Entry XII
Celesta is dead.
She left so peacefully, and yet the tremor she left in our hearts will never fade.
After the explosion, the abandoned factory was filled with the stench of gunpowder and scorched earth.
The shards of the Grail were nowhere to be found.
Edgar knelt beside her, like a statue that had lost its soul.
He didn't cry.
He didn't scream.
He simply held her cold hand, silently, mechanically.
At that moment, I thought he would collapse, rage, destroy all of us in his grief.
But he didn't.
He merely lifted his head to look at us. His voice was hoarse and low:
"You… destroyed her only hope."
"Her hope was to destroy the Grail!" I shouted back.
But then I saw it—
a flicker of madness, stubborn and wild, begin to glow behind his eyes.
"She didn't understand…
She didn't know…
If I can gather the fragments,
I can save her…
I can bring her back…"
He wasn't really talking to me.
He was trying to convince himself.
That desperate longing twisted his once-calm face.
This man, once so rational and composed, now looked like a hollow shell animated by obsession alone.
"You're insane, Edgar… You can't do this…" I murmured—
but I knew he couldn't hear me anymore.
He stood, draped in dust and blood, staggering into the dark, leaving behind a single whisper:
"I will bring her back… even if it costs the whole world."
At that moment, I knew—
he was truly lost.
And worse: his madness now wore the mask of reason.
I cannot let him succeed.
I have to find the Grail shards first.
Destroy them.
Or hide them where he'll never reach.
Even if it costs me my life.
Entry XIII
Time feels like a severed thread—
we've lost all sense of direction.
The city, on the surface, still moves.
The expansion is complete.
People sing praises of Edgar's vision.
But underground, in the shadows,
everything is quietly rotting.
Our bodies—are rotting too.
My wife and I both began to notice it—
a strange fatigue and pain, gnawing day after day.
At first, we thought it was grief or exhaustion,
but eventually even breathing felt heavy.
Maybe…
we were too close to that thing, too many times.
After Celesta destroyed the Grail, Edgar predictably refused to accept it.
He had his men comb the ruins of the factory for days.
We watched him in secret.
He brought strangers—people I didn't recognize—
but found nothing.
That's because he didn't know this place like we did.
Beneath that old factory lies a forgotten well.
And years ago—
we discovered that something else waited down there.
At the bottom of that well…
we found the base of the Grail.
It lay there silently.
Not glowing like the other shards—
but heavy, oppressive, present.
We didn't dare take it.
Instead, we built traps, seals—
buried it deep, where Edgar would never find it.
Because if he ever gathered the shards,
without the base, the Grail would remain incomplete.
Still—
we couldn't help ourselves.
We kept returning, just to look.
Every time, it felt like it was looking back.
Whispering.
Tempting.
Sometimes I even dream about it—
a figure standing before me, offering everything—
if only I said yes.
It's a poison buried in the blood.
And now I understand—
Edgar didn't snap all at once.
The Grail chipped away at him—
slowly, gently, insidiously.
It twisted his love.
It devoured his ideals.
It ground down his resolve and shaped it into an altar of sacrifice and prayer.
We cannot let this happen again.
So we made our decision:
Let this ruin, and that base,
be sealed.
We sealed the wellhead.
Trapped it with every mechanism and safeguard we could imagine.
Not for use.
Only for forgetting.
The Grail must never return to this world.