[UNOFFICIAL BRIEFING: THE FIRST DAMNED]
SUBJECT: Dr. Thorne and His Garden of Glass
The Corpos have a file on Dr. Aris Thorne. It’s short. A brilliant but arrogant Vaulted biologist from the early days who broke quarantine, wandered into the Wastes, and was never seen again. A cautionary tale about hubris.
That’s the sanitized version.
The gutter truth, the story you’ll hear whispered around an Outlander fire, is that Thorne wasn’t just a tourist. He was an archaeologist of the apocalypse. While Silas Vance was building his cage, Thorne was the first to step into the new, alien world outside, obsessed with documenting the madness. Anya Volkov is a prophet because she learned to survive the Wastes; Aris Thorne is a legend because he was the first to let it break him to show us how it works.
His fragmented logs, recovered over decades, are the foundation of every bestiary and survival guide that exists. Here are the horrors he found.
- The Lure: Thorne’s Folly Aris first wrote about the amber crystals, the ones that now bear his name. These massive, glowing shards jut from the frozen earth, radiating a soft, life-giving warmth. To a survivor freezing in a blizzard, they are a miracle. This, Thorne learned, is the trap. The warmth is just the bait. The crystals also radiate a concentrated form of the Blight. His logs describe the “warmth-sickness”: a slow, crystalline transformation. Stay too long, and your skin hardens, your flesh turns to a brittle, amber glass, and your mind dissolves into the static.
- The Garden: The Weeping Caps Thorne’s logs detail the impossible flora of the Wastes, most famously the towering mushrooms he called “Weeping Caps.” Sprouting in clusters of two or three, they glow with a nauseating fluorescent amber light. They constantly ooze a thick, sticky slime that coats the ground around them, trapping the unwary. Outlanders now know that this slime is a potent alchemical reagent, but Thorne only saw it as part of the world’s creeping, alien infection.
- The Inhabitants: The Pale and the Warped Thorne was the first to categorize the Wastes’ new predators.
- The Pale: His logs describe encounters with fully blighted humanoids, their skin bleached white and their eyes sealed shut by the unending, frozen darkness. He wrote that they move with an unnatural, twitching grace, navigating the ruins not by sight, but by some uncanny sense he couldn’t comprehend. They are the silent, lurking horrors of the deep wastes.
- The Warped: He documented creatures that defied biology—animals twisted into new shapes with crystalline shells, scaly hides, and a hostile, “unknown geometry”. His notes obsess over how their forms seem purposeful, as if they were being redesigned by an alien intelligence.
- The Revelation: The Whispers and the Echoes Thorne’s final, frantic logs reveal his most terrifying discovery: the Blight wasn’t just changing the world, it was changing the mind. He was the first to truly document the Whispers, describing them not as a sound, but as a “psychic pressure” that translated into sensory glitches and maddening paranoia . His last revelation came after killing a warped creature. He described a “psychic backlash,” a flood of the creature’s final moments, its alien logic, and its pain, downloaded directly into his brain . He called it an “Echo.” He was the first to experience what every hunter in the wastes now knows and fears.
His final, corrupted entry is just a single, screaming audio file, the sound of a man whose mind has been shattered by seeing too much of the world’s new, terrible truth. His body was never found, but his legend serves as a warning: you can study the madness, but you can’t stay an observer for long. Eventually, it will make you a part of its collection.
[TRANSMISSION END]