My mind is troubled of late. I have sailed north from the lands of Banu, into the frozen seas that lie beyond the northmost edge of that continent and found myself stymied. What I saw there in the sky, in the water, in the air has been enough to give me pause. I have lost three crewman, sturdy dependable souls all, and good friends at that. It brings to mind the many warnings I received from the people of Banu and I do wish I had heeded them better. The north seas are not one that can be conquered with a single ship, even with a warrior as mighty as I aboard. I had thought to track the path of the Jing, and indeed, I found some success, in the shape of broken ships frozen in vast islands of ice too cold for me to touch.
I will say this for the crabs, if they do not sleep at the bottom of the sea, they must have been hardy indeed to survive that journey. Yet when the assaults of the spirits suffused with that malevolent light in the sky grew too much, I turned back. I followed the coast of the eastern continent this time, seeing no reason to halt my explorations. There I met with numerous peoples. The eastern continent is densely forested, even more so than the great Emerald Seas. The men of Khem told me of the Kasin, the people of the black trees, but never in any detail. They called themselves Tuiston when pressed for a name, but they are a scattered, tribal people; Galliar, Allemis, Teutos, Daniar and a dozen other tribal names reached my ears. Tuiston is not the name of their people, but their land, and their god.
I will have to write another letter to my sister, she will greatly enjoy dissecting my findings I think. But those people are not what trouble my thoughts. Rather it is my own reticence, and the tales of giants. Heraklios, that striking fellow, warned me of approaching the Emerald Isle, so too did the folk of Banu, and now even these simple tribals. I ignored a warning once and lost three men who have been with me all my life. I hesitate, and the foundations of my Way tremble.
I cannot just head home, I need to investigate.
***
These tales are frustrating. In some the folk of that isle are pale as ghosts with orange or crimson and golden hair and bodies and faces speckled with spots yet beautiful to behold. In others they are swarthy, hairy nearly to the point of being furred, with the features of a menagerie of beasts spread amongst them. The only commonality is their immense frames. I was briefly mistaken as one of the latter sort and I am no small man. Yet my height appears to be on the smaller end of average if the tales are to be believed.
My only conclusion then is that the Emerald Isle is peopled by two tribes of different countenance. The types never appear together, rivals for dominance perhaps. I have docked back with the banu, in a different city to investigate those who have seen them. Very rarely do these folk leave their isle, despite seeming to have ships of their own. Those who do seem extremely violent, leading to the belief that they are exiled criminals.
Most are quite strong, from the stories I'd say that most of these 'exiles' are somewhere in the range of the Fourth to Sixth realm in cultivation, although their methods are strange. Yet if it were only strength I do not think the folk of Banu would be so concerned. No the issue seems to be that each encountered giant of the isles has been driven to seek battle and have no regard for their own lives. A cultivator of such power unleashing themselves without restraint or concern for others or even their own survival is a frightening thing. We with power hold so much of ourselves back, even in a duel with foes.
Surely every man or woman that leaves that blasted isle cannot be a madman though. I will get to the bottom of this.
***
At last I found my lead, down in the warm southern waters around the isles of the Bronze Men. it took a great deal of questioning and not a few matches in the wrestling ring, but my trail finally led me to the tale of a goat horned giant, said to have settled on one of the more northerly isles. He was said to be a tremendous mason of all things with a body as tough as the stone he worked and a gaze which could petrify unruly troublemakers. The structures I saw there were impressive, hardly work to match the palace of the water curtain cave, but impressive nonetheless.
I found however that the giant himself had passed away two centuries ago after driving off the army of another kingdom, whose tricksome ruler had wounded him harshly with poisons that broke even his legendary resilience. He had however left behind kin, children and grandchildren of mixed stock.
I was able to speak to one, a daughter whose tawny skin wild hair set her out from the Bronze men, her feet were hooves as well as some of the more pure Weilu once were. It took some doing and not a few drinks, but I was able to learn something of her grandfather. His tribe was called 'Fo-vor-uh' or something like it, the lass slurred the word and pronounced it differently half the time. The other tribe of the land were the Danaan. They were a rival people as I had suspected, but the details surprised me.
