Prilfazar's Fate

There weren’t always dragons in the valley.

Rather, there weren’t always valleys in the dragon.

Our land is as cruel a beast as any average dragon... just how in its valleys, where dark dark pasts creep around. Ones that thrash around in the night like hungry bats, that hide under overturned stones, right in plain sight. A past that gauges deep cuts into the present and into the future, widening its gushing valleys.

Our race thrives on this place’s natural resources, but at what cost? Resources only remain natural to a certain point of ravaging. I am surrounded by ravaging, and I can't take it much longer. I need some retribution. There is but one man who I can accredit such detritus to.

I’ve visited the great windy pike on the northern mount. I've seen its engravings, laid in by the man. They tell the same tale that anyone might imagine– Vermïr the Conqueror was a feudalist monster.

Long before my time here, the country of Prilfazar’s ground was slick and smooth. Prilfazar never wrought her claws through our stretches of land. She never had to.

It wasn’t necessary for us to dig very deep in order to find well bound soil for our lichen crop, for it was right there in the caliche. Thus there were no tremors or talonic storms caused by our disturbances.

Vermïr the Conqueror was the first to discover the land of Prilfazar. He washed up clunky unto her shores, tethered to the same dandelion that he was exiled on. Any details of the place that exiled him were not documented in the engravings of the great windy pike on the mount. Only hieroglyphs about his own philosophies, and quests that he’d succeeded in were adequate enough to be recorded on the pike.

In the first summer, the land would not dry up but it would ooze an unusual excess of the yearly sulfuric secretion. Not only did it have a putrid aroma, it killed all of the lichen. Vermïr the Conqueror, being an absurdist objector to failure, suggested that we find the theoretical sulfuric vents in the sediment and clog them up with our inedible lichen scraps. So all of the population started digging and tunneling. Oh, the carnage we consumed on our way in. This immediately caused the first record of a talonic storm.

It was depicted as a huge claw with a hundred or so talons coming down from the sky to ravage the surface of the earth. Civilizations were turned to ruins in minutes by the havoc of this strange weather phenomenon.

According to the record of the pike, no great loss in population occurred. But based on a carbon date that shows a sudden dip in lineages, historians believe that over half the population was decimated.

Those who knew how to dig kept digging.

When they got to the sulfuric glands, they noticed that there were other natural formations in the surrounding caverns– some of which secreted an edible colorless goo. Since it was safer in the tunnels, my ancestors started their colony in those depths. With time, and with an increase of talonic storms, and as Vermïr the Conqueror forced a handful of technological advancements, the ceilings of our caves naturally eroded. Now miles of open valleys stretch and connect like a circuit of wounds across the land of Prilfazar, and the highest peaks at the surface are reduced to chafing plateaus.

On my pilgrimage to the Pike, I saw the scaly horizon. It’s not nearly as luxurious as how we live in our stylized trenches.

The horizon was elegant. It taught me about my own body. This elegant horizon is a torn up version of what Vermïr the Conqueror must've seen as he landed... It must've been even more elegant then. Yet still he innovated its demise.

I noticed the movement of the horizon. It twirls and shifts as the sky changes. It soars through its own sky, like the huge majestic rice weevils we shoot down every summer.

This place turns to dust so my own shell of a body remains nurtured. She's aging, and we're not taking up the cudgels for any of it at all.

We are so comfortable in our lush valleys, we've adapted well. We've got our fungus crops and what not. We've got our goo. But these valleys are wrinkles, scars, and tunnels boren and kept only by our parasitic tendencies. Vermïr the Conqueror has been long deceased, but still our leaders continue to expand his vision for our colony to all sanctions of this strange pristine place.

Prilfazar has inflicted less talonic storming lately. She is becoming tired and hopeless. Our scientists can't determine the catalyst of this trend, but I know exactly what happened. I was there. I was born into the blasting wind, right at the edge of the earth.

My mother was on the lamb for this event. Immediately afterwards, she dove into a chasm to her death. There is a great well there at the edge of the earth, something like an eye. It looked at me. It saw me become born from my egg. Even now, I remember this. It offered a mortified observation, a glued terrible gaze of witnessing.

I don't know why I was let to live. In that moment, it felt like I was supposed to have died on the spot. She needs me now.