1, my original opinion was that it was kind of incoherent, but despite that, there was still something intriguing about it. I kept listening to it again and again. Some kind of weird brain alchemy happens when you do this with dissonant classical music. The repetition causes it to become familiar, and I started to feel more of the push and pull between tension and release, where the tension is the sections that sound bad (to be a bit blunt) and the release is the stuff that more resembles the kinds of approachable harmonies/melodies that my ear is more comfortable with. It’s both serious—avant-garde classical music—and deeply unserious.
I thought I was listening to fragmentation—random scattered shards with no association—but I realized that I was actually listening to slag—these pieces melted together and taking on qualities from each other to create a single seething mass. (UK residents, do not interact about any other meanings of the word “slag,” which are not being referred to here. According to OSA, you shouldn’t know about those anyway.)
I pair this Schnittke example with a closely related bit of inspiration. The Dreg Heap is a location in The Ringed City DLC for the game Dark Souls III (2016), and serves as the penultimate location of that trilogy. This is a unique location that really stood out to me when I first played the game a few years ago. It’s a place where time and space have distended, reality in the process of collapsing upon itself. It’s an unusually vertical region. You start at the top and travel down, falling through decontextualized (and now recontextualized) buildings and set pieces from the previous three games all jumbled together. The “dregs” being “heaped” are the sum of all the in-game societies’ yearnings to build something and have a legacy, and all of it is sloshed together in still-eerily-beautiful ruin.
Continuing this theme, the boss of this area is a pair of demons—the last two, supposedly, but not actually—who try fighting off the player. In the Dark Souls trilogy, “demons” are the result of a powerful sorcerer’s—the Witch of Izalith’s—failed attempt to create a duplicate copy of the first flame, the source of most of the power/energy in the game. This failed copy backfired, corrupting everything around it and melting it, and the living creatures nearby twisted together and transformed into demons. The presence of these last two demons in this environment resonates with the in-universe history of their creation. (Soulsborne fanwiki editors, do not interact about my from-memory explanations of lore that may or may not be accurate.)
Once the player has successfully killed one of these two demons, the other rushes to absorb the last of their power, becoming an amalgamation of all demons that came before it, until the player kills that one, too. If the Dreg Heap represents the world of Dark Souls turning the environments into slag, its boss represents turning all its already-corrupted demons into slag as well.
I wanted the structure of Pharos Fidelis to feel like shattermelting fragmentslag (kaemis, do not interact about subconsciously kaemian phrases like “shattermelting fragmentslag,” especially not at gunpoint). Shards of glass, melting together. A unified whole composed of a lot of arranged pieces with disparate tones and elements that nevertheless orient toward each other.
You might at this point be like, did you seriously spend your entire summer writing and designing a novella-length work of interactive fiction because you were weirded out by a throwaway obscure side-side-side-quest in Skyrim, and also like Russian classical music and Soulsborne games?
Well, yes. I guess I did. Under these conditions, wouldn’t you have done the same?
The Three Principles of Summoning
Now that the bigger stuff is out of the way, I can explain the origins of a few elements that are still relevant, but not as overarching as the last ones.
One of the first things the reader sees when they start Pharos Fidelis is a reminder—courtesy of Luminary Raekard—of the Three Principles of Summoning. As a reminder—courtesy of me, this time—these instructions for how to safely and effectively force a demon to do what you want them to are summarized for the in-universe characters as a kind of litany: (1) obey the principle of authoritarian primacy; (2) beware the principle of semantic dilution; (3) account for the principle of planar reversion.
The direct inspiration for these comes from the game Outer Wilds (2019), which I played a few years ago. This game is especially vulnerable to be ruined through spoilers, but it takes place in a cute and never melancholy miniature solar system and is a genre that I saw somewhere described as a “metroidbrainia,” the idea being that all the progression is knowledge-based, and once you know about something or an in-game physical rule, you can make advancements to open new possibilities for what to do.
One location in Outer Wilds is called the Quantum Moon, and has three “quantum rules” that the player must learn in order to navigate it successfully, that are memorialized as plaques once you get there. The game is fascinating and horrifying and sad, and this location is where I had some of my most emotional moments with it.
At any rate, I had the quantum rules turning about in my head over and over as I worked to understand them, and it stuck enough that I referenced their structure/litany here.
Return to Title
A key element of the Pharos Fidelis user interface is a link at the bottom center of most passages that says “Return to Title.” However, upon clicking these, the reader is shunted instead to a false copy of the title screen that replaces the menu items temporarily with a cryptic message based on the passage they departed from. This is an intensification of a mechanic that I used in Radiance Inviolate, now fully realized.
The “Return to Title” misdirect in Pharos Fidelis is inspired by the FromSoftware game Otogi: Myth of Demons (2002), one of my favorite weird games that no one seems to know about when I ask. (People who know about Otogi and/or its sequel, do not interact, but only because you are willfully neglecting your responsibility to instead be creating Crimson King x Raikoh shipping fanworks.)
In this action game, the player controls the undead warrior Raikoh like a puppet, while the Princess—an NPC not seen directly—provides eerie guidance in an echoey voiceover. The game takes place in standalone stages with a built-in time limit. If Raikoh runs out of magic—a constantly depleting resources which powers his actions that he must steal from demons to survive—he dies again, and the player fails that stage.
