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A True History of the Conditions & Society of the Kingdom of God

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Cetashwayo said:
(a note to censors: you should not remove this portion, as to be a a whale in Vaspukaran is to be glorified, and therefore I am only praising the Archdeacon of Titarkulan for his closeness to this enormous glory).
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I choose to believe this is entirely unironic because I find it endlessly more amusing that way.
 
I mean, it's one thing to be compared to a moa, given that you can probably find a few deacons who match that description wherever you go. But to merit comparisons to a whale, one must have achieved a truly exalted and prodigious girth the likes of which is almost never seen, given how many families' worth of food one would have to consume on a daily basis.
 
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8. The Yoke of History
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    • CHAPTER 2: THE VANISHED WORLD
    ​
    On my Time Imprisoned

    It was 789 and it had begun to dawn on I and Dina that perhaps we were in a great deal of trouble.

    The problem is that we were very clever. Our surreptitious excavation had successfully allowed us to conduct a full survey of Baalon and even secretly correspond with other scholars making similar investigations across Lake Hamgad, but it also was wildly against the rules of our respective orders. We had hoped the immensity of our discovery would simply overawe our superiors and make them think that we were brilliant risk-takers. Instead, we were immediately ejected and stripped of our immunity to Synodic prosecution. Jurors raided the village of Takan-Baal and confiscated every copy that they thought there might of be of our report manuscripts, then sent us under guard to a holding cell in Vikrag Prison along the Vermillion Way in Nachivan itself. The proctor of the village avoided arrest only by hiding in an eel barrel until the jurors went away, then coming out and impersonating his replacement. The villagers supported this, claiming the new proctor was the true imposter, and drowned him before anyone could verify.

    It is a charming little prison, I should say, with exactly the right amount of rats and dim-lit cells to match one's expectations. The always-moist walls and the constant dripping ensured you were never dehydrated, and the unblinking onyx statues of distorted angels with eyes embedded in their feathers watching us made sure that you were never truly alone. They were kind enough to grant me and Dina cells opposite to one another as husband and as wife, so that we could spend romantic moments together such as the time I remarked that 'at least we know they read the report', and Dina threw a piece of moldy bread at me.

    After some time I was released to meet with the Autocephalon, emissary from Kusro responsible for the safety of its souls outside the communion's territory. I had known him as a child, of course, as the Amalganis had bred so profusely throughout Kusro he was my cousin twice removed. He explained it to me plainly. Normally, such a report might get one a charge of Sacral Disorder, that is, disobeying the authority of your given order, and perhaps Low Blasphemy, for countermanding the authority of Order of the Reliquary in charge of approving works of history.

    But the Great Synod, and the Scholastic Order Reliqaury charged with guarding the country's history, wanted to make an example. We were everything wrong with the country: radical youths, one a witch's daughter and the other a wayward son of Kusro, dabbling in challenges to eternal truth. When I pointed out to the Autocephalon that everything I had written in the report was based upon a description of exactly what we had found, he shrugged and said simply sometimes the truth and the Truth do not see eye to eye.

    He gave me two choices plainly crafted in part by my domineering family. In the first, I would voluntarily defrock myself, renounce the priesthood and return to Kusro, where I would be free from general prosecution. The trial there would proceed easily, especially given my lineage, and that Kusro did not care at all about matters of such ancient history. In the second, I would be left at the mercy of the Synod, and even if the charge from High Blasphemy was downgraded, I would almost certainly be transferred to Harasdad as a penitent of the Order Reliquary.

    And of course, if I wanted to come home, I needed to divorce Dina, he added without even a hint of understanding what she was to me. When I pressed him, he, baffled, told me that of course a man of Amalgani could not marry the spawn of a filthy witch, and that this 'escapade' had come to its close. In my mother's words I should grow up and cease with this foolishness that had already got me captured in Kutan. Besides, my mother and my father both disapproved of the match and so by Kusro law it was not even legal. The moment I stepped into Kusro Dina would not be my wife and would be remanded to the deadly custody of the witches' court.

    I have never felt my heart harden more than it did in that moment. This man, this scum dredged from the eastern sea who called himself my cousin, dared say such a thing of my wife. He dared say of the only soul who had ever cared for me as something other than an ornament, an obscure branch in a family tree, a side-character in the theater of Kusro, that she was nothing more than filth. This brilliant, daring, strong woman who I had spent two years of my life with as partners and as colleagues, was a spawn, because some imbecilic priest had decided that the right way to convince heathens of the word of God was to declare them witches and place them at the edge of the communion.

