It's been almost a week since the last entry. I found plenty of brief mentions of the Moarte Verde, but none of it told me anything new. They were all about rampages or searches for an adequate host, just more of what I had already learned from the accounts of Markus Dufresne and Coribeth Breckenridge. In the meantime, the Archives began to demonstrate bouts of increasing hostility. Four days ago I got chased down several aisles by some gibbering mass mismatched limbs and mouths about the size of a large cat before I managed to climb up a few shelves and drop a sufficiently heavy volume on it. A bit earlier than that it lured me into reading something that has...deprived me of the ability to sleep soundly every night since. Just yesterday on my way back to my room I found myself wandering through endless hallways, talking to Agency staff who spat out utter nonsense, and being taunted by my own shadow. At first I thought it was residual psychological damage (maybe even a stroke) until I realized I had never left the Archives. After that, I decided to add some warding symbols to my quarters. It should already be entirely secure, but I feel like the recent hostility has been a bit more than just the Archives...being the Archives. Maybe I'm just being paranoid, but I sort of get how paranoid Gilbert and Shauna have seemed. Even more so after reading the accounts of Caleb Dietrich.
Born in Vienna in the fourteenth century, Caleb Dietrich was a thief and a con artist until he tried to burgle an Agency safe house. He nearly made it out of the city with a chest containing an ancient, Carthaginian spirit before a he was stopped by a huntsman named Petrus Moser and an alchemist named Leandre Flamel. Moser was furious, but Flamel was merely fascinated. They locked Caleb away for the night and told him they would decide his fate in the morning. A few hours later the man had nearly reached a balcony when a trap door opened up and dropped him into a room with Moser looking even more annoyed and Flamel looking even more intrigued. That was when the alchemist offered him a job as his assistant. Caleb agreed quite readily, but it took three or four months before he really decided to settle into the role. That was after he had taken several opportunities to run and had been caught by Moser every single time. It was also after he'd had the chance to see Flamel at work. It's said that Leandre Flamel could catch a storm in a bottle, brew up concoctions to bring down manticores, and build fortresses that could man their own defenses. Some of his brews and mechanisms have never been replicated because no one else could figure out how to get the materials just right or what confluences of natural and supernatural forces needed to be present.
To understand Leandre Flamel, it's important to realize that the Agency was then in a time of transition. For quite a while, it had been under the management (in theory, at least) of the Catholic Church, but now it was being funded by and using the infrastructure of a handful of highly placed nobles. The trouble was that many of those nobles wanted to use the Agency and its resources for their own purposes, and it was slowly being split into factions and deprived of its autonomy. Like many his comrades, Leandre Flamel disliked the changing atmosphere, and he believed that with enough wealth and arcane power he could bring unity back to the Agency and put the upper management back at arms length. And when the Black Death first hit Europe, he was convinced that if he could conjure some weapon against it then the final victory would be his.
Unlike his more famous nephew, Leandre Flamel had little interest in the Philosopher's Stone. What did grab his interest was another marvelous and highly theoretical substance that as yet had no name. All anyone who had previously hinted at it knew was that it would have to be a substance possessed of life and even a sort of spiritual element. Theories about actual uses varied, but most alchemists agreed that it could be employed to perform medical marvels. Flamel began work trying to create the substance a few years after he acquired Caleb Dietrich as his assistant, and it took about fifteen years before his quest was completed.
It was slow going at first. Caleb would simply help him toy around with various fluids and other such things whenever they had the time. Sometimes Flamel would want the spinal fluid of a ghoul or some other exotic material, and the two of them would travel with huntsmen in search of ingredients. At that point he was just looking for the base substance, the thing that they would later project a spirit or other metaphysical form onto. But then things started to get worse. Flamel would spend days locked in his lab. He would send Caleb out to "acquire" increasingly dangerous materials, and he showed less and less interest in the feats of cunning that his assistant enjoyed bragging about. There were books of magic bound in human skin. There were sealed containers taken from the dungeons of dark sorcerers. There instruments taken from Agency safe houses which had been lost various disasters, accidents, and attacks. Then one day, Caleb was sent to track down a caravan of artists, performers, and fortune tellers in Eastern Europe. After several days of studying the group, and one very near miss, he got away with a locked chest containing the skull of a pig. Ever inch of the artifact was carved with arcane symbols and one brief phrase written in some ancient language. The mere knowledge that he had such a thing made Caleb uneasy, and he quickly locked it back up after he'd inspected it. He delivered the skull back to his master and then took a leave to consult with another scholar of the Agency about Flamel's obsession and the phrase carved into his latest find. Shortly after that, Leandre Flamel completed his work and consequently lost all that remained of his mind to the Moarte Verde. On that same day, Caleb Dietrich was in Florence learning the meaning of the phrase written in Aramaic on the skull of a pig. It meant, "We are Legion, for we are many."
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