Dethroning the Fiend God: Terces Archive

Terces Archive — An invitation behind a familiar face

The opening recalls Adimonde’s surprise at Oblivion’s attack and his command that Nulgath return as a god. It then moves to a wooded meeting with someone presenting herself as Jadzia. The Hero expects a private conversation about Nulgath’s ambitions but immediately notices an unfamiliar manner. Trust in the real loremaster’s steady work at Termina Temple makes the Hero willing to listen, though recollections of unpaid loans soon cool that enthusiasm.

The apparent Jadzia promises a discovery worth more than gold. There is a forbidden place behind Nulgath’s usual position; Carnage and Oblivion have been admitted, she claims, while the Nation’s Loremaster has been excluded. The Hero worries that intruding could destroy hard-won trust with Nulgath. The invitation turns that concern around: why should the Hero be kept unaware of what happens behind their back? They agree to find out.

Inside, the borrowed loremaster says Nulgath is recovering from his tests and has gone silent. So much for the Hero being first to witness a new age. The guide claims no one is born a Fiend anymore, and finds transformed creatures tastier than any that once were. The guide’s enthusiasm for mutation is visceral: horns tearing through skin, eyes opening, mouths gnawing organs. This is the figure who later admits the disguise, not reliable evidence that the real Jadzia delights in eating or mutilating everyone around her.

Terces Archive — The operating theatre

Oblivious Oblivion begins the nine-quest route by silencing Magi loyal to both their old and new Masters. The guide calls Nulgath’s tolerance of divided loyalty either growth or weakness. Tongue and Cheek turns to Fiendish Devourers—failed experiments reduced to walking mouths. O.T. clears the way to the Operating Theatre. According to the guide, Nulgath normally puts new Fiends straight to work but adjusts exceptional followers such as Carnage, Jadzia and Dage on a dissection table.

The Fiend is in the Details sends the Hero to recover the experiment log and speak to Carnage. A message attached to the dissection table describes its remaining warmth and a Fiend’s nervous system spread across it: Nulgath’s nerves. The guide finds the real distinction in the research’s cost. Nulgath is not merely treating minions as disposable subjects; he is scarring his own soul in pursuit of Adimonde.

Carnage immediately contradicts the alleged exclusion of Jadzia. She is required at the experiments and devises new plans when Oblivion runs out of answers. He first suspects a prank, then grows serious when the Hero grabs his arm and insists that he tell Nulgath. Carnage’s account reveals that the real Jadzia and Oblivion are experimenting directly on their Master. He says they are running out of clones and begins to explain that they will need to use “more of our own,” then stops himself from oversharing and insists Nulgath will explain when necessary.

Terces Archive — The log’s purpose

The Experiment Logs bear Jadzia’s name and describe a project to make Nulgath’s body capable of destroying Adimonde and taking his place as God of Fiends. She does not consider directing it a loremaster’s proper work. Secrecy has put her in charge for now; the records are intended for a more capable ritualist who can eventually replace her. The eleven pages are an attributed laboratory record, not a demonstration that the intended godhood has already been achieved.

Initially, Jadzia and Oblivion meant to use inert clones. Nulgath insisted on inhabiting them himself. Oblivion’s inherited knowledge guided attempts to enlarge and strengthen Archfiend bodies, with the available information on Elemental Titans serving as a reference. The first five clones were dipped back into the Fiend’s Void while Oblivion steered their mutations. Favorable early results ended in bodies collapsing into puddles within hours.

Each failure required an immediate transfer of Nulgath’s soul. Repeated trials caused injury, confusion and increasing difficulty moving him between bodies. Jadzia calls for fewer experiments rather than pretending the disposable flesh makes the process harmless. Soulectomy gives that account a brutal counterpart in the halls: the Hero clears Wasted Clones while the guide describes minions ripping Nulgath’s soul free before it degrades further.

Terces Archive — Fear and the self

For clones six and seven, Jadzia suggests slower and less intense mutation. The bodies last longer but fail in combat with Carnage, their own muscles squeezing and breaking their bones. During the mutation of clone eight, Oblivion accidentally obscures a part of Nulgath and removes the mortal impulse to fear. The log calls this body superior to its predecessors and records it becoming his primary vessel. That is the researchers’ reported change, not a measured law for every Fiend’s soul.

Clone nine exposes a greater danger. In Jadzia’s account, mutation ordinarily improves a Fiend while leaving a recognizable self. This creation holds Nulgath’s soul but speaks as something the observers cannot recognize. What remains of his self-awareness orders an immediate transfer. Carnage and Jadzia dispose of the abandoned body in a furnace. Her nausea marks the gap between stronger flesh and a surviving person.

Nulgath asks them to reproduce the ninth trial without inhabiting the experimental bodies. For clones ten through twelve, the Fiends being mutated keep their original personalities while the researchers monitor changes. Jadzia reports that aggressive, reckless, greedy and wild subjects retain themselves in stronger Archfiend bodies. The experiment has shifted from testing Nulgath’s soul repeatedly to comparing what other personalities can withstand.

