It is well known legend the Cleansing Waters of Traveler's Respite washes away ones troubles and pains. So well know, in fact, it is hard to find any merchant on the Road these days without a bottle or two claiming to be the Cleansing Water or a few dozen different vague maps to the source of this water. However, the veracity of the merchant's claims aside, one must wonder what this liquid, if it truly be a liquid, is. From many interviews with those who have visited Traveler's Respite and my own extensive knowledge of the legends of Shadow, I believe I have solved this great mystery of the Mists.

The first clue as to the nature of the Cleansing Waters comes from the ancient legends of the Archmagus Babbage. As you may recall, the story of Babbage ends with the Archmagus turning himself into the great machine Naetriks to remove all suffering from the whole of existence in seven times seventy millennia. Now, the Apocrypha of Byron—the only existing copy being found within the halls of the Great Library of Alexandria on the Tier of the World Entire—describes the great machine Naetriks as "...a great constellation of corundum orbs of all sizes and colors. All whom orbit a central sapphire of such girth and depth of color as to be unimaginable, which shines with a pure light greater than that of the mighty Sol upon the cracked spine of the Blasted Lands." Compare this with the description of the stars in the sky of Traveler's Respite by Eldric Pliny, "In the center of the sky is a perfectly spherical blue gem which is seemingly is greater than twice a troll's height in radius. Three quarters of the day this orb shines with a pure white light greater than that of the sun on any tier I have seen. When the light fades, a great number of smaller spherical gems of every imaginable color appear, orbiting in unison around the central 'sun gem'." Pliny's report is verified by almost everyone who has been to Traveler's Respite, leading me to the conclusion the gems in the sky over the tier are indeed the great machine Naetriks.

The second clue comes from the stories of the Great Questing Knights of Sargon XI. During the third age of Sargon's reign, the knight Galahast the Puerile was commanded to find the Goblet Arcane. After years of searching the Mists, Galahast was said to find the "Land of Pure Bliss". Via the descriptions of this "Land of Pure Bliss" in the Apocryphae of M'Lorrey—found in the stacks of the Library of Alexhereta in the tier of the Lore Master's Hold, Blanc—found within the data store of the Hyperlobic Omni-Cognate Neutron Wrangler the Magic and Indefatigable of the tier of Ciceronicus Twelve, and Tenaesen—whose location I can not divulge due to an agreement I made to be able to see the document, it seems fairly clear to me that the tier Galahast found was actually Traveler's Respite. Now according to the story, Galahast finds the Goblet Arcane there and drinks from it. The draught from the Goblet Arcane awakens within him a realization of the evils of Sargon XI, and so he remains in this"Land of Pure Bliss" for the rest of time as a guardian of the Goblet Arcane.

But, both the Apocrypha of M'Lorrey and Tenaesen have an addition to the story. In this appendix, the knight Trystik the Unholy is sent after Galahast to discover what had befallen him. Upon arriving in the "Land of Pure Bliss" Trystik finds Galahast not guarding the Goblet Arcane, but rather frolicking mindlessly with "Temptresses of Bliss." Note the similarities with the Warning of Zealotus here, "The man I found there, the man who greeted me as a friend, was not Símeon Orance. It was instead some sort of stepfordian zombie, who had no memory of our exploits during the revolution. It spent its time reveling with the nymphs of the garden or in discussion of mindless philosophies...." From this and the reports of others that have been to Traveler's Respite, I conclude the Goblet Arcane and the Cleansing Waters are one in the same. Furthermore, imbibing in this drink seems to induce a state of mindless bliss as well as partial amnesia.

The third clue comes not from legend but from the studies of St. Lorentz Pascal and St. B. F. Pavlo from the Tier of the Skinned Box into numerical personality replication and phantasmal data storage and retrieval. In their breakthrough work "Phantasmal Data Structures and the Human Experience", Saints Pascal and Pavlo show not only the human personality can be shown to be a large series of calculations performed on a ten dimensional matrix, but that both the computations and the matrix can be used to control the behavior of a phantasm. Furthermore, it is fairly easy to, once the location of the necessary data within the matrix is found, alter the memories or behavior of the phantasm simply by changing the data within the matrix. While interesting information, the significance of this clue would probably have eluded me were it not for the fact that Pascal and Pavlo mention a possible mode of transport for this spell to map the personality matrix of an individual be the ingestion of a liquid.

More to come...