It was said that on the day when the sun went black and the 'worms' were cast down from the sky, the three mothers of earth, for them, she raised an island, a paradise, verdant and pure, safe from all the corruption of the world, and there she shielded them until the sun defeated his foe, the Terrible Gnawing Worm. Those brought to the island were the ancestors of Danaan and Fovoruh alike.
But quarrels happened, as they do, two brothers sought kingship and their striving broke the people in two, but as the destruction mounted, the two brothers went before the mothers, their three gods and sought their favor, instead of risking the destruction of their paradise. Both brothers were wise, worthy and strong, and so the Mother goddesses split the land in two.
And this is the odd part, they did not merely divide the island as we might. Instead, the Danaan and their shining kingdoms exist in the day, and the quiet villages of the Fovoruh exist at night. I was incredulous of this but the girl could hardly tell me more. Only that the land of day and the land of night were forever divided by the kingdom of the third goddess, the Land of Shadows, through which no man or woman could pass.
How much of this was exaggeration? Even with all my travels it seems strange. The girl knew little more of the matter, just half forgotten tales on her grandfathers knee. She knew though that the people of the isle were deeply suspicious of outsiders, considering all who lived in the lands beyond tainted by the Worm that Gnaws. Exile from their island of paradise was their harshest punishment, even beyond death. Those exiled would usually go mad with grief, explaining the tales.
Yet, her Grandfather had endured. She assured me he had been a deeply maudlin man, but driven to aid and build in a way that had given him purpose. Sadly she could not explain the Isle's cultivation methods. She trained in the ways of the Bronze Men, for the methods used by her grandfather's kin were impossible beyond the Emerald Isle itself.
She too warned me against going there, that the Dun Scaith, the Land of Shadows did not just lie between day and night, but 'Inside' and 'Outside'. That an uncle of her's had tried to return 'home' and returned mad, gibbering about an endless grey shore and the Witch of Shadows, Queen of Dead Men. Other's didn't return at all.
I will return home after this. I need clear my head. I
am the King of Explorers. I will set foot on this land as well… But my men I think deserve their homes and choice, on whether they take this journey.
-Entry from the private journals of Zheng Lu, King of Explorers
Second Part below
Danae watched the door the foreign man had walked through long after he had left. The kapaleia was quiet, few had the courage to come and drink when a man with such a heavy legend was about. He was surely a hero of his own strange land, marked and forged by his gods as only the greatest heroes were. As was common in those heroes his flaw was pride. He spoke to her like a child. It was not a cruel arrogance but a… condescension. She was an interesting object to him, to be studied and catalogued, but not respected.
So like the Tyrants of eastern islands, who came swaggering to the lands of the great god of the woods and ways between, judging the people of Arcadia simple, their gods weak. Danae tipped back the cup in her hand, draining the remains of the wine. That at least was good. Paion's wine was the best. Standing, she swayed a moment, she wasn't half as drunk as she'd put on, but the wine had made her head fuzzy. She knocked thrice on the counter as she passed it, letting the owner know the danger had passed. Her hooves clopped on the tiled floor as she ducked the doorframe and squinted up at the afternoon light.
She put on an easy grin for her fellow citizens who looked her way. She might not be a legend like that man, or her grandfather, but she was a hero, and people looked for her guidance. She towered a head and a half over most of her fellows, but they were used to her and her kin and so she found her way down the winding polis street without trouble.
Ah, but that man had stirred her memories. She'd been so busy with her training and her Deed-doing she hadn't thought of grandfather's stories in an age. Well, she thought, glancing up at the artificial mountain, their acropolis, and grandfather's masterwork. Most polei built their citadels on a hilltop, theirs was the hill. There was a reason Grandfather had been made a citizen after all. Pausing there in the street, she looked up at the immense blocks of stone, wrought from the little island which had once sat off the southern coast, the fits and joins of the rock needing no mortar to hold and the columns of the entranceway, the natural seeming way it rose from the surrounding landscape overgrown with moss and grass and trees, an immense mound with only a single entrance.
She called grandfather a legend, but that wasn't right. His way had been different. Few knew his name, fewer still his face. No god blessed his blood, no mighty foes fell in his name. He was a Mason, not a warrior, and when the trickster king of Lerna had come he had not fought in the way of heroes and legends, but as a builder.