    God made something snap in me, filled me with the rage of all the nations. I grimaced like a demon and bared my teeth as if I was an ape. I grasped the autocephalon by the arm and gave him my counter-offer: If he spoke up against Dina like that again, he could return to Kusro by himself in a cedar coffin. Then I released him, stood up. I told him to tell my father he was a beast with no back. That my mother was a serpent choking on a moa's egg of sin that engorged her ugly throat. Then I turned about, strode out of his legation heedless to his pleas, and turned to the jurors waiting outside. I told them they better take me back to Vikrag now, as I had spent too much time away from my beloved.

    When I arrived back at our cell, Dina knew immediately what had happened from my expression. "Well," she said, chipper and sardonic, "we will at least make a fine bunch for kindling."

    Three days later, we were transferred by prison streamer to Harasdad for the trial.

    On Our Trial for High Blasphemy

    Unlike Dina, I never truly believed that we would truly die. In the first place, high blasphemy was a charge often deployed in order to speed up proceedings, then dropped so soon as a confession was exacted for some much more minor offense. In the second place, I had by this point become hopelessly obsessed with a particularly obscure brand of millenarian pugilism that claimed that the Pasan Ghadi would be resurrected within months and would then bring about the final apocalyptic war against five evils. If only I could perfect my Twenty Angels Screaming Downwards kata in time for the trial then the Pasan Ghadi would explode from the sky in a flaming chariot, banish all evil on this plane of existence, lasso heaven down to earth with a lariat of mammoth hair, and then hopefully commute our sentence to communal service.

    Dina appreciated my newfound fitness but remained skeptical of the practical effect. In the end, though we would indeed never come close to execution, the Grand Mouflon had no influence upon the proceedings (beyond a time when, during a testimony, I attempted to perform a kata and was nearly shot by a juror who thought I was reaching for a hidden gun).

    Harasdad was a dusty city high above the Hadit floodplain, perched upon an unnatural formation of stone and dirt. Harasdad was built literally upon its history, with successive layers of habitation across thousands upon thousands of years raising it high above the flood plain. It was this same elevation that had saved it from the flood. Unfortunately, the city's height above the landscape was reflected in the ego of its denizens. The Metropolitan boasted opnely and proudly it was the oldest city in the world, and reacted poorly to those like me who might dare challenge its antiquity stretching back to its place as one of the great five fallen stars in the time of Old Kokab.

    But I had nothing against Harasdad. I would never deny its antiquity, or the respect with which Harasdad has always held its past in. I would never deny honour to the legendary scholars who by preserving the legacy of the vanished world in the wake of the flood prevented so much from being lost. I would simply deny, and always have, that this respect accords them a monopoly over the truth of the past, that all the rest of Vaspukaran ought to be in yoke to the history of Harasdad and its version of our history.

    The inquisition panel was composed of Archdeacons from the Circle of Sufgar on recess from the Great Synod to act as judges on our trial. They were led by Archdeacon Ravagan, himself a famous scholar for his work upon translations of the Kokabi script. The rest were mostly retired academics who fell asleep during meetings of the Great Synod, not the ruthless preachers who had been drawn from the missions and lusted for chances to accuse their enemies of heresy. It soon became exceedingly clear that this was more a scholarly defense than a true trial for high blasphemy. Indeed, Ravagan opened by apologozing and explaining this had gotten out of hand, and that our treatment in Vikrag had been because our respective orders had wanted to punish us for humiliating them with our initiative.

    All they wanted, they explained, was to claim ownership of the report for the Order of the Reliquary, and redact the most controversial portion on Baalon as the first city and the first people, as there was simply not enough evidence to prove so. Indeed, they praised sections of my work, such as the care taken with extracted artifacts and the organization of the village work crews. Perhaps they hoped their flattery would weaken our defenses, but in fact it only strengthened our resolve to fight.

    We refused to budge, arguing that the sequence of archaeological remains clearly predates anything from the first period of Harasdad, the culture of Kokab. Kokabi artifacts were found at much higher layers than those of the Silent People, and it would be nonsensical for an advanced civilization to form in Lake Hamgad and have no interaction with Kokab, which itself knew about Lake Hamgad, referred to it as the Lake of Baraksha, and never mentioned anything about this advanced civilization despite the thousands of petriform engravings we have as evidence. Further, it was my right as a scholar to put forward conclusions even if ultimately proven incorrect, so long as my evidence was gathered faithfully and my methods of research legitimate and absolutely non-heretical.

