The Blood of Terra

Prologue

There weren’t always dragons in the Valley.

And the hands of my people, though calloused and hardened by years of hard labor in the fields, cultivating the once-fertile soil, never bore the splinter of a hilt, nor felt the aching recoil of a spear shaft as pointed end was driven into its mark. What weapons we had bore the chipped-edged and rust glazed scars of old age, mere relics of an era long forgotten. Used now by my people only as ornaments and mementos of what our ancestors were, and reminders of what we were not. Indeed, the unsheathing of a sword was considered a vulgar and hapless act and we were not hasty to expand our misfortunes.

The Valley was surrounded by Okken trees then, thousands of years old and hundreds of feet high. At dusk, as the western winds hummed a soft howl through woods and groves, and across freshly tilled land, the lush leaves of so many blues and violets would dance in chorus; a stunning contrast to the lambent evening sky.

From my home you could look out onto a once-massive lake, so large it was barely possible to see the opposite bank on a clear day. More water than you could imagine all year-round, and teaming with fat, delicious fish. We never felt the pangs of thirst or hunger. And no trenches were ever dug, save to irrigate the fields.

Our hearts were strong then. Though we bore the joys and aches of fully-lived lives, we never knew such endless sorrow as we feel now. Never felt the chilling bite of hopelessness; more cold and unabating than the fiercest blizzard winds.

You cannot believe what I tell you had you not seen it for yourself. The world was so different then. We were different. And I imagine if I am successful in my final task, the world will again be made different. Whether it will ultimately lead to a better world is something you, and not I may know.

Before imparting to you, dear reader, the entirety of my tale I wish to clarify something. I will not blame myself nor my people for what befell us. A fool may barter away his home in the hope that it will improve his condition, only to ultimately meet his ruin, but such a man shouldn’t die for his ignorance. Nor should anyone else. And man’s nature has always been to find a better way to live. As the lion hunts, the fish spawn, and the birds nest and migrate with the seasons, our kind forges. We forge new roads and paths, new shelters, new knowledge to improve that which we already do, and new ideas for thinking and living.

Our existence, such as it is, remains driven by a compulsion for invention, and to that end we collectively turn the mill each generation, progressively improving on what came before. It is with that knowledge in mind that I earnestly wish to convey to you the opportunity we believed we had. In all our existence, there was no equal in promise or reward. What we discovered, lying dormant in the ground, enabled us to skip the rungs of several generations with nothing short of miraculous advancement. How ironic that it would ultimately undo numberless generations' worth of work. We didn’t turn back the mill. We shattered it.

It was in the year 297 of the Neogoran calendar. We were farmers then, and the northern Valley our home. For generations, our ancestors had cultivated the expansive fields bringing in year after bountiful year of food with which to trade throughout the realm. We were industrious folk, and many skills and trades flourished within our community. And so it came that we eventually found employ from the southern capital helping to mine the northern cliffs for the precious metals that lie within. The mining was hard, arduous work, but we were compensated well for our labor, and so we did not languish nor take for granted our task.

The foremost roads running east to west and north to south converged in the valley, and we found ourselves ever at the crossroads of various trade routes between the realms, opening us to a transient but steady stream of merchants, performers, combatists, and mancers from the four corners of Terra.

To the south, stood Crinsca. How to describe such a place now? I don’t imagine our kind will be able to create another marvel like it for millenia.

As you rounded the Prism Pass of the northern cliffs, suddenly it would come into view. Draped in a thin veneer of mist, its magnanimity would overwhelm you no matter how many times you saw it. Not a town but a city. A real city! Like something from an ancient tale. Buildings and structures that stood several stories high. Streets paved in marble by the hundreds. Taverns and inns, venues for casual meals, and the grand lyceums; palaces and sanctuaries for learning. There were lyceums for every pursuit imaginable, from the artisanal to the combative. Dance, story-weaving, musicianship for all seventy-eight instruments - nothing was beyond the realm of possibility to learn in Crinsca. No matter the conditions of one's birth, acceptance into a lyceum could profoundly alter a person’s life and make of them someone of such repute that people from all realms could admire them.

