Pillars of Qomm

"A valley I know, | and Qomm its name,

Cut with water white | from peaks long dry;

Thence come the dews | that live in the Pikes,

By the spring of Hod and Han | it stands forever.

There came the Saints | mighty in wisdom,

From Yshir's burned hall | to far mountain's roots;

Ten score carved their names, | Magda the first,--
On the stone they carved,-- | and Anja the next.
Laws they made there, and holdfasts built
for their sons and kin, never there to live."

The Dawn of Dawns, Book of the Vigil Triumphant

Geography

Deep in the wilderness of the Zwischenland, beyond the forests and mountains east of Rheinwald, lies one of the greatest wonders of our world; a natural marvel so breathtaking, that it should be the pride of any nation who possesses it and the ceaseless wonder of any one who beholds it.
At least, so we are told.
To write of the Pillars of Qomm, as an historian, is to meet a peer for dinner with one's pants on backward; that is, to be embarrassingly unprepared for the task at hand. The tools of our trade are a keen interpretive mindset, reliable primary sources, and cold, hard facts. Of the first, I may confidently claim to still have full possession. But of the second, the rub lies in the word 'reliable' and of the third, in an absolute absence. So, it is necessary to beg your pardon, and invite you on a digression from our accounts of what is to explore the mystery of what may be.
To begin, allow be absolutely clear: I have, myself, never seen the Pillars; nor do I expect to. We must, therefore, rely upon the accounts of others who have – at least, so they claim. However, the limitations of this approach quickly present themselves.
Our first source comes from the hand of Barbara Gettlinger of Stradtberg, a socialite and travel writer^[1], while on her tour of the Commonwealth c. BW 112. She writes:

... [had sailed] for three days since leaving Rheinwald, and the unyielding majesty of our country was enough to send several of the ladies in my company to swooning. For my part, I was merely stricken with a sense of deep patriotism! What great lands were these! What marvelous destiny!
On the morning of the fourth day, after being served breakfast and tea, with the mountains soaring up around us on every side, the land dipped, and soon a wide valley opened up beneath the ship. There, we saw the trees give way to meadow, which in turn gave way to a dry, grassy plain. Captain Wilkins pointed out the signs of an ancient riverbed to the ladies aboard (who knew but little of such things!). We thought it a crude tragedy that such verdant landscape should fall into such disrepair on account of a fickle little stream.
But before we could jointly lament or begin to devise a solution to this indiscretion of nature, the clouds, which had rolled in beneath us, broke, and gave view to a truly marvelous sight. There, below, in the dried-up valley, were dozens -- hundreds! -- of enormous, dusty stone pillars. Each rose hundreds of feet into the air, and down between them could be seen a tiny rivulet - the remnant, we supposed, of the great river which once ran past them.

— Views on Society and Manners in the Commonwealth, first edition, p. 58-59
Mme. Barbara Gettlinger

This concludes Mme. Gettlinger's remarks on the subject. Which, in itself, is remarkable, considering she was to have borne witness to one of nature's legendary marvels; and one which is written of in Vigil literature as well. But let us pause our dissection a moment, and consider the next best source we have – the other hand, the account of Izik Barytokos, a merchant of Zamarkand whose account predates that of Mme. Gettlinger by only thirty-one years. He writes:

With wind and weather favorable, which lasted two days, the party traveled nearly fifty leagues. The weather then changing, we made but little progress for the next two days. Fortune favoring the most beleaguered among us, the weather again changed and the rain so subsiding and the sun yet remaining mild, we reached the Mouth of the Mountains in two days.
I write to you now, O Seeker, that there is no greater beauty in all the world than that which comes to relieve weary souls! So it is with the Mouth, which is wide and open, and covered with grasses which are soft and which smell sweetly to walk on. In any direction you choose, you may reach out and pluck a flower from countless blossoming trees. The lark and a dozen other birds sing, every one a song worthy of adoration itself. Here, there is honey, and many kinds of fruit, so that no man could ever want.
Yet in this marvelous land, the most marvelous sight to behold is surely the spires of the Mouth. O, they are most beautiful, and of a thousand varied forms! The pillars climb so high as to seem prideful in their work to rival the mountains, and all along them blossoming vines and fruit bushes cling to whatever precarious footing their sturdy roots might find. Between the spires runs a clear, shallow stream with rocky bed, and which splits, and forks, and quenches the thirst of the desert from whence we came and nourishes with life everything around us.
Into the sides of the Pillars are carved poems and prayers in strange and familiar tongues; faces, and even whole persons, stand eternal against the stone. At first, many of our number were stricken with fear at the unexpected sight of such alien sentinels. Yet their expressions neither invited nor cautioned our advance, and at length many of us grew easy once more, comforted as children by the presence of ones more sage, who knew more than we of the Creation and Creator which did certainly fashion them. So we passed through the Mouth after several days, lingering not longer than our captain would abide to eat, and drink, and rest our mules.
O, Seeker! That we should never see this land again! Had I known it then, I would have abandoned our folly and remained. To have tasted the waters of Paradise and left them behind is the cruelest burden to bear!

