At the End of the Sandstorm

History books said that Puman, the "Mad Poet" who had lived several centuries ago, was someone who had touched forbidden truths yet somehow survived. Legends also recorded that this mad poet often fell into dreams, claiming that he had traveled through different times and spaces within them, visiting all manner of bizarre and fantastical realms.

This mad poet had left behind countless works that amazed later generations. He was extraordinarily gifted with words; even early in his career, his elegant yet profound verses had conquered even the harshest critics of the city-states. Yet near the end of his brief life, the poetry he left behind gradually began to change—his words increasingly described strange and grotesque things, filled with unsettling metaphors and the near-prophetic ravings of a madman. He babbled endlessly about things that did not exist in the Real World, things that were almost blasphemous, and thus became a madman both pitied and feared.

Those who had once admired him abandoned him, and those who had once praised him gradually came to see him as dangerous. The Church's administrators attempted to contact him, yet could find no concrete information in his writings that possessed the power of contamination or blasphemy.

The final fate of this brilliant yet deranged poet was another mystery in the eyes of the world—some said he had been imprisoned by the Church and eventually died quietly in an asylum on a remote island. Others swore that he had survived, even lived until some winter day in 1842. These people insisted they had seen the poet that year: standing upon Cold Frost's famous sea cliffs, looking exactly like the portrait left in books, with paper and pen in hand to record his verses.

A "caretaker" who claimed to have cared for Puman during the final years of