At the heart of the city lived the Sovereign. In contrast to the monarchs of ancient tales who lived apart from the people, ruling on high with autocratic finality, the Sovereign was a man of unparalleled virtue and diffidence. He lived, worked, and walked amongst the citizens, and they knew him well and trusted his word. He was a governor in name and title only, but his effectiveness as a leader came from the incomparable virtue he radiated in all his dealings. He never made an order without a proffer of sufficient value. Never really ruled so much as he convinced others of the merit of his position. A true leader. And though we in the northern Valley did not live in the realm of his territory and governance, we trusted him and treated him as our leader. That was why when he asked us to aid in the mining of the northern cliffs, we acquiesced to his offer, knowing he would generously repay us for our efforts.

The mining had driven us deeper into the cliffs than anyone thought possible. The oil emitted from the Crinsca Samore trees had become a necessary commodity to do our work, as the depths we reached were too far for the sun to illuminate. The Sovereign kept us in good stock of everything we needed, and we in turn brought out from the black depths all manner of precious metals. As part of our compensation, the Sovereign had also bequeathed to us a dozen fishing vessels, capable of penetrating the surfs and reaching the deep water where the game was abundant.

Deep saltwater fish were principally coveted by traders from the eastern realm. A folk very unlike us in every way, they carried massive weapons with them at all times, and never traveled in groups of more than four or five. Instead of hauling wagons to house their wares and food, each carried massive packs slung around both shoulders, filled to the brim with their mysterious machine tech; devices that operated from the vapor of boiling water, carefully stored to create force. These machines did we covet above all else, and so it was that by agreeing to mine the northern cliffs did we achieve the means to improve our trade position with these eastern merchants, and thus our Valley began to mechanize at an accelerated rate.

It was several years after we began mining that we first discovered the Trowa.

At first sight, many thought themselves bewitched for it was near impossible to believe what we saw. Lakes upon lakes of liquid so luminous it chased away the pitch black of the deepest reaches of the Terra with light that never faded. With a viscosity like blood, but a color like green lightning, there was a mystery about it that connoted a sense of both value and purpose, and so arose in us many questions as to the function of this new miracle.

We first fashioned lanterns for it, modeled after the fat-burning lamps that hung along the roads in Crinsca, but modified to both contain and showcase the Trowa. And thus the first of many inventions, the ever-lamp, was born. Soon we would discover it wasn’t just the gift of never-fading light that Trowa would bequeath to us, but also the miracle of never-waning power. For it wasn’t until we began adding it to the machines from the eastern traders did we unlock its true benefit.

A drop of Trowa added to water would extend the active life of a machine by a factor of twenty. Any more than that would generate so much power the machines lacked the durability to withstand the force generated and would be destroyed. Innovation was thus required. And so we began refining our machinery, making it sturdier and more durable to the powers unleashed by Trowa.

In one case, a drop of Trowa was set aflame to see how it compared to the oils we used as a combustible fuel. The fellow who attempted this did not survive the experiment. Trowa, we learned, though very stable, was violent and explosive when touched by fire. Thank the Gods we didn’t first seek to burn it in a lantern lest we would have surely destroyed the entire village. We proceeded through each subsequent failure with an overabundance of caution. As I previously noted, it is mankind’s nature to improve, and failure is both the fuel and generator of improvement.

The last time the eastern traders visited our village, we showed them what we had discovered in the mines. Showed them what a drop of this miracle elixir would do for their machines. How their genius was further improved by our discoveries. We expected they would be ecstatic to learn of Trowa and would want to trade all their wares just for a liter to take back with them across the eastern blighted slopes where they could further refine their inventions.

To our surprise, those who came from the east were not impressed with our discovery. Like children, we were reprimanded harshly by them, and they admonished us to cease bringing it forth from the ground, lest we meet a horrific end. They left abruptly thereafter, and never returned to the Valley. Dismayed by such a discordant reception, we took their words for nothing more than the paranoia and superstition of an overcredulous people, and so paid it very little mind. This, as it turned out, was the moment where we rejected our salvation and invited doom into our homes.

It was very soon after this episode that we completed our first mechanical marvel: a four-wheeled cart that, with the pull of a lever, would propel forward without the need of an ox or horse. Only by the energy of Trowa did it move, and with less resistance and at a much greater speed than an ox or horse could pull it. Other like inventions soon followed. Our fishing boats, heretofore reliant on the power of wind or oar, could now advance further and faster, out where the biggest fish swam, and even out past the dangerous breaks off the shore that threatened our now obsolete sea vessels. I remember I felt pity for those naive eastern folk, who so loved the fish of the sea. Surely their paranoia had robbed them of an even greater bounty than they had ever enjoyed in the years they traded with us.

When first the citizens of Crinsca beheld our wondrous new inventions, they called us “magic.”

