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Just outside of the fox’s den, on the same island but further north from the entrance, I found another reading area with three scrolls set out. The structure around the scrolls had suffered a lot of wear over the years, with the base fragmented at the northern end and nothing overhead at all. The entire place was skewed, sloped downwards away from the cave, but thankfully the scrolls were still readable.
I am Ura, and a Guardian of the Land of Gods. I made this record so that my children and children’s children may remember.
On the day of the Great Divide, when our world shattered, I was still a child. I remember sitting at the white stairs of the southern city of Urzha. We had planned to journey to the West, but since the God-King had waged war on our city, our lands were not safe anymore, and we stayed inside the city walls. The God-King, Koroku he was called, had built horrible weapons. Flying machines of raining fire, but we always thought them far away. Or even empty rumors.
I had a feeling I was about to find out why I couldn’t find any trace of Urzha.
When the bells started ringing, fire and tears mixed in a horrible rain over us. We wept and screamed to the Gods to end this, but were answered by silence. Then the ground trembled. Great cracks appeared and split the white stone walls of Urzha and people fell into the black depths of the earth. I saw my loved ones disappear into the heaving earth, and when the steps beneath me broke, I fell, too.
But my Spirit Animal spoke to me, and I remembered, and spread my wings. I do not know how, but I flew for a long time over broken lands and stormy clouds.
With all that I’ve been learning… I’m not certain that this attack was just coincidentally at the same time as the Great Divide.
I arrived at the outskirts of the Land of Gods half dead, and fell unconscious on its grass. When I woke there, a priestess sat beside me, tending my wounds. She said that Urzha was no more and that the world had shattered. A God had sacrificed himself to seal away a Void from our hearts. And broken the world in the process.
A small bit of the text is smudged and unreadable.
Many had died. But so had the God-King, and his city of Onn was no more. Our shattered world was now at peace. I wept, and still, after many years, I weep at the memory of this day and the terrible cost of this peace.
Ah! So that’s why Koroku vanished! I suppose the other monuments to him had been from before the Great Divide… as well as a lot of other things I saw. This Ura met Karah, I was certain. And now I wondered if I would see more from him, whether memory or further writings.
The island immediately to the north was split into two halves vertically, with the appearance of a great cave between them, though no walls of the cave existed, just several stalagmites and stalactites. Inside were two ghosts. “Let’s hide in this cave,” the first said.
The latter, holding a sword, admonished the first. “Those are your friends fighting out there, you coward!” This place still isn’t all that far from the collapsed statue of Koroku; just how much of the Land of Gods did he conquer?
Since I’d found important items in clusters before, I decided to wander in a circle around the Spirit Fox’s den. A small island to the east held another ghost looking towards the last temple I had entered, beside a large and fractured pillar: “There is always smoke rising from the temple nowadays…” The top of the pillar held a small tree and another ghost looking to the south, hand shielding its eyes from the sun, so the pillar had been fractured for a long time indeed.
Another island to the west had two tiers of land, and the lower held a statue. I attended the statue; it depicted a man and a woman, facing each other and holding hands. But behind each was a pillar with unreadable letters on it, and each statue was chained to the pillar behind it, the chains attached to their backs. A scroll sat on a podium between the two figures.
We are lost in different worlds. I without you, and you without anyone. In my mind we reach out to each other, and hold hands in the cold. But as the statues are chained to the walls, so are our souls to life and to death.
Saridha, I don’t know where you are, but your memory will forever roam the halls of my heart.
After a bit more wandering, I decided it was time to move to the lands to the north, which were shrouded by snowfall and held no uncovered grass. The few trees were the only green available as far as I could see. Almost immediately, I found a cave with wind flowing into it, its sides lit by lanterns. I decided I may as well take a look.
I immediately wished I had not.
