random bullshit from my notes go
Country of origin: Ulor. Quite possibly a mythologised retelling of the genuine collapse of the Su'a arch and the disappearance of the Su'a arch treasures.
Qyei-umu was a poor man, who lived by himself. His trade was as a carpenter, but the wood of the new land he found himself in was dry and scarce. He had tried growing crops, but they failed in the dust. He had tried telling stories, but he could not stomach to stand on a podium all day in the vengeful sun.
So one day, Qyei-umu travelled to a temple of Qyumus and pleaded for help. Qyumus came to him in a dream later that night, and declared; out into the grassland, under the arch of the false god Su'a, lies a deposit so rich and golden it's contents would make you a king.
Qyei-umu woke in the middle of the night and journeyed straight there with nothing but a gourd full of water and a pickaxe. He began his work. He layed into the rocky ground. He found nothing. He went home to rest and returned the next day to find nothing yet again. He did the same the next day. And the next.
Qyei-umu found nothing within that ground for a full year of digging, but he always kept on; so strong was his faith that he knew Qyumus would never lead him astray. So he dug and dug and dug.
One day, well under the surface, he broke into a cavern. Holding up his torch, he could not believe his eyes. A whole cave, formed of solid gold. His faith was right, Qyumus has not lied. He got to work ripping it apart.
He hired wagons, crates, pulleys. He still couldn't move or store it all. It was overflowing. Qyei-umu was the happiest man on Tokwe.
Meanwhile, in the nearby town, a street beggar stirred in his sleep. His name was Amta-umu, and Amataba herself, treacherous waters incarnate, spoke to him through his dreams; travel to the arch of the false god Su'a, my son, there is a fate waiting for you there that you could never imagine.
So Amta-umu woke in the middle of the night and began his journey there. When he arrived, he saw a full mining operation. Not just that, but enough gold to build a palace. When he saw Qyei-umu emerge from one of the tunnels below the arch, Amta-umu hid behind a far boulder.
He then heard a skittering of dust and pebbles, then a large crack, and looked upon to see the arch collapsing from the unsteadiness caused by the tunnels below.
The arch fell, and killed Qyei-umu instantly. Amta-umu was unharmed, far enough away, and quickly understood the mission given to him by the flighty mistress of water.
Over the course of several years, Amta-umu stole every speck of gold from Qyei-umu's hard work.
The moral of the story is usually taken to be: years of good, honest hard work can be undone in an instant by a trick of fate, but cheating means you have nothing to lose. Sometimes it is better to be the clever one than the honourable one.
Landmark: Issubus in Ulor
In the middle of the savannah on the tallest hill stands a great statue to Issubus, representing him as a giant with the body of a man but the sun in place of his head. His right arm reaches up to the zenith of the sky - at noon, he points at himself. The statue is built on the ruins of the only walled city the Oantik ever build, where once stood a (much smaller) statue to Su'a, the old dead Oantik god of heaven, the sky and all high places.
For a long time the Oantik want to visit the grounds, to mourn what was lost, collided with the Ulora want to worship Issubus at his most major site in the country. This caused so many fights and killings over such a period of time that a rule was set to prevent the chaos; and to this day the statue to Issubus is the only site in all of Ulor that the Oantik are not allowed to visit.
Cementing the rule, a few notches, dents and cracks are seen throughout Issubus' form; vestiges of Oantik attempts to ruin him that have persisted throughout the years. Issubus is said to be the work of every single Ulora craftsman ever born; because so many have had to repair him.
Sure as the sun, he still stands.
(Someone has managed to carve on one of his big toes, "fuck your sun ours was better" in an old Oantik script so rarely used that no one has even figured out it's a hate message yet.)
Landmark: An Old Cinsolian Church in Ohd
Let's get married in the broken church.
The first catapult shot hit it from the hill. See? You can see the angle it came in at, and hit the wall as well as the floor. That's when the mosaic of Our Lady Cinsolorn was cracked at the hip which bore Moch. Poets loved that part. "For a brief moment, her pelvis shattered as she bore him again."
You always liked that song more than I did.
The door is still black from the fire. So are the beams.
