Low Owl -:- An Atlas Prologue
Version One: Opening the aperture on a world in turmoil, this is Aphantasia
A Message from Aphantasia — What follows are a koan and letter by an Irelkan and Orlantian monk and mage of unknown origin and time. It is believed they were written during the Gavran Wars and were contemporaneous with the mission of the Enegaed …
The wind howls at me,
Kindling fires of memory —
Meteor reborn.
— Haiku of the Banshee
How far back did it go, the madness? Everything went mad. So mad was the escape. Some thought: outrun the dawn. So no one knows how it came to us. Or when it took place. Somewhere along the way, the chain was broken. All we had was fire. We stared into the flickering flames of an old lantern, lifting its mantle, so its brilliance would play shapes and shadows. It billowed our dreams into new being, like night clouds on a breeze passing by stars and meteorites in moonlight. And then, we came back out of the cold rolling darkness.
The ice world had forever changed our perception of time. Everything stopped save for the howling of the wind and the circling of the Sun and the Moon. So few survived its unending cold, its glaciers pulverizing everything we had known into dust. Black sand filled the caves under the long march of ice, harder than stone — the fires of the underworld moaning and erupting forth, shearing and reshaping the land and the sea. Black sand absorbed and carried the treasures of the past, echoing and rolling like waves under hundreds of thousands of years of biting white snow and sleet, eating away at our faces and our teeth; a black sand that piled at the bottom of mountains and dozed into dunes and drumlins — the moraines of a future casting shadows as mad as the birth of the Earth.
For we could not see back past the ice age before the last. What lay back there drove all who looked insane. Yet to be locked in such a gaze was for those who could not laugh. For a funny thing happened: we could finally take a deep breath and reflect on our renewed days. Behind us was a blinding blizzard and before us was a new frontier of reason, a respite from the cold. Then the magus civilization of Or’Loz shined a bright light across the world: its many wonders beamed a new path to the riches of the ancients, one that did not rob the mind of wisdom. Or so we thought. For this was not the first or last time we forgot.