Low Owl -:- An Atlas Prologue
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. Its voice comes to us in waves from the far future and it is yet still breathing and changing …
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, roiling, bone-chilling 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 long 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 would forget. For we forgot.
But lo! We could not forget the drum. We did not have one. So we relearned how to make one. It took centuries to perfect the round wells of sound that tapped out mantric rhythms, opening the mind to future lunar visions of Orlantian wizardry; blasts that hit and flashed by us like sun rays through the eyes; wind that danced with water and skipping stones. The whiteout of the ice age had benighted our falconer sense of time. Day after day, year after year, century after century, the landscape little changed. At night, the snow glowed to any glint of the Moon, sparkling in starlight. And the drum made the past and the future into one. Meeting fate with cunning, the sky magicians re-ignited fires of the mind.
And so thousands upon thousands of years of splendor replaced our amnesia. In the Last Age of the World, as the sun began to cool, great waves of time pressed beyond the reach of memory. Many ice ages had pummeled the Earth and many floods had wiped away much of what had come before. But the second ice wave was different: the Great Ice and the Great Sleep. The colonization of the Outer Rims had failed. The Masters of Or’Loz retreated. In a last gambit to save the world from breaking, they had to bring the Earth back into ice and darkness.
Yet a comet returned with a brighter blaze than before: Razakusa. Its light was a beacon to all tribes and nations that still believed there was a way out, before all was lost. At the End of All Things, the world could go in reverse, back on through knowledge to magic, when the gods and other strange beings walked the Earth. It was not lost on the wise that this was also perhaps a world-wide dream, as strains of the future gave way to despair and madness. Elves had returned, and they were unhurried and unconcerned with the wavering of the world — until they also became sick from a plague called Omodos, that oozed on a noxious breeze.
Blood Honey it was called, for it did not instantly kill but made one fade into the ghost world and its wraith lands, turning rivers and lakes a luminous red. Only by ingesting liquid fire with the Blue Honey could one return from madness and still taste the sweet nectars of life. Its secrets were known and mined by the Akalaras, one of two branches of the Fáta, the mystical winged beings that had come from the Outer Rims to the Earth when it was young, and who were taught by insects how to think and build and yearn. Now Omodos seeped into trees, a poison that bled deep down to their roots and into the earth, infecting all the insect hives.
The Kirrai these insects were called and their power was not fully revealed to all until before the last great ice age. It was then that the Magi of Korin, the leaders of the Orlantian civilization, made a bargain with the Fáta and the Kirrai — and learned how to make a new whirlwind-mind that could bridge the world to the Outer Rims outside time. At its core was an etched diamond called a dryst. It reflected and refracted any image or thought, and could create shadows of consciousness, a dark fantasia — “shadow dopplers” of any kind or mind.
But its power was taken from a high art kept secret and protected by the Kirrai, and their allies among the Fáta — the Ovyrrakrúsk, the other branch that prized wisdom and kept all dreams since the beginning of Aphantasia: this world unseen and seen. Now, nearly five hundred thousand years after ice covered nearly all of the world, freezing the mental horizon into what seemed like an ice ocean, that trapped water between its jagged crests, the sun had begun to blaze hotter once again. The moon too was more luminous than ever before. Volcanoes bellowed. What sparked these fires? Or were they the rhythms of a much deeper time?
Out of the cold came an even deeper cold: Drèloak. The ancient enemies of the Magi of Korin, the Witch Elves of Khyryll started to dig deeper into the Caves of Saiga once again, searching for the crystals that formed the drysts. They coerced a great alliance among the embittered, the restless and the savage. Wars quickened between old friends and neighbors, a series of conflicts up and down the winding rivers of Kúmareg and Taggor called the Gavran Wars. Amid the tumult, rumors quickly spread about a plan to awake Greyvalk giants as big as mountains, as whispers of a dreaded name grew in the ranks: “What of Tulmatap?” they said.
The Greyvalks broke the clouds with their heads as they walked the ice lands. Seagulls flocked to their shoulders as they waded the open waves. The Orlantians made them to colonize worlds outside our own, to break through the Outer Rims. But they had fallen back to the Earth, lost beneath the waves, buried under rock, asleep — the bones of moraines and islands. Without stars for minds, they were lifeless things. And yet as the word of Tulmatap came, and the search for the drystian crystals grew, the rise of a new empire in Drèloak and Vashvaroun unfolded on the snowy Plains of Wyheiros, readying for war upon war.
One realm in particular stood in the way of this Vamarian Empire: Killadran, an old ally of Orlan Kan, the land of the Magi of Korin. Less skilled in ways of the mind and mage-craft, they were a noble and sensitive people, who welcomed wanderers from around the world into their keeps. Lamrok was their capital, modeled and related to their cousins across the Moon Sea on the islands of Arandakain — most of all the beguiling fort-city of Yenblade: it was there, according to legend, that a sword was forged that could cut ghosts in two; hammered over several days with an ore smelted in a hay-stacked furnace towering over blacksmiths’ heads, it housed their restless ancestor spirits.
