Arcanum

Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura (aka Arcanum) is a computer role-playing game with a cult following. Developed by Troika Games and published by Sierra Entertainment, it was released in August 2001.

Dialogue

 * Magnus: Have you heard about the Eyeless Five? Eight years ago, there were five ruby pendants sold at auction through P. Schuyler and Sons... all the ladies who wore them were murdered, their eyes plucked from their heads!
 * Player: It could very well have been a strange coincidence, Magnus.


 * Kerghan: If only I could show you the places I have seen, you might understand the things I say. I have been to the Desolate Lands, wandered by those souls who still see the lands of the living but wear the cloak of the dead. Blind to their own ends, they cry, passing through one another like shadows in the dying light of day. I have travelled to where souls rot in torment, pierced with the jagged shards of life and vision, clinging to memory - regrets of the flesh. I saw that this prison was of their own making, and that the key was in unknowing, in release... and still, I travelled on. And finally, I came to the place where souls go to die. Where the mirrored and worn spirits fall into an endless sea of grey, mirrored glass... and I lowered myself within... and lay among them... and I almost did not return. And do you know what I found there? There, among the silent and battered shells of the innumerable? Peace. Enlightenment. Truth. Only then I realized that this place, this "Life", is an abomination, a horrible distortion of the natural order. This "Life", who mothered Pain, and Fear, and Envy - these twisted children who exist only because we are here to feed them, to nourish them. This "Life", this... afterthought - a disturbance, a mere ripple in that great, dead sea, not even the cause, but merely an effect, sending these souls upwards, screaming for release from the day they are torn from their waters! The effect of what! I do not know. Nor do I care.

Have you ever spoken with the dead? Called to them from this side, pulled them from their silent rest? Do you know what it is that they feel? Pain. Pain, when torn into this wakefulness, this reminder of the chaos from which they had escaped. Pain, at having to live. There will be no more pain. There will be no more chaos.


 * Kerghan: I see your soul, traveler. It screams, tattered and spent. Do you feel its pull? Do you hear its wailing?