Terces Archive — The price of a predator

Jadzia sees a difficulty in Nulgath’s cultivated calm. He sharpened that calculated mind through centuries of leadership and has lately risked trusting followers despite Dage’s betrayal, yet she concludes that none of them are moving fast enough. In her interpretation, Adimonde is scarcely more than a savage animal, and another predator would be needed to destroy him. For Nulgath, she fears, the necessary change would mean regression. It is a conclusion of the log’s writer, not the only possible solution established by the story.

The last recorded trial, clone thirteen, follows Carnage’s suggestion to make an animal Archfiend: no thoughts or emotions, only instinct. Bodies of contract breakers supply the new clones, and replacements take time to gather. The result is only hunger, meat and teeth, with no sentience. Oblivion stations it beside the Fiend’s Void like a rabid guard dog. Jadzia calls it progress that still misses the goal: if Nulgath is no longer himself as a god, what was the point?

The log ends with an answer the researchers hesitate to use: ask the Hero for help. Jadzia believes the Hero usually finds a solution or a direction. But the Nation already owes them favors. She wants the balance reversed to prevent recklessness from both the Hero and Nulgath. The secrecy is thus tied to debts and control as well as technical uncertainty. Carnage likewise describes the Fiend Shards he and Oblivion carry as symbols of Nulgath’s trust and imagines Jadzia earning one, even while complaining about her unpaid loans.

Terces Archive — What the guide wants to eat

A Nation Night Terror clears Fiends who, the guide says, were mortals able to enter dreams and can now crawl through a victim’s nose into the brain. The supposed loremaster eats the remains and likens their taste to dense cotton candy. Point of No Return leads through more failed clones and Nightmare Fiends toward the infinity pool. By its completion, the disguise is barely being defended: the guide admits not being Jadzia and points out that the Hero never actually rejected the invitation.

All Appetite destroys the Fiend of Voracity, a clone the guide considers Nulgath’s closest approach to success. It can supposedly chew and swallow pieces of the Fiend’s Void but is brainless, all gums and fangs above the waist. The guide guesses Nulgath fled that body quickly. The log’s description of the mindless guard provides context, but its numbered trials are not equated with every later clone the researchers continue to test.

The borrowed face also offers a theory of the place itself. The Fiend’s Void is Adimonde’s realm and, according to this speaker, his body; leaks pool into Lore, and Nulgath built his lair above one. The caverns are slowly pulled downward rather than simply dug deeper, like something being swallowed. A teasing warning that saying “Depths” would draw “Kathy’s” attention does not identify that name or establish a general rule for everyone who uses the word.

Terces Archive — The real loremaster arrives

Outside, Carnage encounters the real Jadzia beside Oblivion. She says she has just arrived to review the latest trial with clone twenty. Carnage had assumed the Hero was accompanying her with permission; Oblivion mocks that assumption. Carnage now understands why the Hero told him to fetch Nulgath. Jadzia volunteers to go. This newer trial number is not substituted for the log’s last recorded thirteenth experiment.

Carnage’s later response is alarm rather than mere embarrassment. He has found nothing missing, so the impostor must have wanted something beyond theft. He realizes the objective was to take the Hero into the Fiend’s Void, interpreting it as Adimonde’s retaliation against the Nation’s last resort. That remains Carnage’s explanation of the danger; it does not settle why the Hero chose to keep following.

Terces Archive — The name beneath the costume

Adimonde’s Invitation brings the Hero to the infinity pool. The guide openly calls it a leak from the Fiend God’s realm—or from their own body. On a rocky ledge beside orange waters, the Hero admits expecting something meaner: a monster, a wave of filth, even a knife. The host replies that such a welcome would be poor treatment for an honored guest. The Hero asks for the costume to come off and names Adimonde.

The Hero asks why they were brought here alone. Adimonde turns the question around: why did the Hero go along with it? The scene fades to darkness and a familiar three-eyed, toothed face, postponing the answer until after the plunge. It ends with that demand; these samples do not show the Hero completing the descent or what waits in Fiend Void.

The later conversation explains the borrowed appearance. Adimonde says a Fiend taken from his Void was mutated into a puppet resembling the smoothie-loving loremaster. He only supposes Nulgath makes clones the same way. The real Jadzia is not the host of the god’s invitation, and this account does not establish that Adimonde personally occupied her body. His claim is to a separate created likeness.

Terces Archive — A final taste before the plunge

Boredom Eating offers two optional repeatable reward versions, including a Legend variant, with the same request to finish off Wasted Clones, Nightmare Fiends and the Fiend of Voracity. The host imagines the Hero on the operating table and claims Nulgath must have considered that experiment too. It is another provocation, not evidence that such surgery has happened or been ordered. Terces Archive ends with knowledge of the experiments, the exposed puppet and the unresolved reason the Hero accepted the invitation.