Excerpt
Fundamental Lexicon
##
The world was not always thus.
Keepers of histories agree on this, if little else. Those from the southern continents insist the world began as a frozen hen's egg, its yolk the ground beneath, its pristine white the ice, and its shell a sky of endless darkness and stars. When the shell cracked, in poured sunlight and warmth, melting the ice. Finally, the world was ready for people to live upon it, and so they did.
Historians and lore masters of the northern continent, experienced with ice, teach the world started in fire and it was only as it cooled that life of any sort could exist, be it hen or person.
Theologians both north and south avoid the topic, the present and future wellbeing of the souls in their care having the greater weight, the past being unalterable.
And perilous.
We were not the first here.
This is the truth no one—no person—dares imagine. That there were voices before ours. Hands. Hearts and love. Rage and a hunger so terrible it consumed the surface of the world, heaving mountains skyward, tossing continents, boiling oceans. Until nowhere was left unscarred.
Save one place.
This is a truth impossible to rediscover. Only in the names of places, only in that one place on all the world, could you glimpse it. For ages flew by and everywhere, even there, came new voices, new hearts and hands, to claim the land and write their truths upon it.
Magic, once, was everywhere.
Now magic is not, being confined to that one untouched place. Those of north and south might be curious. Might long for magic of their own. Might wish, in the fragile moment between twilight and the rise of the moon, to see a gossamer come to life before their eyes and transform the ordinary into wonder.
But there is only one place left in the world where you could. Where the words of those who came before linger. Where mage scribes write them down, to summon magic from the land itself.
Tananen.