For the residents of the capital, the most advanced Terranean civilization of its time, were not prepared to see their farmer neighbors to the north ride through their paved marble streets on unhitched wagons nor return from the sea in an afternoon with deep water fish that took the better part of a week to catch traditionally. They watched us come and go in our various dealings with a mix of awe and wariness, for they couldn’t yet conceive just how significantly our discovery would change their lives.

The tales of our exploits circulated through the capital for weeks, making their way eventually into the very heart of the city. It was then that we received the Sovereign’s invitation.

In attendance with him were his greatest engineers; the minds of which, already enriched with the secrets of the forebearers who built the great city, were in the best position to further unlock the powers of Trowa. Keenly, they listened as we imparted every detail as to how we found the Trowa, and how we had learned to harness it. The Sovereign was quiet as we detailed the breadth of our knowledge to him, allowing instead his engineers to ask the bulk of the questions. But when finally we finished, The Sovereign let out a mighty laugh, clapped his hands together, and exclaimed, “soon friends, we will fly!”

A massive mining operation for Trowa began, and very quickly we watched as the world around us transformed. The Sovereign’s engineers devised machines capable of clearing the land of rocks and trees a thousand times faster than the hands of men, and so Crinsca quickly expanded its territory further into the bay, and into the southeastern valley. To connect the far corners of his dominion, the Sovereign’s engineers built carts suspended by cables and powered by Trowa. These carts ran along specific routes above and across the city. Soon it was a simple thing for anyone in Crinsca to travel to any part of the city in very little time. The fat-burning lamps that famously lined the Crinsca streets were also replaced, but not by our crude ever-lamps. Using Trowa as fuel, the Sovereign’s engineers built generators capable of pulling heat through certain elements, causing them to illuminate. Soon all of Crinsca used this form of illumination, both publicly, and privately in every home.

The buildings in the city also grew, now towering to impossible heights, and glimmering in the dark with their Trowa powered lights. And the Sovereign, true to his word, did give his people the power to fly. His engineers soon built massive airships, whose complexity and function I have not the knowledge to explain. But soon mankind found itself sailing the skies on ships powered by Trowa. And as more Trowa was mined, so too did Crinsca expand further and further, and ever skyward as people flocked from across the globe to live in this city of miracles.

All of this, from discovering the Trowa to the heights of the Sovereign’s glory, took about one year. In a single week, it was all undone.

The rumors were scarce at first. Stories from tradesmen, who traveled the pass that ran through the southern cliffs, claiming to have seen the silhouette of a serpentine body swimming through the clouds. Though intriguing, these claims were mostly disregarded as flights of fancy. And even as cart-bearers from across the southern plains made such claims with increasing regularity, no alarm was raised nor any thought given to the merits of such tales. For we knew how rumors grow and circulate, but rarely do such things manifest.

Soon stories began to pour in from the north as well.

A potter claiming he saw a creature in the clouds with wings each larger than a ship’s sail. A flutist from the red northern forest claiming he saw a massive creature crawl out of the lake at night, its body obscured by darkness with massive eyes that glowed bright green and illuminated the night. A ship captain claiming he saw several long, winged bodies swimming along the coastline at speeds unmatched by any ocean creature he knew.

More accounts of these creatures found their way to us from every corner of the map. As the rumors steadily grew, so too did a collective worry begin to bourgeon and infect our minds, filling us with subliminal dread that hung in the air like a thick mist. Where one finds smoke, one often finds fire at its source, and so the skepticism and doubts we felt initially slowly began to evaporate. Anxiety began to fester like green rot in a wound. We watched the skies with dread, wondering when these phantoms would appear. But as winter turned to spring, no flying serpents found their way to us. No devils or monsters crawled out of the lake, nor appeared in the hills. And so we went about our days, preparing to harvest our crops anew. And the worry left us, as spring imbued our groves and trees with unmatched majesty.

It was a hot morning when the howling trader came, the sun still hours away from rising. Yet the southern sky was a bright red to rival any twilight, illuminating the land in a baleful crimson hue.

The messenger’s eyes were wider and redder than a full moon at harvest as he tried to convey to us what he saw. He stammered, on the verge of seizure, as he spoke, occasionally lapsing into fits of laughter or sobbing. Those who were aroused from their sleep by his howling in the street had left their homes and a crowd had steadily formed around him. Only a few dared get close enough to offer soothing drink to aide him, for fear that he had succumbed to a catching madness.