It took a lot of the roof with it, look, but it's a miracle there's still shelter left at all. It's funny. I used to sleep up here, as a youngster, when my hikes had taken me too far into the evening to make it home before night. And when I did, it was always so cold to make me wish it was still somehow on fire. I doubt the worshippers felt that way back when it happened.
The flowers outside are beautiful, aren't they? What a gift they can bloom through snow. They were right when they said the Karlisias soldiers carry seeds on their armour no matter how hard they try not to. If you come here- yeah. Right through this window. You can see the exact path they marched through the mountain, in the trail of flowers they scattered with their walking and planted with their feet.
The ivy is just age. The moss, too. Strange to think it's already been that long, my father talks about it like it just happened.
Don't you think it is so beautiful? They abandoned it when it was ransacked, but I like it this way. Let's get married here.
A report on dead souls and the death mist
The scholars at the University Gresse have found the concept of spirits to be an entrancing subject for a very long time. Indeed the existence of ghosts which has been categorised across the world seems inherently tied in with magic, as most of the unexplainable is.
It has been long since proven that, despite everything inherently flowing with magic, the human soul is the most magical thing in the world. It makes sense then that upon death, the magic that once made up a soul does not vanish, but persists.
In places where many souls have gone to die, there seems to be an ever present mist. There are many stories across all cultures on why this might be, but from our research and visits we can confirm and conclude that this mist is a conglomeration of souls. One soul by itself may be completely invisible to the plain eye; as pure magic always is, but a large surplus of them builds up on top of each other to create a thin mist, visible to the eye, quite literally made up entirely of the dead. The death mist, when looked upon closely, is different from a regular mist. Aside from the obvious fact that it doesn't dissipate, it also moves peculiarly; it doesn't follow the flow of the wind, and even when there is no wind it moves in strange patterns by itself. People have also reported seeing a death mist carry its own colour, which we still cannot quite understand. In places where many people were killed unjustly, a faintly red mist settles. In places where many people lost their lives to a tragedy, a blue mist settles. Is it possible that these drifting misty souls are still conscious enough to feel, and is it too, possible that the human soul is so strong that its emotions can be seen even when it is nothing more than a pure magic spirit? There is much to still be looked into.
The behaviour of spirits is certainly strange too, although we have found it to be mostly predictable. Spirits, as "beings" of pure magic, are drawn to strong magic themselves. This serves as an explanation as to why they tend to stick to each other in large groups, and why they migrate towards mountains and high plains where magic is more concentrated. It doesn't necessarily, however, serve as an explanation as to why spirits so often choose to follow their living killers around.
This is one of the strangest things we have seen and reported, and is perhaps the best proof we have that spirits retain their living memoirs and emotions. When a person kills a large number of other people, they find themselves haunted by an ever present mist. A death mist. It follows them wherever they go, with a vengeance. These spirits could easily become attracted to another source of equal or greater magic, like another person or a land of high elevation, but they choose not to. It is bizarre and frightening. Is our fate, after we die, to remain drifting through the world in a half conscious, intangible state forever?
I still remember when he stood at the balcony of his palace. I had never seen him before. The stories I had heard of him were so far off, so grand, I almost thought he wasn't a real man. But there he was. Old, white and monumental, he as a mountain towered above us.
His voice was like sticky sap, like tar, like pitch, slow moving and black, sealing you in and allowing you no escape. No movement.
It was filled with the scowl on his face.
"You have lost me this war."
The vice grip Fear had on the crowd tightened, strangling their skeletal bodies.
"You did not fight enough. You did not work enough. I sought to win back our great country's glory. To squeeze the life out of the treacherous Ohdi. For you." His voice filled with a thick and vile phlegm at the last two words. "But you failed me."
He produced a plate from a table behind him, and faced the starving crowd with food filling his red and fattened hands and his yellowed and worn-down teeth.
"You have whined much. About not having enough to eat." A wet gulp. "All this has shown me. All this has proven to me, is that you insects are so, so easy to punish."
