## Beyond Britannia Being an account of Goodman Aric, Contractor and Engineer for His Liege, Lord British, and His Efforts to Design the Britannian Sewers Let ye who reads this know that the first of my two mistakes was to consult that damn mage Sutek when Lord British commissioned me to design and construct the sewers beneath Britain. My peers cautioned me against Sutek. "Half-mad," they claimed, his mind shattered afoul by some secret knowledge of the accursed Shadowlords and their birth. But that I could not believe, for rumors also claimed the mage had been pivotal in the Avatar's victory over the tyrant Blackthorn. And those in the Lycaeum and the Great Council heralded him a genius, a mage ahead of his time. And his idea was intriguing. "What better way to rid thyself of sewage," said Sutek, "than to have thy sewage simply disappear." Disappear? No. His vision was a sewer system without end, infinite in size to slough infinite streams of excrement and sludge. So we set to work, he and I. He with magic; I with pen. I drafted a fundamental design, one the mage would expound with magic, then I hired a crew. The little worm, Toede, was the first to join. A nasty little brute, he was, and his mouth was always yappin' about the "good ol' days" with Blackthorn, "a nicer overlord I've never met." Still, he was skilled with his hands and there was intelligence once thou didst dig past his surface of dim wit. More importantly, he knew Blackthorn's castle from foundation to roof. Thus he was charged with constructing the "test" we held beneath Blackthorn's crumbling palace. Toede was enthusiastic, that much I give him. Perhaps that was why he was the first to lose himself among passageways that Sutek had extended beyond Britannia itself. When Toede returned, thanks only to a safety mechanism that Sutek had built into the passages to save unfortunate souls who had lost their way, the poor fool's mind had cracked. He gibbered of a cave of fire that had appeared behind him in a flash of light. Daemons dwelled there, so he claimed, and captured him, but he escaped and became lost, though he drew a map to the daemon's lair, not that I could make hide nor hair of it. He disappeared again, a few days later, and so did many of my men, swallowed by my sewers. What worlds Sutek opened up to extend my passages beyond Britannia, he would not say, only that he was working to control them and that it would be best to avoid them. My second, and fatal, mistake was not to heed his advice. While inspecting the walls of a junction, I suddenly found myself here, in this place which seems a jumbled collection of places I once knew, without a soul in sight, left to wonder what happened to that cursed Sutek and my doomed project. Know ye this, reader: Thou art lost if thou dost read this, and thou art alone. Years I have spent here, years far too many, and now 'tis time I end my imprisonment. 'Tis time to join the souls that I miss 'Tis time...