From the private logbook of Decadent Design, Captain HRH Aurora Dawn.
This is a most strange circumstance. It leaves my staff and me truly baffled. There is indeed a camp, but the whole thing is well and truly abandoned.
But I get so quickly ahead of myself. I must get my thoughts in order and tell the story properly.
The first sign of the camp was not the tents or equipment or sleds, but rather a great crack in the ice. Though no more wide than seventy centimeters, it spreads in a general southwest course a distance of approximately seven-hundred meters. It might not have even been visible from the ship were the ice in this region so pure that even the slightest marring becomes starkly visible in contrast. That there is no snow to speak of in this area no doubt helped tremendously.
The camp is centered over a part of the glacier that is pristine enough to allow naked sight to see deep beneath, though it is difficult to say how deep. What is clear and unmistakable is the formation of stone directly below, which consists of what appears to be a massive crater, within which lie three near-perfect circles of black: a great one in the center, two smaller ones in the southwest and southeast. Obsidian? Onyx? I am no geologist, but that does not prevent me from thinking the geography peculiar.
Gilderoy’s camp is set right in the middle of that great crack, which also happens to be near the center of that largest black formation, though not precisely. Yes, we know for certain that it is Gilderoy’s camp, but I am getting ahead of myself yet again.
Leaving Ms. Coxswain in charge, eight crewponies and myself boarded a lifeboat and descended to the camp for a personal inspection, joined by the pegasi squadron that had originally made the discovery. I offered Rusty Iron the chance to come along, hoping to ease his mind with action, but he adamantly refused. Though he never said as much, I strongly suspect the fellow feared whatever dark sensations worrying him might have their cause below. I did not press him, nor embarrass him by speaking of it, and instead invited Mr. First Star. This will no doubt be of greater aid anyway, as the experienced navigator might be able to make some sense of any maps or records found on the ice. Mr. Iron may busy himself with the “anti-occult” preparations he has in mind.
Upon landing, we found the camp in the contradictory state of organized chaos. The tents were raised, hard nails wedged in the ice to hold them steady against the biting wind. There were eight sleds, which accounted for all those listed in our copy of the expedition’s manifest, many of them still heavily laden with equipment and supplies. A short, wide apparatus was set over the crack in the middle of the camp. It was a puzzling device, clearly not designed for any boring but instead, I think, for pouring. Pouring what exactly was beyond any of us. All these things were in perfectly stable order, along with the food supplies in one tent, still reasonably stocked.
But in other ways, it was clear that this sight had been greatly, perhaps violently disturbed. One tent, clearly intended as a combined meeting room and mess hall, had the stools and tables thrown about, with certain parts looking almost like makeshift barriers. A set of smaller tents, apparently the sleeping quarters, were in mixed states ranging from undisturbed to the interior furnishing like sleeping bags and stools seemingly burned and torn apart, without so much as a scratch in the tents themselves. The largest tent houses all sorts of research paraphernalia well above and beyond my comprehension of the sciences, and much of that paraphernalia faced similar scorched scarring and destruction. One of the pegasi, a young lady ironically named Tip Toe, got shards inside two of her frogs and is currently in the ship’s infirmary, the icy floor making it all but impossible to spy the shattered glass.
All this and not a soul in sight. Not a griffon or a zebra or a diamond dog or a kirin. The place is utterly lifeless.
At this time there can be no question that the expedition met with catastrophe. But of what variety? Were they attacked by outside forces? That hardly seems likely, for what would be the point? This was a scientific expedition, and the equipment found on site would hardly be worth the expenditure required to get a raiding party of some sort out to this frigid emptiness. Mr. First Star proposed the possibility of a mutiny, citing how there are clearly not enough tents in the camp to support seventy-two souls, and some of the sleds appear prepped for travel. But for what reason would the crew take up arms against Gilderoy? They clearly had enough food and lodging, the enchanted heating gems are all in working order with spares readily available, and no payment was expected until after the expedition had concluded. And to finalize my refusal to believe in either theory, where is the evidence? No doubt there are signs of disturbance and violence, yet if the bodies were, say, dragged off to some unknown environs there would surely still be signs of blood, yet there are none.
I have issued orders for the squadrons to continue searching the area. There is still a small but not impossible chance of some creature escaping whatever happened in this place and even now wandering, lost and starving, atop the seemingly infinite ice. But if this great misfortune occurred shortly after Gilderoy was scheduled to arrive back in December then the odds of survivors out there are practically none, especially with all the food stores seemingly still here.
I dread writing the report I shall be sending back to the Crystal City after completing this private entry. The one solace available to me is a series of journals found in some of the tents, one apparently written by the griffon leader himself. I can only pray to the Royal Highnesses that they shed some light on this mystery. I have brought them up to the Aurora Dawn and divided them among some of my officers for study, keeping Gilderoy’s writings for myself. We shall see what comes of them.