Between stages, or after failing a stage, you can go to a menu to check out the shop or stage select. But if you do, you might encounter the Princess, obscured as a hazy figure in the background. Every so often, if you try to use the menu, she will freeze the screen temporarily to deliver some cryptic dialogue before allowing you to continue with your tasks. I love this feature of the game because it brings the simultaneously supportive and oppressive princess closer to the edge of the fourth wall. Instead of simply being a voice narrating the self-contained stages, she haunts the player in interstitial spaces that are normally safe from this kind of intervention. And you, the player, might notice that you are more similar to her than Raikoh than you wish to be, since both of you are attempting to control his actions for him.
I wanted to create a version of this eerie menu screen effect in Pharos Fidelis, hoping to spook some of the more thorough and attentive readers who might try to “Return to Title” while hunting for endings, and further draw out the relationship between the unknown narrator and the Warden of the Calciferous Wastes with these strange little messages infesting the title menu.
I don’t know that I want the reader to feel fully comfortable with their exploration of the timeline, and searching for every permutation just for the sake of completionism. Maybe the Warden doesn’t care about tormenting the characters, and I can’t force the player to do anything, but I can at least ask, “Must / your tenure / devolve / into scum / salvation?”
The Title to Return to
I came up with the title, “Pharos Fidelis,” very early in the process, on October 1st, 2024. I was brainstorming names for the in-universe lighthouse.
I was reminded of the word “Pharos,” not out of some high-minded attempt to reference antiquity, but instead because I had recently been replaying Dark Souls II (2014). I think that’s now every part of the Dark Souls trilogy mentioned in this journal, and the fourth FromSoftware game.
That game features a prominent and iconic lighthouse at Heide’s Tower of Flame, and a later area called the Doors of Pharros [sic]. Oddly, these two areas are not directly connected to each other in the (strangely constructed) game world of Dark Souls II. But I made the connection between the lighthouse and “pharos” all the same.
The first (bad) name I came up with was Pharos of the Howling Seas, which feels very weird to read now that I’ve typed and read the words “Pharos Fidelis” thousands of times, but I quickly (within minutes) moved on to the title Pharos Fidelis.
I like it for a bunch of reasons. I really enjoy the novelty of the visually clashing Ph vs. F alliteration, the English language just crunching random Greek and Latin roots together as it does. The English language is slag.
The phrase “Pharos Fidelis” means, roughly, “faithful beacon,” which I thought in-universe would be a very sarcastic way for people to describe the lighthouse. Oh yeah, that faithful beacon, that’s under an endless cursed storm and covered with shipwrecks. I feel like people often have a dark sense of humor about this kind of thing in real life.
And another thing, something I really love doing when making up names in or for projects, is to try to invent words and phrases that don’t exist in Google searches yet. Now there’s like, nine Google results for “Pharos Fidelis” instead of zero. You love to see it.
Much later, toward the very end of the process in August, I realized a stunning coincidence. Vosaphar (named in May 2024, much earlier than this game), contains both syllables, “phar” and “os.” I wish I could say I named the game after him on purpose, but I think it was just a subconscious word/sound association from having all these syllables floating around in my head. Coincidentally, Why Pout? (2024) was the last IF Comp game on my review list, finished up just prior to coming up with a title that subconsciously rearranged the syllables of the name of a key character.
So maybe the title is somehow Andrew Schultz’s fault. Really makes you think.
The Archives Will Haunt You
Some of the weirdest sections of this story—if I’m allowed to make that judgment—are the “Chronicles,” passages that represent in-universe archival documents that the characters annotate and discuss, if you click on the ⛯ (unicode “map symbol for lighthouse”) on those pages.
A few of these are too weird to have a direct inspiration. For instance, I have no real idea what the Era of Lightning chronicle is, or why it’s like that. My best guess is that it’s something to do with the iterative structure of fairy tales, with different groups of people volleying back and forth with the Emperor as they try to follow her misguided suggestions. I don’t know if it’s fully a poem, or what. The characters in their annotations are as confused and annoyed by it as I am.
At any rate, two of the Chronicles do have a specific inspiration. The Era of Pyrelight (that is, the pyretender consignment report) is a take on an office memo I found in the archives, describing thousands of copies of “obsolete” paperwork that were “destroyed by burning.”
In the context of historical violence conducted by a state, it carries a sinister weight, transforming the visceral act of watching paper peel and flake as the flames consume it into something unremarkable, commonplace. The memo describing the destruction is itself an obsolete text that could be discarded, yet it avoided the fate that it condemned others to, surviving in the archives, where I eventually saw it. I imagined, in Pharos Fidelis, a slippage from burning things that are simply unneeded out of convenience, to burning things that are undesirable. Things that aren’t person enough to continue to exist under a regime of burning.
Another chronicle, the Era of Sunlight, takes the form of an interview transcript between an unnamed Justiciar and Leisenelle, the Accused. This is meant to emulate the experience of reading old trial transcripts, where an attorney and the witness on the stand are required to contort their communication into a stilted question and answer performance for the judge and the jury. Stylistically, I wanted this (the oldest document in-universe) to feel the most jarring, so I loaded it up with uncannily modern-sounding language to set it apart from my more standard fantasy prose voice.