Not All Who Wander Are Lost - 03/08/2023 - Calla Prim
Aug 9, 2023 12:49:38 GMT
Jaezred Vandree, Andy D, and 5 more like this
Post by dee on Aug 9, 2023 12:49:38 GMT
Three seasons in the Dawnlands and I have already learned so much. I have been inside a mountain, and then scant months later, been able to look back at it from far away... to see the scale of it. Its siblings. The way it reaches toward the sky.
When I left the Feydark, I did it the long way around. I found hidden paths from Echo and Ember to Aeschera, from Aeschera to the Rift. I crept from the edges of one Holt to another, took on airs and affectations to stride and slink through the cities of my Drow cousins. Listened attentively to the rumbling whisper of my patron to avoid cave-in, dead-end, wrong-turn. That patron, a creature I romantically thought a lost child at the crux between the Fey and the Hidden Below. Like me: abandoned, ignored, forgotten. Ill-fit to its environment.
Occupied entirely in navigating a winding route from that place to this, I dismissed the fastest path entirely. My antipathy for the Feywild is no secret or surprise. When your people are absent from every tale, ignored by every court, left to struggle on scraps while others frolic in the sun... resentment is the flower that strangles out every other in the dark.
But I had not seen the scale of it. I had not yet heard the crash and slide that would take me directly to the heart of things. Only in the last season has it come to me, to guide me to the Court of Stone.
The people there have faced a calamity. One so total that they have never recovered, choosing instead to seal off the source of their shame. Two huge doors past which few go and none return. Two huge doors marked with the sign of my patron. Beyond them, the loss of half of their people or more and a crater. Something colossal had fallen upon them and carved its way directly downward.
Unsure of what we would find, I followed that path with some of the best priests I could gather. Three of them, to make sure our bodies would return from under the earth. And one other, a child, to make sure our souls would follow. Mendal: brave, loud, uncompromising. Bosalind: caring, wise, steadfast. Bella: cunning, quick, silent. And Mittens.
Down, through the Feywild. Down, into the Feydark. Down further, past the Holt of Stone and Blades. Down, through the Hidden Gate. Down so far and so dark that we lost our way, and forgot ourselves. Down into the amethyst labyrinth at the heart of the mountain. And finally, at its core, the full truth of things.
Back before the beginning of time, four Behemoths were created from the primordial nature of matter. Four colossal war machines brought to life in a desperate attempt to win an interplanar war. So vast and mighty, that in their defeat the remnant power of their bodies was cast into the distant void, to be kept there by ancient seals. What little remains on this side of that prison, embodied as Lords of the elemental planes- the Primordials Incarnate. But some of the Incarnates have faired better over time than others. Of the ascendant four, Asteros, First Flame, sits comfortably in the City of Brass. The Cartographer, First Mountain, instead broken and exiled from his realm.
Broken, exiled, and left to plummet through the planes. Shattering on impact with the Court of Stone. Dragging unwitting victims in its wake to flounder, and find themselves, and flourish at the end of a nigh infinite fall. Naught but a crystalline heart in the Feydark. In my people’s Holts. In our markets, in my house, and finally in my pocket for these last hundred years.
The Feywild are not ashamed of us, these natives of the Fall. They’re ashamed of their own failure to rescue us.
The Cartographer is not a lost and neglected prince, but the living echo of a primordial king.
Now, I have learned, the cousins of the ascendant four seek to upset the balance of the planes and wrest their own power from the Behemoths. Not Earth and Air and Fire and Water, but Ice and Ooze and Magma and Smoke instead. A new order, and the utter destruction of the old. Were they responsible for the Cartographer’s fall? I cannot be sure. But nonetheless, his rise remains my responsibility. Now placed, purposefully, back in the Dawnlands, I carry the seed of a temple of sorts. My familiar, transfigured from a cowardly lump into something strange and new.
I...
I am not an imprisoned cast-off from a long forgotten House.
I am a herald in the war to come.
When I left the Feydark, I did it the long way around. I found hidden paths from Echo and Ember to Aeschera, from Aeschera to the Rift. I crept from the edges of one Holt to another, took on airs and affectations to stride and slink through the cities of my Drow cousins. Listened attentively to the rumbling whisper of my patron to avoid cave-in, dead-end, wrong-turn. That patron, a creature I romantically thought a lost child at the crux between the Fey and the Hidden Below. Like me: abandoned, ignored, forgotten. Ill-fit to its environment.
Occupied entirely in navigating a winding route from that place to this, I dismissed the fastest path entirely. My antipathy for the Feywild is no secret or surprise. When your people are absent from every tale, ignored by every court, left to struggle on scraps while others frolic in the sun... resentment is the flower that strangles out every other in the dark.
But I had not seen the scale of it. I had not yet heard the crash and slide that would take me directly to the heart of things. Only in the last season has it come to me, to guide me to the Court of Stone.
The people there have faced a calamity. One so total that they have never recovered, choosing instead to seal off the source of their shame. Two huge doors past which few go and none return. Two huge doors marked with the sign of my patron. Beyond them, the loss of half of their people or more and a crater. Something colossal had fallen upon them and carved its way directly downward.
Unsure of what we would find, I followed that path with some of the best priests I could gather. Three of them, to make sure our bodies would return from under the earth. And one other, a child, to make sure our souls would follow. Mendal: brave, loud, uncompromising. Bosalind: caring, wise, steadfast. Bella: cunning, quick, silent. And Mittens.
Down, through the Feywild. Down, into the Feydark. Down further, past the Holt of Stone and Blades. Down, through the Hidden Gate. Down so far and so dark that we lost our way, and forgot ourselves. Down into the amethyst labyrinth at the heart of the mountain. And finally, at its core, the full truth of things.
Back before the beginning of time, four Behemoths were created from the primordial nature of matter. Four colossal war machines brought to life in a desperate attempt to win an interplanar war. So vast and mighty, that in their defeat the remnant power of their bodies was cast into the distant void, to be kept there by ancient seals. What little remains on this side of that prison, embodied as Lords of the elemental planes- the Primordials Incarnate. But some of the Incarnates have faired better over time than others. Of the ascendant four, Asteros, First Flame, sits comfortably in the City of Brass. The Cartographer, First Mountain, instead broken and exiled from his realm.
Broken, exiled, and left to plummet through the planes. Shattering on impact with the Court of Stone. Dragging unwitting victims in its wake to flounder, and find themselves, and flourish at the end of a nigh infinite fall. Naught but a crystalline heart in the Feydark. In my people’s Holts. In our markets, in my house, and finally in my pocket for these last hundred years.
The Feywild are not ashamed of us, these natives of the Fall. They’re ashamed of their own failure to rescue us.
The Cartographer is not a lost and neglected prince, but the living echo of a primordial king.
Now, I have learned, the cousins of the ascendant four seek to upset the balance of the planes and wrest their own power from the Behemoths. Not Earth and Air and Fire and Water, but Ice and Ooze and Magma and Smoke instead. A new order, and the utter destruction of the old. Were they responsible for the Cartographer’s fall? I cannot be sure. But nonetheless, his rise remains my responsibility. Now placed, purposefully, back in the Dawnlands, I carry the seed of a temple of sorts. My familiar, transfigured from a cowardly lump into something strange and new.
I...
I am not an imprisoned cast-off from a long forgotten House.
I am a herald in the war to come.