Just as mysterious were the shadowy holts and hidden forts of the Greenglum forest, where Elves vied for control of waterways crucial to trade in the Plains of Sarkadon, which included no less than eleven nations and kingdoms; and down to the merchants of Muscatan and the seaports of Harcoleen far in the south. It was in the woodland kingdom of Rhahaleth that the two elf rangers Sheevuirwaru and Malathillian marshaled the cleverest and deadliest fighters in the world. It was also in their woodlands that Omodos was peaking in its transformations. The Shadow Mind was no longer disembodied. Now everyone might cross paths, swords and gazes with a wicked twin from the other side of moonlit woods. Staring into the clouds, seers read mazes of dread in their ghostly shrouds.
Star-bound, a mountain city still dreamed of wings: Avaray. They stayed above the fray or flew right over it, scouting and fiercely protecting their lands and friends. Like Killadran, old allies of Orlan Kan, the dragon lords of Valmer had preserved what wisdom they could from the Masters of Or’Loz. Their great abiding pride were the Drift Dragons that the Magi of Korin made, calling them Ramdrayks. They were bewitching airships, the size of a skiff and in various likenesses of animals and beasts. Much smaller than the massive airships of the heyday of Or’Loz, they were fast and agile, long called by the holy, the Kymeraz — the Acrobats of Time. Inside them lived the spirits of ancient waves and tides.
Travelers on the dragonback of time, the Kymeraz were one of Aphantasia’s greatest mysteries. They could disappear like a wave on the horizon, only to then reappear on the other side of the world. As sure as the sun rises and sets, each day was a different yet repeating visit, the turning of the Earth like the flickering of the fire in the hearth. The Lantern of Aphantasia we called it. In its heart was a falling star, the shining echo of Razakusa. And so the Acrobats of Time howled and pulsed with the wind, here then there flying faster than one could imagine, faster than thought, drifting and gliding in the nick of time. For in that hum —between worlds — could live the married soul of the master and her dragon.
Inspired by the Owls of Kanmôn, the great guardians and assassins of Or’Loz, such Orlantian designs blurred the line between animals and machines. Yet the owls were not devised. They were shapeshifters who were bred and trained, and possessed a magic that allowed the souls of their masters to enter their bodies. Such was the power of the Magi of Korin, who made their capital city Or’Loz a principality between the two states of Orlan Kan and Or’Kanden. Built on an archipelago in the Lost Sea, no raiders or pirates ever succeeded in invading Or’Loz, or its defending cities — deadly misty Ankaras and uneasy Meleras.
Tall were their towers. Green dusted were their valleys and hills. Deep in their libraries amassed the famed Book of Knives, which held all of their knowledge of things shaped by hands and minds. But when the airships fell, so came down the snows and ice of the Great Sleep. After the end of their empire, the Orlantians scattered to the winds until most went west into the lands of Khallain, before settling in the glacial highlands of Irèlia, finding peace in the Magistrad. A sanctuary riddled with moraines and eskers, the very rebirth of the Earth, a grinding glacier had made this Riverland both austere and long obscured.
The Magistrad was the last echo of Or’Loz. It had terraces of green tea and gardens grown for alchemy. The Exiles built domed libraries and celestial halls. And yet there were no airships. No peers of clouds. And there were no towers tall. The valley turned such exaltation and hubris upside down, back to humility, back to secrecy. Writing by lantern light, we long scribed the teachings of the Magi of Korin: the ideas, codes and hymns animating the rhythms of the drum. Turn the pages of the Book of Knives and you will see that some thoughts were sharp and prophetic while some remain lost or yet to come. Much was undone.
Trying to piece back the puzzle, hiding from the hunters of Khyryll and Kalambarg, we Exiles found friends in the vast realm of Nolorym, where counselors and philosophers huddled in the halls of the great city of Elfsayker. From their quiet remote redoubts, they could not simply watch everything flood and burn from afar. Soon, no one would have a choice. But what that meant scared even the bravest, who feared that time could only run along one course. Razakusa reminded them: every day the rivers quickened as the ice melted. Every minute a realization grew. The world could burn away too. Next was oblivion.
Time itself was never ever bound. The ghosts of the future were the same as the ghosts of the past. Look deeper at either and they become mirrors that throw the spirit back through you into you out of you. Yet the ice cut the future in two. Only one hand is on the drum. And the gods must wonder: perhaps the days are done. Forever shut. For it seems, even they will not remember us.
— Old Rachis, the Last Mage of Ageless Ord
Atlas of a World Deep in Time — Here follows a map of the Earth at an unknown time in the history of the world — along with descriptions of regions and its places of significance during the Gavran Wars, recorded by Old Rachis, including local parables. For the Outer Rims had fallen away as a chief concern of the star-ascendant and the wise among the survivors of the Great Sleep, who had shifted their gazes and minds back toward an unknowable dimension of the human spirit — changing — where no thoughts go…