    This impasse continued for some time. Dina was sometimes allowed to explain herself, which she did so in her lovely and particular manner, causing the Archdeacons to bark that the only reason she was not being tried by a Witch's Court was that we were married. This at least was a relief, as no just decision ever came from such courts, and there would have been little hope of leniency for her as both a woman and a witch's daughter contravening Patriarchal law. Dina herself confessed after the third interrogation ended in Ravagan's face turning to the color of a blooming amaranth that it'd be better if I handled the talking from now on.

    On Our Sentence

    At last our shared stubbornness exasperated Ravagan, who had clearly been hoping for two pliant youths to recant quickly and confess some minor crimes and be done with it. He granted us an ultimatum: Abandon the most controversial portions of the report, or else the sentence will be permanent penitence, defrocking, and indentured servitude to the Order for the two of us. Even Dina was shocked by the escalation to a sentence normally reserved for outright heretics, and at last my will began to spoil.

    After months of prison, testimonies, trials, cross-examinations and with no right to witness or defense beyond what we could muster as a single couple, I was utterly exhausted. Dina herself was pregnant, and I was terrified of bring a child into bondage. After one last kata did not summon Ghadi from the heavens, I went to Dina and asked if we might just redact some parts of the report, which anyways might require more research to substantiate, in order to rescue ourselves from the potentiality of unrestricted penitence for us and for our children.

    Dina responded simply that if I accept the deal we should better divorce on the spot, as she refused to cuckold our work for the sake of the ego of a "crusty, third-rate scholar".

    So I refused the ultimatum and stood at the stand beside my defiant dearest, and the spurned Archdeacon Ravagan sentenced us in a shaking rage. For two counts of sacral disorder, one count of low blaspemy, and one count of encroachment on the responsibilities of the Order Reliquary, we were sentenced to be permanent penitents of that order, at the mercy of their laws and regulations, no longer free souls and clergy but mere mouflons bound to the Harasdad Monastery of Kunkalin.

    Never again to publish in our own names, never again allowed to make choices of our will, our purpose to be nothing more than servants to the men who had spit on our research and conclusions. We had been summarily defeated, our assault on the grand mausoleum of the past entombed within its labyrinthine marble halls, never again to threaten its foundation.

    Or so they thought.
     
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    • Cetashwayo said:
    God made something snap in me, filled me with the rage of all the nations. I grimaced like a demon and bared my teeth as if I was an ape. I grasped the autocephalon by the arm and gave him my counter-offer: If he spoke up against Dina like that again, he could return to Kusro by himself in a cedar coffin. Then I released him, stood up. I told him to tell my father he was a beast with no back. That my mother was a serpent choking on a moa's egg of sin that engorged her ugly throat. Then I turned about, strode out of his legation heedless to his pleas, and turned to the jurors waiting outside. I told them they better take me back to Vikrag now, as I had spent too much time away from my beloved.
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    Cetashwayo said:
    Dina responded simply that if I accept the deal we should better divorce on the spot, as she refused to be cuckold our work for the sake of the ego of a "crusty, third-rate scholar".
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    They're perfect for each other!!! 😍😍😍😍😍

    Loving the scholarly political drama!
     
    I like the worldbuilding but I've grown surprisingly attached to these characters.

    Cetashwayo said:
    They were kind enough to grant me and Dina cells opposite to one another as husband and as wife, so that we could spend romantic moments together such as the time I remarked that 'at least we know they read the report', and Dina threw a piece of moldy bread at me.
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    True love.

    In the second place, I had by this point become hopelessly obsessed with a particularly obscure brand of millenarian pugilism that claimed that the Pasan Ghadi would be resurrected within months and would then bring about the final apocalyptic war against five evils. If only I could perfect my Twenty Angels Screaming Downwards kata in time for the trial then the Pasan Ghadi would explode from heaven in a flaming chariot, banish all evil on this plane of existence, lasso heaven down to earth with a lariat of mammoth hair, and then hopefully commute our sentence to communal service.
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    I'm not sure why but that seems like such a mood.
     
    Ah so the reason our author lays into pugilism as foolish nonsense is because it makes him think of his cringe 21 year old self.
     
    I stand corrected, I hope not only to be as cool as the author when I'm old and gray but to be as cool and as much of a chad as him in the now.
     
