Howard Phillips

The History of Howard Phillips

In my shard of Cloudsbreak, I am a scholar, much like I am in the Dream. I was the assistant of one Randolph Carter, a researcher of magic, the occult, and other mysteries. We were recluses, living in a large house alone, except for servants who came by once a week to do the housekeeping. I served him as scribe, fellow researcher, and confidante. This is how I have passed many years of my life, until recently.

A few months ago, Randolph began becoming more and more interested in dreams. He told me there was a dream world, a place where people from all the shards of Cloudsbreak came together into a shared dream. He was quite excited about this finding, and I also became interested. We worked hard to find a way to enter this place. We built secret, mystical, machines, designed to perhaps break through into the Dream, but to no avail. We took drugs, rumored by mystics to awaken the senses and grant the user powers over dreams, but, again, to no avail. Meditation techniques, taught to us by aged sages in our shard, did not work either.

Then, one night, Randolph found a spell in a book that he thought might help us find our way to the Dream. To keep me safe, he cast it on himself first. I assisted with the ritual, and then guided him to a bed when it was done. I watched my friend that night, looking for signs of trouble. Unfortunately, I could not stay awake, and soon fell asleep at my watch. When I awoke in the morning, I found Randolph dead. In shock, I recoiled from his now-dead form, and turned to see something that saddened me and broke my heart into pieces. It seems in my sleep I had kicked over one of the candles forming a corner of the protective circle we had cast about the bed, to guard against the influence of evil spirits. As I went to the bed, I thumbed back his eyelids and saw that his eyes were now black pits, a telltale sign of murder by evil spirits. I despaired for weeks, and though of killing myself several times.

As I was looking through Randolph's notes on our experiments, I saw something that gave me an inspiration. That night, I combined certain of the drugs that we had tried before, and went to sleep. As I drifted off, I felt something strange around me. I opened my eyes and found myself in the city of Underlight.

And the rest, as they say, is history.