The Land
(from Toph 100:2-4 of The Ballad of Shiva, kept in the Pache’s Great Dome in the tiered city of Copertha):
"D'izen scaled the holy peak and gazed upon the ruin the Destroyer had wrought. And thus she returned to her people and spoke. Listen! for I have seen the mighty fallen and the fallen raised high and what was before is gone, and what was before that has come again.
And the people were awed by the voice of Izen and gazed upon her as she spoke, for they were young in the Land and knew not what great Shiva had birthed to welcome them.
And thus the Prophet spoke. Listen! for we shall make of this place our home, and it shall be ours for as long as mighty Shiva gazes upon us with her three faces."
(from The Wisdom of Tamerlane, collected by Asamath Grecerius from the oral tradition of the Two-Blade Axe Clan of the Dragohn):
"I surfaced to wild seas and the raging neon flaring of a sunset which surely no civilized being had seen before. Low in the western sky was Alune, child of sorrow, soul-soother, light-bringer to the night. And above, caught in the streaming light of sunset, was the red, veined mass of Shiva, the Destroyer, harbinger of ill, goddess of monsters and fear. Three times the size of Alune, the world still quaked with her passage.
My brothers, sisters and I swam to the newborn shore, thinking we were the first creatures to walk the Land since the Inversion of All. We had great works to do – to remake life, to create what was, anew. To breathe civilization into the new Land.
Upon the steaming beach I looked upon the closest of my companions and we said nothing, only nodded to one another, and then we set out to the eight corners of the Land."
The Dead awoke from long sleep to a world changed from what they had known before, if they had known the world before the inversion. From their citadel of drowned Siat’le they arose to fulfill their immortal mission, whatever that mission might be.
From what little can be gathered from the Dead themselves, they did not find the Land as devoid of life as they had expected. In fact, life teemed: left dormant for unknown centuries or millennia under the oceans, now that it was exposed to air and sunlight ancient seeds awoke, plants unseen for unknowable years pre-Inversion waved in the breezes once again, fed strange mutations of creatures that had somehow survived the destruction and re-making of the world, and mutated themselves. The Dead, despite what the scant “official” records document, did not re-create life on the Land, rather, they facilitated it, added to it, guided it into even newer shapes and patterns
Geography
Related Reports (Primary)
Related Reports (Secondary)
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