And all the tricks in the world had not served to break their stout walls, built by his hand. She had lied to the man a bit, but it was the same lie her kin told everyone. Grandfather had not died of poison, but grief.
He had lived longer than most of his kin, but the yearning for the blessed isle had taken him all the same. He had never recovered from grandmother's passing. She and her father had held his hands as he lay in bed, singing a song in the tongue of his homeland, until at last he went back to the stone.
"Danae!" the call of her name shook Danae from her contemplation of the acropolis.
She grinned down at the speaker as he came to her, wrapping a muscular arm around his slender shoulders. "Kyros! Back already from your consultation with the oracle?"
Her husband grinned up at her, the shimmering curls of his blonde hair gleaming in the light of the setting sun. "How could I do anything but hurry back, when I hear my wife is in audience with some foreign despot!"
She laughed, squeezing him more tightly in her one armed embrace. He grumbled good naturedly at being pressed into her side. "Is that what you heard? Not a despot, he didn't carry himself like a king or a tyrant, a hero certainly though. It was peaceable enough."
"You worry my heart even more, an unattached hero is much worse than a king," Kyros replied, ducking out of her grasp. She grinned and followed after him as they resumed walking down the street.
"Pfah, you worry too much, my husband. Do you not trust my strong arm?" Danae asked.
"It is not the strength of your arms I doubt," Kyros shot back.
Danae pursed her lips. It was true that she was only a hero, not a legend, let alone a true demigod. Her eyes flicked back up to the acropolis again. She was not her grandfather, who could carve whole islands into blocks and carry them back on his shoulders alone. She wondered sometimes just what the truth of her blood was. He had always complained of feeling so drawn and weak.
What did they call the gods in the land beyond Dun Scaith? She knew so little, just the stories of a sad and dying man, why had a man as gentle as her grandfather been cast out by the High King of the Night?
Some days, she wished that she had chosen to be initiated into the Cult of Ways, perhaps then she might have been able to reach the glimmering silver shores that hung in her mind, shrouded in mist.
"Danae, you're sure you are well?" Kyros asked, snapping her out of her thoughts again.
"I'm fine you worrier," she dismissed. She had chosen to be a warrior, she didn't have the patience to be a priestess. "No, the foreigner wanted to talk about grandfather is all. I'm feeling a little lost in memory."
He nodded, some of the tension bleeding from him as he looked her over with concern. They were nearing the city gates now, and Danae found herself wishing earnestly to be home, looking out over the fields of their farm. For all the crowds of the polei proper, she felt terribly alone.
She did not truly belong here, with these little folk, and this pale and tepid land and colorless sky. What was she even doing in pretending? She wielded her weapons without purpose, took up a role that fit least ill and failed to master even that. What…
The blessed isle she had never seen gleamed like the finest silver in her thoughts. The voices of her ancestors called from the grey land where shadows lay.
She felt a warmth, and looked down to see her husband holding her hand. The dull grey at the edge of her vision retreated, gleaming yellow hair, sun darkened skin, the rich dyes of his tunic, purchased with the wealth they had made together. The warmth of his hand mattered the most, driving back the cold, the empty feeling that a part of her was
missing.
It had been, but now he was right here.
"That is why I worry," he frowned, and she had to restrain the urge to kiss him then and there.
Danae clapped a hand on his head and he scowled at her as she ruffled his hair. "Its passed, my husband. I might have ill dreams this night, but I'll be with you in the morning."
"Do not make light of your ailings, my wife," Kyros sighed as they left the city descending the winding road which lead down to the farmlands beyond.
"I'll make an effort," she chuckled, locking her fingers between his as they walked. "Oh, did you get an answer from the oracle?"
Her husband's perpetually concerned expression softened, a slight smile gracing his lips. "The best time will be on the next night of the harvest moon."
"Well," Danae chuckled, bumping her hip against his side. "We'll have to keep trying till morning comes then, won't we?"
She didn't need such dreams, dreams of what was never hers. There were more than enough here. Let fools incapable of contentment chase the dream of paradise.
