From the Journal of Elion Karsis
On Artificial Hunters, Ruins, and the Economics of Memory
Before the Brotherhood had a name, I was a courier.
Not the romantic kind—no banners, no last stands. I carried sealed parcels through condemned districts and dead archives, memorized routes that no longer existed on maps, and learned which ruins were guarded by monsters and which were guarded by ideas. That distinction matters more than people think.
Artifact Hunters are often mistaken for adventurers. They are not. Adventurers seek stories. Hunters seek function.
They are artificial in the purest sense—not born to their role, but assembled into it. Training layered atop instinct. Memory stacked against fear. Each one learns to think like a ruin: where pressure accumulates, where attention collapses, where guardians grow lazy. They do not rush. They read absence. They listen for things that no longer make sound.
Luck keeps them alive only briefly. After that, pattern recognition does the work.
Most ruins are not deadly because they are trapped. They are deadly because they are misremembered. Doors labeled safe that never were. Corridors that reward reverence with collapse. Guardians that respond not to aggression, but familiarity. I learned this early, running packages into places the Ascendancy no longer bothered to catalogue because meaning itself had become unstable there.
The Lamplight Collective understands this better than anyone.
They do not hoard relics. They circulate them. Knowledge, silver, partial schematics, ritual fragments—always incomplete, always moving. Lamplight trades not in power, but in distribution. They believe concentration is how artifacts wake incorrectly.
We trade with them because they accept a truth most factions refuse: no one survives alone, and no relic should belong to a single narrative.
As a courier, I carried silver wrapped in oilcloth, diagrams written in three dead alphabets, shards that hummed softly when no one was touching them. I learned which Hunters could be trusted with which burdens. Some artifacts demand caution. Others demand speed. A few demand neither—they demand distance.
Hunters die when they confuse confidence for understanding.
Artificial Hunters endure because they know they are temporary interfaces between past intent and future obligation. They expect guardians to lie. They expect traps to teach false lessons. They expect the ruins themselves to resent being entered.
That resentment is real.
I have felt it.
Places that remember the sun do not want to be awakened carelessly. They test motives, not skill. I watched capable Hunters fail because they wanted to use what they found. I watched others survive because they treated the relic as a witness, not a weapon.
The Brotherhood learned from this.
We do not send zealots into ruins. We send technicians of restraint. People who can leave things behind. People who understand that some treasures are messages, not tools.
Lamplight supplies routes, dead drops, and misinformation. We supply protection, extraction, and silence. Neither of us claims ownership. Ownership is how artifacts become gods—or prisons.
I remain convinced that my years as a courier taught me more than any doctrine ever could.
You cannot argue with a collapsing vault.
You cannot debate a guardian that remembers betrayal.
You cannot moralize your way past a door that opens only for those who do not want what lies behind it.
Artifact Hunters survive because they accept this:
The past does not want to be corrected.
It wants to be finished properly.
We trade with Lamplight because they understand that completion is a collective act. No hero returns the sun alone. No relic answers to a single hand.
If the Forever Night ends, it will not be because someone was brave.
It will be because enough people refused to let meaning be locked away,
forgotten,
or monopolized
by those who profit from darkness continuing.