#sphere steppers

The very earliest account of the Realm comes directly from records so primal that they needed to be carbon dated to prove authenticity. While the initial explanations of sentient beings on Atma’Zae can only be revealed through what little archival knowledge was handed down from the Ancient Gods, every being on the continent has viewed the three closest stars to the Realm with reverence and awe throughout the Ages for their ability to assist in sustaining life. Even before the Ancient Gods, and even before an age where Atma’Zae was ruled by nothing more than mindless blood-thirsty giant spiders, there existed the olde tales of the Sphere Steppers, written on a series of interconnectable cuneiform tablets. This prehistoric legend, though regarded largely as mere myth during the Enlightened Age, has been passed down throughout all the generations of all the conscious species of the Realm and still celebrated to this day as a source of intrigue and wonder. Even now, in the Days of Ash, desperate survivors still remember the story of how their pocket of the universe was supposedly founded. For in the days before the Forgotten Times, there was a race of astronauts that first came across our stars. These astronauts worshipped a God whose name has long been lost and obscured to localized references. These aliens viewed the entire expanse of the starry heavens as their God’s Garden and named each star system after themselves to help categorize, itemize and map their findings.

The Legend of Xylania’s Garden was reportedly uncovered on a deliberately fractured tablet by the Ancient Gods on a frozen island deep into the South. The tablet is recorded accountings, regional star charts, and the poetry of a singular being called Xylania. The ogre-giants, who merely called themselves Gods, clumsily and lazily translated Xylania’s prose from the dead language of an assumed dead race of star faring beings who were and are known only as the Sphere Steppers. Although very little is known about the Steppers, it is recognized that they travelled through the stars since time immemorial to provide a simple survey of all known celestial bodies in creation. It is through these accounts that this species identified our local system as a trinary one, that being a pocket of the cosmos which has three suns. While most systems in the starry heavens had one or two stars at most, this patch of three stars each had its own unique age and characteristics. The blue supergiant star is the youngest and is rumored to have a massive sapphire or diamond burning hot within its core. The yellow dwarf is the Garden’s second oldest and closest to the Realm, giving the continent its most proximal source of heat and light for hundreds of thousands of years. And the red giant, the one closest to death and furthest from Atma’Zae, has been burning for billions of years.

Our three stars; Xear, Qo and Nuc are widely regarded as The Fruits of Xylania’s Garden. The Steppers also observed a fourth object in the garden, a small watery rock, which they called Ædorna, which gracefully moved in between the suns like a light stone atop the ripples of a gravitational river in lazy figure-eight patterns. A perfect sphere to step on, this rock could contain life, perhaps not intelligent life yet, but the primordial beginnings of it. And on the rock that was called Ædorna, there was found its largest and most prominent landmass, now known as Atma’Zae, where the Steppers landed near to refuel their rocket-powered craft, which could be operated for centuries on nothing more than large amounts of salty sea water. Upon their landed arrival, the astro-poet Xylania planted a seed from her home world in the Realm, and proclaimed it was the most staggeringly beautiful, magically concentrated and resource rich rock she had ever laid her eyes upon. And while our star system had only one rock when Xylania visited, Ædorna would have a companion satellite thousands of years later. Our moon, Appaxxis, has only existed for just under three millennia, and is the calcified remains of a long-tailed, four-eyed ogre-giant that ascended into the starry heavens to demonstrate his luminous, tidal and reflective glory for all that would behold his magnificence in future ages. Although the astronaut and her crew were forced to leave to complete their astral survey, it is easy and somewhat comforting to presently view the stars and moon through the toxicity of fresh smoke and ashes. We are still part of the region of time and space widely viewed among humanity, the gryphons, and the merfolk to be Xylania’s Garden.