I thought I’d spent this week sharing some design ideas I had for my novel. But then I realised I could have some fun and practice a style I don’t normally get to do.
Not entirely sure how good this’ll be but hey, my tagline is “not always great writing”. (which is probably putting it nicely)
Day 3, Month 3 of the Year 233.
I spent much of the day sifting through an old book I had discovered in the ruins. It was perhaps an ill-fated day to venture into the ruins, or maybe it was fate. Three is the number of the Lost God after all, perhaps she guided me here.
An old book, yes. It seems that even two hundred years later the tomes of the precursors hold together. It is a stronger and sturdier book that most of those in my own library back home.
I think I must remember to send some of these to my daughter.
But more important, and as to why I decided to write today, this old book I discovered is significant. It is different to those other books I have found elsewhere. It doesn’t surprise me that it is still here despite its obvious value. Gold trim, fine leather, it would be worth a good price to an archivist or a collector that would never know the true value it has.
Inside, in great and painstaking detail are illustrations of the world as it was. Cross-referencing it with my own atlases has revealed much to me.
It seems that much less has changed than we realised. For instance, the city of Mesogrin was here before the Reaping, though its boundaries were much larger encompassing all of the ruins. It sat upon the same northern coastline of the Firelight Sea and to the west was a forest we now call the Ironsnarl.
Far to the south linking the coastlines east and west of Mesogrin was the Southern Dam, that has not changed. It seems that even then the Firelight Sea was a small part of the greater Fog Ocean. Far north was the Sorrow Ocean, to the east of Mesogrin was the Glass Pillar Sands and the Ashfields. To the west of Mesogrin was the Fjords of Myrn and Farza. All of that is unchanged.
The differences as I can tell are the cities, all of them are familiar names washed away by time and resettlement. Two centuries has turned grand cities into dust and sand and ash. And then there is the Sunderline. On the old maps I found the entire place does not exist, nor is there mention of the cavern complex that snakes from the Sunderline out underneath much of the known world.
The great rift in the world, the Sunderline as we all know it, divides the world in two. Separates the West from the East. It is entirely missing.
No record that I find can tell me what happened, I am unaware of when exactly this ancient map was made, but by my judgment it was very recent during the Reaping. It has information I know to have been recently discovered when the Reaping began. On this old map, the rough path that the Sunderline now follows is marked as a wall.
I will need to investigate further.
L. Beaumont 