The interior was lit by creepy, glowing purple rocks and held a trio of ghosts cowering in fear. One was wordlessly pointing at the ceiling inside the vast chamber ahead of us. I looked, and found, once more, a rift in space. More ghosts were inside the cavern, either cowering or… worshipping? the rift. One was huddled by a scroll laid out on a table.
My love gazes at the false sky, but she will not know me. I took her hand and said her name, but her mind was empty. I fear that it’s the doing of the Hungry Star. It has stolen her soul. The followers say it’s a new God and that she is part of it now. The priestess of the old gods said that her soul is lost forever, but do I want to believe this? She will try to close the rift it has opened to our world, but all those who wander on the other side will never come back.
Her name was Saridha.
Oh. That’s what the statue was about.
The space below the rift is occupied by the same kind of spikes that have erupted from the temples I visited, and I feel that’s no coincidence. However, there’s no evident way to close this rift as in the cave with Lifla. All I can do is leave.
The only sounds I can hear outside are the howling of the wind and the chiming of unseen bells. A small island I passed to the south bore two ghosts.
“Where is this cave?”
“It’s just ahead. We are almost there.”
They probably should have picked a different cave.
Further north than the cave and slightly to the west, I found two towers of wood with what looked like gigantic scissors between them. That’s certainly not what they were, but it was the only comparison I could make, lacking the knowledge of what construction equipment it must have been, based on the statement of a nearby ghost. “Heave! The God-King demands more rocks for his mechanical beasts. And it’s your heads if he doesn’t get them!” The others appeared to be tugging on unseen ropes that would have led to the overhead “scissors.” Perhaps they were some kind of mining equipment, their use long forgotten.
I’d nearly reached the northernmost reaches of the Land of Gods, and so I headed west, wandering slightly southward whenever something caught my interest. It was indeed quite frigid up here, and I wondered how the Spirit Bear survived. I did find one boon of the Spirit Fish nearby: a small set of hot springs welling from the ground of a small island. A pair of ghosts knelt by their center, and one reached its hand into the water. “Even if the temperature has dropped, the springs are still as warm as ever!”
Another cave was visible nearby, with more chimes and lights marking its entrance. Barely visible through the snow was another ghost, so difficult to make out that I could only find its words. “Who keeps these lights? I wonder if anyone has taken shelter in this cave.”
This cave was also lit by the purple rocks, but with no rift evident, they somehow seemed less sinister. The entrance was quite narrow, but I found another tablet when it opened up, sitting at the far end of the space across from the initial hallway and with the rocks almost appearing to be growing from the edges of the tablet.
Notes on legends of the western clans, by Ret, the scholar of the Summer Islands.
Everything in the Land of Gods is sacred. Especially, there is a shrine called the Lighthouse, which is rumored to be a place of power. Some ancient texts refer to it as “The House of the First Light,” the cradle of the world, where the ancient Gods first woke up and walked the lands. Now it just looms as a small black tower made from alien obsidian, lonely and abandoned. A relic in the eyes of our civilization.
Is it a mistake that we don’t care for what was left to us by our ancestors?
Probably.
Another narrow hallway led me further upwards, to a well-lit place from which I could peer down and see the tablet from before. Further along was a pair of normal lights, one lit and one not, and between them was an enormous animal, pale gray with age, though still bearing a mane of brown. It was lying down, resting between the large lanterns, but sat up when I approached.
“My lady, welcome!” the Spirit Bear greeted me happily. “It’s an honor to receive you here. You may not know me, but I know who you are. Come, listen to my story.
“Ah, I still remember the time when Karah was still a cub. It was her first visit to the Land of Gods. Her clan was travelling through. I myself was still young, just over a hundred years, and as chance would have it, they stopped for a rest near my home at the time. I was walking by, and she went up to me. She was still without words, but she hugged me and her heart talked to me.
“Years later, she came back. She remembered me, one of her first memories, she said. I offered her a pact, but she had already entered one with the Bird of the Thunder Isles. We became good friends, however.” He trailed off for a moment, and I felt that I knew what was coming. “And I was the first to meet her after the Great Divide.