    Cetashwayo said:
    God made something snap in me, filled me with the rage of all the nations. I grimaced like a demon and bared my teeth as if I was an ape. I grasped the autocephalon by the arm and gave him my counter-offer: If he spoke up against Dina like that again, he could return to Kusro by himself in a cedar coffin. Then I released him, stood up. I told him to tell my father he was a beast with no back. That my mother was a serpent choking on a moa's egg of sin that engorged her ugly throat. Then I turned about, strode out of his legation heedless to his pleas, and turned to the jurors waiting outside. I told them they better take me back to Vikrag now, as I had spent too much time away from my beloved.
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    Ok nevermind i retract my judgement of him as a snarky academic he's cool now
     
    Ah, a shame. A great city that had done great things, and yet it could not bear to share the glory with a backwater village so stunted in intellectual traditions that the effort of the dig would be remembered more clearly then the findings!
    But one jewel in it's glittering crown, and it responded to the offer of giving it up with horror and clutching all the tighter at it's treasures!..
    As for that but if moldy bread? I do not mean to cast insult, but I imagine Dina's aim was true, and struck her husband right in our author's face, for she could do naught else.
     
    It would be funny if the judge dying of apoplexy in the middle of the trial was treated as an Act of God and allowed the defendants to go free.
     
    The real one small trick to make inquisitors hate you in a trial of heresy is of course the Joan of Arc classic- to say you'll only answer their questions if provided confession with a priest and to keep responding with "I dunno, I just put my trust in God".
     
    ScottishMongol said:
    I like the worldbuilding but I've grown surprisingly attached to these characters.
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    Yeah I mean for me part of how I want to introduce people to a world is more through how the people behave in it rather than huge infodumps. I feel that if you can get people actually engaged with the characters and who they are then they'll be far more interested in everything around them.
     
    9. People of the Fallen Stars
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    • CHAPTER 2: THE VANISHED WORLD
    ​
    On the Nature of Our Penitence

    If Archdeacon Ravagan had hoped to be rid of us Kulkanin was a poor choice of dungeon. Situated on one of the high satellite hills of Harasdad, overlooking the industrial lower town and the Hadit floodplain well below, Kulkanin was the last resort for failed scholars. Second sons deposited by disgraced fathers and examination rejects assembled here together to engage in a conspiracy to do absolutely nothing at all and enjoy their daily ration. Placing I and Dina here was to release raptors among sheep.

    Seizing control was fairly simple. Dina identified that the abbot was addicted to sweetmeats imported from Tiran-Peshutun, so she would save and then spend our penitential stipend on these as a gift. The abbot so adored the gesture he warmed up to us quickly, and even offered Dina assistance from the hospital when our daughter Miriam was born. Then the abbot realized we were not random debtors from the streets of Warabad but accomplished scholars who might actually help him accomplish his academic quotas. He had been warned by Ravagan that we were here, and to keep a close eye on us, but I had been placed in the monastery's mail niche so this letter was strategically misplaced until such time that he was too fond of us for it to matter.

    Excited to have someone willing to do any work at all, the abbot tasked us with translating Kokabi texts written on the petrified bark that was the ancient scribal style. The bark had been first treated in a solution which softened the skin and made it easier to write on, then after writing fired in a kiln with certain minerals that burned it absolutely solid. Thanks to this process, which today has been outmoded by the printing press, these tablets are far better preserved than the skin and paper writings of a later era. Still today canal projects around Harasdad will come to a halt because of the discovery of some new archives containing thousands of the things.

    Dina and I were admittedly disappointed that our penitence was not an awful hardship we could write a stirring novel on. But our boredom had purpose as we took control of the monastery to sate our deep ennui and to build a place our daughter Miriam could prosper. The lazy monks became our scribes and translators on the threat of blackmail, and we undertook a project to compile and categorize a vast number of works from old Kokab. I look back on it now as one of the most peaceful and happy parts of my life, all thanks to my conviction for low blasphemy.

    On the Structure of the Vanished World

    From here we will shift the progress of our story. Our understanding of the world before Babarak, so long before the flood, is still in the process of construction. Huge quantities of written material has been discovered from every single era, new archaeological sites and tells have been surveyed, and new epics have been put to print that we had never before even heard of. Across my lifetime the vanished world has been unveiled before our eyes, and new avenues of investigation our ancestors never would have believed have become available to us. But it is still fragmented. Tremendous gaps lay in the record, times when almost nothing is known. Chronology is not yet a line but a series of dashes in the record, flashes of light in the darkness that grow ever brighter as we approach the flood, before everything is snuffed out again and we return to a state of mystery for the centuries immediately succeeding that disaster.