— Letter on the Overland Voyage from East to West
Izik Barytokos

Barytokos, writing from his ill-fated overland journey from the distant eastern States of Zamarkand and Amot, seems to corroborate only two facts with Mme. Gettlinger: that the Pillars lie in the mountains between East and West, and that the Pillars exist. Yet for as many as have found this Wonder, there are surely a dozen whose expedition did not end so happily as to warrant record, and a hundred from whom we will never hear. That is, if any of them are true at all; for I hold in my heart a great hope that not so many Men would be liars as to utterly taint the soil, and so I maintain that a kernel of truth may yet sprout from these tales.
The only question is: will I, will we, dear readers, live so long as to see it bear fruit?

History

In the first chapter of the Primary Module of Drosselmeier's seminal work, History of the Commonwealth, 7th ed., the author describes the arrival of the Vigil to the shores above Bluteisenberg and their subsequent advance through the wilderness near modern-day Rheinwald. He writes:

"And they who marched west did settle, and they who marched east did settle, and even they who sailed north did settle, but they who marched south were lost forever. The Pikes thus were slain, their cities burned, and their grounds sanctified by the pure blood of Man."

— History of the Commonwealth, Primary Module, Chapter I

It is from this lost expedition that marched South that we have our earliest extant record of the Pillars, immortalized in the Book of the Vigil Triumphant's voyage, Dawn of Dawns.

"A valley I know, / and Qomm its name,
Cut with water white / from peaks long dry;
Thence come the dews / that live in the Pikes,
By the spring of Hod and Han / it stands forever.

There came the Saints / mighty in wisdom,
From Yshir's burned hall / to far mountain's roots;
Ten score carved their names, / Magda the first,--
On the stone they carved,-- / and Anja the next.
Laws they made there, and holdfasts built
for their sons and kin, never there to live."

— The Dawn of Dawns, Book of the Vigil Triumphant

It is expected that well over a thousand soldiers of that expedition were lost to the wilderness of the Zwischenland. Yet no archaeological evidence remains to this effect. The records of the Conquest of Rheinland describe the burning, seizing, and occupation of a number of other major Pike settlements - nearly all of which the Lost Expedition would have had to pass. So where were the signs of conflict? Are we to believe that the Pikes allowed them all to pass, and that those Vigilant in turn forsook their sacred commission to win this land in blood?
Furthermore, who of the expedition survived to write this account? The preponderance of existing questions relative to the number of answers has created, among the more skeptical circles of the Stradtberg intelligentsia, the suggestion that the whole business is, of itself, fiction; that Barytokos was at best a well-intentioned teller of tales and at worst the victim of a mirage. Notably, he went mad later in life.
As for the good Mme. Gettlinger, her love of the Vigil is well known, and she writes at length of their virtue - well past the point of lip service to grease the gears of publication (which, believe me, is a concern). Could it not be that she simply wanted to bear witness to the fables Pillars mentioned in the Dawn of Dawns? Had she seen it, presumably in a galley with a number of other passengers, why have no other supporting testimonies emerged?
Although the mystery that exists between these two conflicting accounts remains an evergreen source of debate and speculation, it remains just that - a mystery.

Other Accounts

Additional accounts certainly exist, but none so descriptive or reliable as those presented here. Many are simply self-styled 'explorers'; quacks attempting, poorly, to replicate the successes of widely-traveled authors such as myself through outlandish, sensational claims of discovery. Others, like the Robertson Manuscript, present a much more convincing hoax, but a hoax nonetheless. Therefore, I have not honored any of these accounts by presenting them to you, holding sacred my responsibility as your guide between fact and fiction, and striving always to keep that line distinct.

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Footnotes

1. Although I consider her form dated and her material to be more concerned with impressing friends than informing minds, Gettlinger's literature must be recognized as some of the most influential; particularly where the opening of commerce and tourism is concerned. Some scholars credit her interstate voyages with opening the lines of communication which ultimately unified the Commonwealth. See Gettlinger entry in section two, Strong Hands and Cracked Skin.

Type

Rock Formation

Location under

Zwischenland

Contested By

• The Commonwealth
• Vigil Triumphant