First entry :
21 st of October, 1889
I don’t remember much of my father; old gazettes had always mentioned him as a bizarre and strange yet alluring and interesting person. During his youth, when his health was at its fullest and years before the fall of London, he was known and famous due to his antics, strange theories and affairs with the top notch scientists and aristocrats of his generation. Somehow he never managed to achieve any real profession yet lived surrounded by wealth…
In a sense it was all a great lying masquerade. All those acts and friends were only a way of filling an evergrowing dark void that consumed him and his mind. He thought of himself as a person without a purpose; what was worth having money if he didn’t really earn it? What was worth living if you didn’t give anything in return? During the first part of his life he had been searching for a purpose, for a true passion that he was good at, yet no matter what he tried nothing but clumsiness came to him.
When he turned 35 he thought of himself as a complete and utter error, a living and breathing mistake that did nothing but wait for him impeding and slow death. He could have found love and ultimately have descending scions, but who could ever love him if he was nothing but a lying soul that deeply was nothing but dull and a failure at everything? He bought a gun, placed it on the side of his cranium and prayed to anyone who listened a desperate plea that asked for an ambition in life. Ultimately his words were heard, it wasn’t an intervention from the Heavens on top of us, but of the Neath below the Earth’s crust.
A rumble stopped his finger from pressing the trigger, a rumble that ultimately swallowed London into the abyss. While everybody else had plunged into darkness, he had entered into the light. He moved away from his lodgings and crossed across the following chaos until he reached the docks. In front of his eyes awaited a vast darkness, an eternal nothingness to be explored and searched, suddenly, his life goal and purpose had appeared in front of him. As the days passed and everything returned to normality he started ceasing contact with his fellow friends and dedicating all his time, money and soul to zeafaring.
Mattheus Lockhart the Third was one of the first persons to launch into the Unterzee with his aptly named “First Witness” in the search of the unknown. He fought against zee monsters and vicious pirates along with discovering marvelous treasures and experienced terrifying situations. Unknowingly for him he had lived for so long with his old eccentric and strange façade that now that he was truly himself he couldn’t remove his mask. He knew that his personality wasn’t truly like that but every time he attempted to be himself…he simply became disoriented and unable to know how to respond or act. It had been so long since the last time that he was honest that he had forgotten who he truly was.
As the years passed his old fame as a Londoner faded away, but his new fame as a Zailor started to grew and surge, ultimately gaining the name of Captain Madhart the First, for his heart was maddened by the Zee. His new friends were not as rich or popular as the old ones, but to him they held a value that mere Status Quo couldn’t buy. No matter how much time he spent on the Zee he never had enough, for the darkness of below held uncountable secrets to be discovered, the first years of his life felts torturously slow yet those last ones were as quick as a bullet, before he could notice it he was now reaching old age. His body was now frailer and weaker than ever.
Back in the surface everybody was equal, everybody was destined to die, and even he was about to before the Neath called upon him.Down there mortality is more lax and even optional… Back in the day the Reaper’s embrace would have felt like a merciful act, now that he finally had a purpose in life it was the cruelest of the gifts. He wanted to get a sip of Hespiderian Cider but now that he wasn’t as rich it was out of his availability and the people who once were his influential friends rejected buying it for him, for he had rejected and abandoned them as soon as London fell.
Without any way of achieving immortality he did the best he could. He married one of his best Zailors and had a son, me. He then started travelling further than anyone in the search of the cure for death. During his journeys he became scarred by the North, touched by the South, estigmatizad by the Western and ultimately became lost travelling to the far East, never to be seen again. I was only a mere child when he disappeared forever, my mother hid it at first, but ultimately her love for him and the Zee ended attracting her to her doom too. Orphaned and barely knowing anything about my parents I found myself lost and with more questions than answers, I went to the Wolfstack Docks to see the last place where both of them had been seen… in there the Harbourmaster found and gave me a set of letters written by him. Inside of the letters there was a mere message “Continue what I couldn’t” followed by a small sum of echo coins and a set of keys, one for a room above the Blind Helmsman where I found some of his notes and this same diary I’m writing on, the other key opened the doors of a small ship that he bought me in case this happened, the “Second Witness”.
I used to be a natural philosopher but now people call me Captain Madhart the Second, I’m not interested in wealth or fame but to find the only secret that managed to escape from my Father’s grasp, Immortality. Soon, soon I will be zailing into to the unknown.