    So we will not proceed in some easy chronicling order. Instead, I have chosen to select three eras and three pieces of literature from each era, pieces that I read to Miriam as by three years old she was ready to start assisting in translation. The first is the era of Oldest Kokab, the Five Fallen Stars, and the Twenty Tales of Kekemish. Second is Great Kokab, the Time of Four Warring Brothers, and the tragic romance of Suppilima and Sala. Finally, we will conclude, fittingly, with the First Revelation, the Scorpion's Domain built by Rippatang the Copper King. He is the last of the old world. Soon after his death the whole upper Hadit is smothered in a sudden darkness. When history begins again, the landscape has shifted dramatically and this land's primacy is ending. The winged bull now rises up to devour all, for by then we reach the unholy rise of Babarak.

    On Dating the Vanished World

    The ancients were excessively concerned with the stars to a matter that seems absurd today. Accounts abound of weddings cancelled and festivities declared on the basis of some heavenly conjunction. Families assigned themselves mother constellations and preferred marriages in certain combinations (it was universally agreed that the frog and the scorpion were a bad wedding match). Eclipses were carefully recorded and interpreted as omens good and bad, sometimes stopping battles or starting new and bloody wars. A comet was once sighted and it is said that 'the whole of Senekad fell into disorder'.

    But although we have question the utility for faith of such star-seeing, it is no doubt that it is of immense utility for scholarship. Thanks to our own developments in true astronomy and the ancient star lists which record stellar incidents according to their calendar, we can accurately date almost every ruler of Kokab. We know, for example, that Kati-Ban was Ensign of Gog in the Year of the Amaranth three years following a black sun, which we trace to an eclipse in the year -3332, or 3332 years before the birth of Amalgast. We know from texts of the time that the romance of Supillima and Sala took place in the -2200s, that Rippatang erupted onto the scene in -1856 and died at an absurd age in -1772, and that the domain he had built was overrun by -1718.

    With the flood having confirmed to have taken place 823 years before the birth of Amalgast thanks to the work of Pontiff-Prelate Yunan, we thus have a rough chronology of this world, albeit it with gaps where the written material abruptly disappears. We can assume that these dark eras are times when the destructive force triumphed and there was profound disorder in the land, but also repair and reconstruction from a failed social order, and that men had better things to do than to write about their troubles.

    On the New Chronology

    We will not be using it. Rav Gunin is a stupid man who uses stupid methods. I have had many correspondences with him in which I have begged that he see reason but he still insists to cut out hundreds of years of history because he claimed it is impossible for nothing to be written in these times. As a result he places Rappagang concurrent with the first Babaraki Limmus, which is absolutely nonsensical as Rappagang's own List of Foolish Peoples makes no mention of the place. Every respectable scholar does agree: Gunin is an ass in human clothing, or else a witch in service of the demon king sent here to mislead the people with improper historic dating.

    So I am proud to say that in this book we shall not mention Gunin again, and that he is no longer welcome at my estate for symposium after the incident involving the so-called "Babaraki beveled bowl"!

    On the People of the Fallen Stars

    Kokab is not how the people of the fallen stars called themselves, but it is the name by which we have called them since they were first rediscovered.

    Kokab is an old Vasparak word for star, and summarizes well these people who shined so brightly in the course of history. They inhabited the country now called Sufgar, after the Flood the core of holy Sufgan's Kingdom. But before the flood this was not the dry and dusty country that he knew but a kind of paradise on earth, where forests of acacia and broadleaf extended almost to the water's edge. Kokab was centered about the now extinct braid of the Upper Hadit, a region where the earth flattened enough to allow the Hadit to split into many tributaries before feeding back into itself. It is along these braids that the first literate civilization in Vaspukaran begins.

    Harnessing the agricultural innovations of Baalon, the people of Kokab added to it the domestication of the auroch and the planting of fine emmer wheat, well-adapted to the rich irrigated soil of the braid. No longer dependent on the capricious monsoon rain, Kokab's population exploded, and it is not much sooner than we see the advent of complicated pottery than do their cities erupt onto the scene. At first undifferentiated and centered on small shrines and temple on high places perched above the often-inundated plain, soon a few placed themselves above the rest in spirit and in fact.