Crinsca had been destroyed, he finally said. Down to the last building. A sea of fire and ash left in its wake.

The very idea was impossible to believe. Crinsca, already a sprawling metropolis before we had discovered the Trowa, had nearly doubled in size since. There was no city nor dwelling in history to equal it. Saying that it had been destroyed, and in a single night no less, was tantamount to saying the world had ended, for nothing more extravagant could be claimed. It was less than an hour after the madman delivered to us his message that a warm snow of ash and ember began to fall from the sky. Slowly at first, then heavier and heavier until soon our streets were littered with it, our aqueducts clogged. As the sun rose over the lake, its color veiled in deep fiery scarlet, the sheer weight of the ash fall began to buckle the roofs of sheds and granaries. The roofs of houses succumbed to it just hours later as it reached a blizzardous volume.

The order, under which we had comfortably toiled for generations, had now been ended. Ended in a single night.

Several parties attempted to broach the Prism Pass to confirm the fate of Crinsca, but the air, thick and putrid with smoke and the smell of rot and death, prevented us from venturing too far south. We were locked out of the invisible carnage, left to ponder the fate of the world’s most glorious civilization in the darkest recesses of our imaginations. Visions of our brothers and sisters in the southern capital burning in agony tortured our dreams; the screams of children, and the wails of helpless babes.

Weeks passed, and the ash still fell. We took shifts clearing it all day and night, now into large heaps that bordered every road. In the lake, fish rose dead to the surface from the shoreline to the horizon. Everywhere there was death. What we had left to eat was only that which was already stored, and the scant few crops we had the opportunity to harvest before the ash came were all that survived, but fast-dwindling. Fresh water needed to be fetched from the hills as our wells turned to poison. Each passing day turned evermore into a struggle for survival, and gradually did we accept the horrid truth of our situation. The valley was gone. We needed to abandon the home of our ancestors lest we join them in the hereafter.

We knew that fresh water was abundant in the east, the source of their innovation, and the lifeblood of the machines we had not long ago coveted above all else. And so we left the Valley, passing over the treacherous eastern cliffs to reach a new land where we might find refuge.

The route we traveled gave us no relief from our mortal peril.

Beasts of all manner dwelled on these slopes, unabated by our numbers, and attacks were numerous. Unlike the easterners, we had no weapons other than our farming tools with which to defend ourselves, and no training or experience to combat with the likes of the giant cats and birds that called these cliffs their home. It was daily that some opportunist monster would converge upon us hoping to find an easy meal, and tragically, they always did. We lost many of those we loved to those hills, ripped from us bleeding and screaming, to meet a most horrid end of which we dared not imagine.

The landscape itself was a death trap to the uninitiated. The ground was porous, with sinks that went down for hundreds of feet. Pools of liquid fire would intermittently form in minutes where there was once dry, rocky ground. And as the liquid fire hardened into smooth rock, the constant rain would make the ground beneath us so slick it was impossible to stand or walk on, let alone guide our animals across. Horses and ox quickly perished as limbs snapped on slick, tractionless ground. There was no way to save them. No way to save ourselves. For weeks we pushed on, seizing inch by suffered inch of this new, hostile land. Mere existence had become a tremulous uncertainty.

Finally, we reached our destination. The first village and last trading post of the eastern realm. To them, we must have looked horrid. Hundreds, starving and broken, our eyes sunken and yellow with malnourishment, our countenance pleading and servile. What a great mercy it was for them to set aside whatever offended pride they may have had from our failure to heed their warning. With open arms, they welcomed us, nourished us back to life, and prepared us for the task to come.

Our rehabilitation was augmented with lessons for surviving the eastern realm. We were given special equipment and clothing for traversing the eastern cliffs. And at last, weapons. Gigantic swords and spears designed to slay the beasts that preyed upon those traveling through the blighted slopes. Lure to tempt the beasts and blades to fell them. We were taught the signs of when a pool of liquid fire would form, and how to avoid it. And in a few short years, we were able to hunt the beasts who once hunted us. We sought the most dangerous of the creatures, our hearts alight with hatred for how they tortured us on our odyssey. Our hands, once calloused by honest work had turned into something else. Something lethal. Our hearts had done the same.

When our hatred began to wane, what took its place was a curiosity about the home we left behind. What had become of our ancestral land? Would we ever be able to return? And so, armed with both the knowledge and tools we needed to safely journey west, a group of twelve of us set out to find what had befallen our once lush and beautiful Valley.