“The Creator had split himself to lock away a Void growing in his heart. The world crumbled. He had given Karah the task of keeping the pieces of his being safe. Three fragments of great power, The Void locked in its prison. And one last piece: his hopes, his dreams and his love for the world and its beauty.
“Karah came to me much later again, when the world was calm once more, to present the last piece to me. The cub was as small as Karah was when we met the first time, and her name was Meena.”
I feel like that name is supposed to mean something to me, especially as the bear lowered himself again as though the story was over. I frowned and leaned to tap the Spirit Bear, and he sat up and continued speaking. “Ah, time flows so fast. My lady, I thank you for coming here. It was a great pleasure to relive the past for a short while. But the world is growing weary, and is missing something it once had. I hope for a great ending of this tale, and it seems it’s not entirely over just yet.”
He offered no further explanation, so I said my goodbye and headed out once more.
John had said there were three caves in this area, north of the Spirit Fox’s den, so I decided to look around a little more. North of the rift cave and east of the Bear’s cave, I found one last one, with jars, lights and more bells outside of it. This one sat in a space between two levels of ground on a very large island, and the space inside was larger still than either of the two I had visited earlier.
The small entrance immediately opened up into an absolutely enormous cavern, well lit by something that appeared to be sunlight from a huge hole in the roof. No such hole (or sunlight, for that matter) was visible from the outside, but the inside was lit, and I would take that over the rift-lighting and the purple rocks. The hole was directly above a pillar of rock at least twenty stories tall that would otherwise have run floor to ceiling, and that pillar held… something, too small to see from this distance, encased within ice and across an unsupported stone bridge at least as long as the pillar was tall.
Directly in front of me was a memory of a man and a bear, smaller than the Spirit Bear, and past them a diamond platform atop a large contraption. The platform was not part of the floor, but instead part of a tower upon which it was situated, though separated a short distance by a strange set of gears and linkages. Looking to my left, I saw another a short walk away, and to my right, another two just as far between them. Looking more closely at the ones to my right, which were not hidden by the cliffs behind them from my angle, they seemed less towers and more… giant… bells. Bells? And different sizes, as well, and all with the upper platform next to a cliff, as though one might be able to jump on top. And so jump I did, with the first one I had come to.
The bell below me rang. It rang out with a tremendous sound, shaking me as I stood on the platform above it, and it did not fade or stop. I moved to the next. This one let out a higher pitch and added to the sound in the chamber. I could swear the floor even away from the bells was shaking. The furthest left bell was the tallest and let out a very low sound when I jumped upon it. Still audible, and still incredible. Hopefully jumping on the last would result in these bells ceasing to ring before my head split open. The final, smallest bell, furthest to the right rang out when upon it I stood, and the giant rocky bridge shattered! And then the bells were silenced.
That had to do something. The bridge had shattered, but much of it still floated in place, so I jumped across it towards the item that hopefully was only previously, not presently, encased within ice. Sure enough, I reached the end and found the brilliantly glowing Key freed from its prison. This one resembled a folded ribbon, crossing below and with a small triangle separated at the top. It flowed into the Lantern, and my task here was complete.
I moved to leave the now-silent chamber and found the Spirit Fox once more at the exit.
“My friend, the little wanderer, found her way to the Far North. Aren’t you cold? Even I can feel the chill through my fur. Might be the hot-bloodedness of humans? Well, at least you made the air shimmer in here.” I agreed that it was quite cold, but the urgency of my task meant I could not stop to make a fire. “Like the stars found at the Roof of the World, where the air is crisp and clear, and storms never rage.” No storms! That will be welcome.
“A key in the ice to break ice once more. Go west, go north, but don’t freeze to death as other creatures before you.” Perhaps due to our recent conversation, the Fox held no more speech for me, and so I heeded the directions and headed out once more into the storm.