    On the Five Fallen Stars

    ​

    These were the five fallen stars that formed a stable balance of power in the region in this first age of settled man, emerging in the -3500s. We know from the copious number of bark tablets the names of these cities, and very much about them. There was Harasdad of course, the holy city, whose symbol was the humble but eternal trilobite. Then there was Senekad, city of the scorpion, Gog, city of the Mastodon, Taridu, that claimed the great Haakwai for itself, and then Sipparak, whose seals bear the fearsome saber tooth of smilodon.

    These cities were ruled by priest-lords elected from the clergy, whose legitimacy was based upon their ability to afford the prosperity of their own people and provide for the temple dependents. Surrounding them were hill and high-plain peoples, living semi-nomadic lives centered on the cultivation of tef and herds of sheep and goat and moa. Kokabi scribes have exceedingly little pleasant to say about these people, and often strained to find reasons to despise them one scribe said the men of Hagag were evil and should be destroyed because "the hairs upon their chest curled poorly, and their feet were too hard for dancing".

    Commerce and trade centered on the planned economy we still utilize today for essential goods, but far cruder and on a smaller scale, with much allowance for the independent farmer. The priest-lord was referred to as the Ensin, a term still used for the elected leaders of our Metropolitans in its modern form of Ensign. The Ensin was a ceremonial symbol of the temple's authority and the manager of the city's fortune. Each city had a patron god or goddess, and the five fallen stars also distinguished themselves by possesion of meteoric rocks that were major centers of a shared cosmic cult. We now understand of course that these deities were mere fragments of God's great divinity, but it would not be till Rappatang that this Truth was first discovered by the people of Kokab, and so they commit the sin of divine separatism to which we would today assign the label heathenry.

    These cities also warred incessantly, fighting over scraps of territory and individual canals, and wrote about every encounter as if it was armageddon. It was with awful relief that I sometimes read the lament of a city's destruction, because it might mean that the endless list of battles might come to a pause for a few decades.

    The boasts of the tablets did not often match up with the reality. The Ensin of Gog in the year of the Blood Mastodon is said to have "crushed beneath his moa's feet," the neck of the Ensin of Harasdad, and "taken all his women and children for himself, such that his household doubled". But in Harasdad we are informed that in the year of the Blood Mastodon the Ensin of Gog "sprouted wings and fled," because he saw that the "Ensin of Harasdad's army was such that he could not nothing more than run to save his skin". The scribe of the city of Iqan, in between the fallen stars, noted only that "The Ensin Maraniki of Harasdad and Hulu of Gog fought a battle over the plain of Hujedi but were forced to retreat as the water they had stocked was dirty and both armies fell gravely ill with leaking sickness [the reader may guess what this is referring to]".

    So the oldest days of Old Kokab were not known for the quality of its priest-generals. We can say at least that there was a novel production of literature and art, a tremendous outpouring by the temples of praises to the Gods and beautiful pottery and high mud brick and earth ziggurats in this new land that was being built in the braid of the Hadit. And it is to this production we now turn, to outline the structure of the first and greatest epic of the oldest era of Kokab. This is the Twenty Tales of Kekemish, the story of the long and fruitless quest of the Gods to convince the Ensin of Harasdad to return his stolen immortality.
     
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    • This is really enjoyable to read. Not got much else to say about it, but good going.
     
    Mechanical said:
    This is really enjoyable to read. Not got much else to say about it, but good going.
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    Thank you! Positive comments like that are always appreciated even more than likes, even if you don't have any specific comment. It's been a while since I've been writing properly.

    slybrarian said:
    The hydrology of this map confuses me.
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    The Hadit flows from the northwest to the south and then turns a bend to the southeast of the braid, pivoting eastwards. The highlands slope downwards from the west and southwest flowing into the Hadit. As for the connection to Lake Hamgad, there are a few outflows in what would otherwise be an endorheic basin around the lake due to certain peculiarities in how the basin around how the lake was formed.

    It might look something like this:



    The nearness of some of the river braids to the Dumuzi Plateau is partly because of specific furrows cut into the landscape by past floods combined with the fact that Dumuz has a number of sheer cliffs on the western side.
     
    Cetashwayo said:
    Positive comments like that are always appreciated even more than likes, even if you don't have any specific comment. It's been a while since I've been writing properly.
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    This is stunningly entertaining and fascinating and I wish more RL historians wrote with such panache as the author of our tale. I particularly enjoy how fantastical yet at the same time recognizable (to anyone who spends any amount of time in history/archeology/theology/adjacent fields) this narrative is. Excellent work!
     
    I should also mention that I love that there's some guy who's trying to do the stupid new chronology thing. The author is correct to banish him both physically and mentally.
     
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