I have no words for what we found. There was simply nothing left of our home. Everything that had once lived was dead. From plants to fauna, everything. The massive lake, which sustained my people from time immemorial, was gone. Black, sooty muck caked in the bleached remains of fish and crays as far as the eye could see were all that remained. The trees had been stripped completely of their lustrous plumage, and were now but pale and cracked obelisks, creating a vista of death that spanned the entirety of the once-magnificent forest. We had sought to return to our home, but found instead a hell beyond imagining.

For most of my life, I never knew despair. I can confidently speculate the same holds true for the majority of my people. To be accosted by so much in such a short time can break a man. I watched many of my fellows succumb to madness even long after we found refuge in the eastern realm. Two in our immediate reconnaissance party broke when they saw what had become of the Valley. One leaped from the cliff face to meet a swift and broken end on the boulders below. One simply drove a dagger into his own neck. I watched both happen from somewhere far away, deep inside my mind. I couldn’t tell you at that moment what I felt, but I imagine it comes close to the feeling of envy. But my despair was short-lived, boiled away in a flash when my party, at last, beheld our woe-begotten home’s newest tenants.

That was the first any of us had seen the dragons. Myths made manifest, for which no prior description nor illustrative narrative can truly do justice. Their scales were an unworldly black, as though even in the pitch black of a moonless night, they would still contrast dark enough to distinguish themselves. As the rumors had suggested, their eyes were as Trowa - a radiant, luminous, and vengeful green. Seven claws longer than a man’s arm at the end of every limb gripped Terra beneath them as they crawled and slithered across the plains.

The sight of them filled my heart with hatred such as I never thought possible to feel. The spear which I had secured to my back itched to be pulled and driven deep into their merciless hearts. My hands, now trained to kill monsters, sought the deaths of these foul demons, and the impulse to rush into combat with one of them nearly took me. But rushing to my death, attempting to fell one, was something I knew to be futile and devoid of the retribution for which my heart ached. I needed to know them better. To watch them and see what weaknesses they would reveal over time. Perhaps then we would have our revenge.

And so we set our passions aside and camped along the hills, watching the bastards for weeks. We learned that dragons were unlike us in that they didn’t require sleep every day, but once they did sleep, they did so for four days straight. Although they slept at different intervals, all of them slept in the northern cliffs, where the Trowa still lay in massive lakes beneath the ground. We dared not venture that close to them, and so the connection between the Trowa and them remains a mystery to us even now.

Perhaps the most surprising revelation was that flight was not something they could sustain for more than a full day during the entirety of their wake cycle. Flight was the means by which they hunted, and they only needed to hunt once during their allotted time, carrying back with them whatever they didn’t immediately devour on the hunt. After weeks of hiding out, collecting information, and learning all we could about our enemy, the question arose as to how we should deal with them. The consensus was that we didn’t stand a chance, and that we should simply retreat and never return to the Valley. A small minority in the group diverged from this opinion, opining that if a large enough armed force were to engage the dragons, we could achieve a costly victory. But it was my proposal that ultimately won out with my peers.

Our home was something forever lost to us, I argued. That which remained was of no value or consequence to anyone. And so the only way we could ensure the destruction of our enemy was to also obliterate the land they had stolen from us.

There was general dismissal of my idea from the rest of the party until I reminded them that which we had first learned during our experiments with Trowa. For that material, lying dormant in the catacombs of where the beasts now made their nest, was so vulnerable to the touch of flame that a mere cupful ignited could destroy an entire village. Their eyes gleamed as realization took them, for all of us knew the expanse of what lay beneath our feet. The volume of it. Lakes upon lakes of Trowa. Enough Trowa to burn the land and reduce all to nothing. The only matter to work out was how the Trowa would be ignited, and all of us knew this meant one of us would not be returning to the east. As it was my plan, I volunteered. There is nothing in my life that I will regret if I am successful in my task, save for my failure to heed the warnings of the eastern traders before this cataclysm was wrought upon us. And if the world might avoid another catastrophe of this scale by the offer of my blood and life, then I will gladly forfeit both for the good of all.

On the eve of my final adventure, I have composed this note to be carried back east by my companions, and hope that its message outlives my people and serves as a warning for future generations across the Terra.

To whomsoever should read this, heed my warning: Do not repeat our mistake. Do not seek the Trowa beneath the ground. Do not invite the wrath of the dragons upon you. Cling to your lives and those of your families and guard them jealously. And forgive us, our many failures for leaving you with such a broken world.

- Author Unknown