I still remember the lines. The long, long lines. A hundred hundred starving people, moving like slugs across the mud. You take one step at a time. It doesn't matter if it takes five hours. You stay put. You pray to Arpalika every inch you move forward, but Arpalika is dead. When you get to the front, don't look his elite in the face. Hide your eyes. They love to be in control, and are sick with the power they have over the people. They will find any reason to hurt you. Choose quickly. If there is fruit, pick it over the bread. It is the only thing you will be allowed to eat until tomorrow. Try to make it last. If someone tries to take it from you, run back to the guards and call them a traitor.
I still remember the traitors. Lined up on the same wooden stage the elite guards hand food out from. Their wispy, dying hair covers their faces. Their hands and feet are not bound. There is no point. A guard comes up, sometimes two. He has a variance of weaponry. Sometimes he likes to have fun, toys with them, kills each traitor differently. Sometimes he likes to get it over with. The crowd itches and squirms, squatting lower into running positions. When the bodies have stopped twitching, the guard addresses the crowd.
"Karlis allows you two meals, today."
The ensuing chaos as the crowd surges forward is more violent than the execution.
I still remember the evening the Ohdi came.
Pulling a path through the flowers into Sarkanseta. The marching of mountain metal. They did not hurt anyone who didn't attack them first.
"We are not your enemy," they kept saying. "Just his," as they pointed their metal plated fingers towards the palace.
They left his elite dead on the streets. I had found a corpse that no one else spotted, and began dragging it to my home, to my fire. When an Ohdi saw me and questioned what I was doing, I pointed to my stomach, my throat too dry for words. He regarded me like a tiny child, and brought me to a cart of food.
A large number of them stayed barricaded in the palace for weeks on end. The rest carried sacks and boxes off foreign wagons and fed everyone they could. I was far from the only one who threw up at the surplus of food in my body, at the quality of it. The Ohdi patted their metal hands on our backs.
I still remember when they threw him off the balcony of his palace. His body was emaciated. They had trapped him in his throne room and starved him, allowing him only one cup of water a day. After three weeks, they took away his water, too, and he died quickly after that.
"Do not be kind to his corpse," the chief among the Ohdi had instructed us as his second and third in command had hoisted the thing over the balcony wall. Not that he had to tell us.
Within a minute or two there was nothing left of him. Within a minute or two the only thing left of him was a smudge of blood on the ground beneath the balcony. Within four or five, even that was gone.
I blink myself out of my head, and look around at everyone else stationed at the large dinner table. Most of them are looking at me, with that miserable sympathy that only an Ohdi can have for a Karlisias. No, not Karlisias, I remind myself. An Asmara.
"Sorry, sorry," I mutter, with a voice I've only had for four years. "Miles away."
"Are you alright?" The woman at the head of the table says, her Ohdi accent turning the phrase sickeningly soft.
"Of course," I say, waving away the question. I look down at the plate in front of me, full of food. I poke my fork into a piece of pie, and wait for a boot to the head. I lift it up ever so slightly, and wait for the hand grabbing the back of my shirt and dragging me off. Caught you out, boy, you filthy traitor! The harsh Karlisias voice hisses in my head. You really thought you could get away with it?
My pulse quickens, and I can feel sweat prickling beneath my skin. I don't want to be eaten, I am scared to die. I put the fork back down.
I am standing at a balcony, in a manor in Ohd, one of the many to take in Asmara people while Karlisias is rebuilt. No. As Asmary is built. I close my eyes against the sharp mountain air, and I still remember.
I had found myself among a group of particularly unsalvageable people, walking like the dead to the outside of the city. Where they were going or why, I did not know. I didn't know anything, anymore.
The walk was long. The bodies at the head of the congregation were growing weaker, and the walk became slower.
As the city and it's now forever settled mist faded away, Asmar greeted us. Our goddess of flowers. Beautiful and kind. That she had seen our actions, that she had bore witness to what we had done, and still held her arms out to us. It was unthinkable. It was undeserved. We all felt it.
The congregation sat down around me, gazing unblinking into the meadows beyond. Many lay flat, sinking into the flowers. All prayed to her. Asked for passage. I now understood.
Later that day, I found myself the only one standing. The only one still alive in a field of flowers and dying people who had come out here to let go.
Maybe she had delivered me. Maybe she had decided she would continue to watch over those of us who would live. A land of the children of Asmar.
