In this work of journalistic non-fiction, award winning long form reporter Amandine Bialik of the Sharn Inquisitive publishes over 2 dozen first hand accounts she has collected from survivors of the events of 20 Olarune, 994 YK, in which as many as 20 million people perished in a single day. Published on the 2 year anniversary of the Day of Mourning, 20 Olarune, 996 YK.
The interviews collected here include:
A 7 year old half orc girl who was 5 at the time of the Mourning: Reading between the lines in the testimony of this traumatized child, she was likely the last person to be teleported to safety from a House Orien Teleportation Station in the town of Whitehearth. From her references to "angry men and yelling," it sounds like the Orien outpost may have devolved into violence in the final moments prior to being engulfed by the mists. The child's recollections of the day conclude with her finding herself suddenly at a different Orien Outpost, (presumably in Breland, though the child would not have known this). She never saw her parents again, but was briefly cared for by a woman whom she recognized from Whitehearth who had gone through the Teleportation Circle with her own children an hour or so earlier.
Colonel Olezka ir'Murkoff, His Majesty's 3rd Army, 9th Brigade, "Crypt-keepers": This Karrnathi Colonel had crossed the Cyre River 30 miles east of Karrlakton on the evening of the 19th of Olarune, 994 YK, and was preparing to break camp and march west to join allied units investigating Fort Bright just after dawn when he began to receive speaking stone reports of a "wall of magical destruction" rushing outward from central Cyre. Unwilling to abandon his objective over heresay, he readied his brigade, including thousands of undead soldiers.
The entire contingent waited for hours, ready to move one way or another when the situation resolved. Eventually, ir'Murkoff's own forward observers reported the approaching phenomenon, and the Colonel realized their only option was to abandon weapons and armor and make a mad dash across 8 miles of pastureland and swim back across the Cyre river, in the hopes that it would provide a natural barrier. Martial discipline being second nature to a Karrnathi officer, this order to abandon their post and flee must've been especially difficult to give. In the end, the majority of the living members of the 9th Brigade were able to make the run, after doffing their armor, and collapsed shivering and exhausted on the north bank of the Cyre river, just in time to see the roiling fog of Cyre's destruction stop abruptly on the other side.
The thousands of skeletons and zombies under ir'Murkoff's command were too slow to flee, and he muses that they may remain wandering in the Mournland around Fort Blight to this day. It is also notable that ir'Murkoff himself dismounted and ordered an elderly sergeant on his staff to take his horse and ride for the river. After making it clear that he expected his aides to distribute their mounts in a similar fashion, he left his ancestral armor on the field and made the breathless run on foot.
Zyther, a goblin worker in a Cannith factory: Locked into the factory building and abandoned by their human overseers, Zyther and a number of other goblins and kobolds managed to survive by sealing themselves inside a dragonshard lined industrial kiln used to temper permafrost chests. While this served to protect them from the initial onslaught, most of the workers she hid with have since succumbed to various magical ailments in the 2 years since, which they probably contracted while trying to make their way out of the Mournland in the week following the 20th of Olarune, 994 YK. This high rate of death from illness is consistent with other accounts of humanoids who were in contact with the mists in the first days following the initial event, when the eldritch energies were presumably far more potent than they are today.
Rahmi Meers, Dwarven attendant on an Orien Lightning Rail: Rahmi's interview details how he reported to Queen's Crossing Station in a suburb of Kalazart before dawn on the day of the Mourning and took up a post on a sleeper train that would depart early on a 3 day journey for Wroat via Vathirond and Starlaskur. It goes on to detail the collective desperation and terror that quickly turned the station into a scene of chaos and senseless violence, as more and more Cyrans, hearing the reports of the fast approaching cataclysm, mobbed the lightning rail in their frantic efforts to escape certain death.
Many trains departed the station with only a fraction of their berths and seats filled, wasting space that could've saved lives due to confusion, cowardice, or both. Others became swamped with bodies, including the conductor stones around them, and, unable to get properly switched onto tracks heading in a safe westerly direction, never managed to escape at all. Meers and the other Orien employees aboard his train began to take on as many passengers as their train could hold, but took so long departing the station that the fog itself was nearly upon them by the time they began to move. Eventually the engineer decided he had no choice but to activate the elemental lightning coils and push the train forward, despite the injury it might cause to the hundreds of people clustered around and in front of the engine itself.
Meers describes the horrific few minutes in which the advancing fog overtook the caboose and the back few cars while the elemental engine struggled to gather enough speed to outpace the advancing destruction. According to Meers, the wall of mist affected each car differently as it overtook them. The caboose was ripped to jagged ribbons, in a sort of corkscrew fashion, like it had been mangled by a giant can opener.
The final car to be consumed before the engine reached a high enough speed to outpace the fog was the car just behind Meers's own, into which, to his great misfortune, he could see quite clearly through the windows. He lost sight of it for nearly a full minute as the speed of the train and the speed of the advancing fog reached a temporary equilibrium, and it vanished into the thick mist. When the train sped up and pulled it forth again, it revealed lifeless facsimiles of the humanoids who had clustered there only moments before, now constructed of iron, rubber, and wood.
Ieleen d'Lyrandar, Khoravar airship captain: Captain d'Lyrandar's is among the most widely circulated first hand accounts to come out of the Mourning, as this interview was published in the Sharn Inquisitive on the 24th of Olarune, 994 YK, making it one of the first to appear in a paper of record. While there are quite a few other survivor accounts from aerial vehicles, nearly all of these were affiliated with the militaries of one nation or another, whereas Captain d'Lyrandar's ship was in service directly to the dragonmarked house, engaged in a meteorological survey to coordinate the efforts of Lyrandar weather controllers on the ground. Her neutral position above central Cyre, and her ability to keep pace ahead of the spread of the mists while still observing it for an extended period of time are unique.
Most experts now agree with her testimony that the phenomenon originated from around the city of Making, rather than near Metrol on the border with the Talenta Plains as others have since claimed. This is, of course, the anecdote containing the now infamous quote from which Bialik's collection takes it's name, in which the airship captain describes the "towering dead grey miasma, boiling forth in all directions like something terribly alive."
An interview with Jode, a Cyran soldier who was present at the Field of Ruins. They describe the moment that everything turned to chaos, a sound like a thousand glass windows shattering all at once. Some moments demand to be witnessed, and the halfling states that the Day of Mourning was one such moment. Even 200 miles away, Jode claims that he saw great glass pillars rise out of the ground in a cacophony around the city of Making, and the roiling grey mist that followed.
The Cyran squad to which Jode was part were sheltered from the initial blast by the geography around them, and they fled to the Brelish border to escape from the mist. First-hand accounts of the events at the Field of Ruins are rare, as there were very few survivors. Jode describes the mixed armies of Breland, Cyre and Thrane all laid low in an instant. One moment the armies were clashing, and when Jode next saw them, it was a field of corpses. Even more chilling, most of the corpses seemed untouched, with no obvious cause of death to attribute their current state to.
The Cyran squad re-entered the Mournland once the fog had stopped it's advance, to look for survivors. They found none, but Jode describes an encounter with what he could only describe as a "living spell". Such phenomena have been observed by groups that expedition into the Mournland. The spells that attacked Jode's squad were Burning Hands according to his testimony, and attacked in concert with what he could only describe as "potatoes with legs and a lamprey-like mouth". Chilling.