Kada Page

Description

A page torn from the Kada, the holy book of Sethyrism. Found in the castle ruins in Marastan.

Inspection Text

And after a span that stretches beyond reckoning - an age, or mayhaps longer, for he remembers not - at last, he halts. He is spent, his will drained, his wits dulled, and his sinews nigh to breaking. Alone he stands, his last embers of light long since swallowed by the abyss, and his throat, parched as a wanderer lost in a desert of night, burns for mercy.

Yet even in this void, he feels the giant confines about him. The press of the unseen walls, or is it but the ghost of memory, etched upon his mind by countless hours of weary gazing upon their never-ending surfaces? He has beheld these vertical planes more than he has the sun or the wheeling birds, and yet he knows them not. Are they truly walls? What substance and matter make them? No stone nor timber of the waking world holds their likeness. They gleam, pale as the snows atop Mount Obek and veined with endless, winding and twirling furrows, as though an army of unseen worms, numberless as the stars, have feasted upon the interminable surfaces for an age beyond mortal grasp.

As his thoughts drift, his left hand brushes against a flaw, a fissure, small and sharp, where his pickaxe last struck moments ago, or was it days? A wedge of rupture within this unknowable matter. His heart hammers in his breast, for from that slender breach issues a breath of warmth, a whisper of air from beyond. A shudder courses through him, not of fear, but of elation. His fingers tighten about the haft of his pickaxe, and with a cry torn from the depths of his soul, he smites the crack with all the strength that lingers in his failing limbs. Blow upon blow, his strikes fall, blind and desperate, until the rift yawns wide enough for passage. He looks behind him, though he is well acquainted with solitude in these forsaken depths for a long time now. The last of his brothers gone, like their attention, to other things.

And then, casting himself forward through the breach, he tumbles from the shroud of night, and into radiance. Into a brilliance unbound, a light so fierce it should sear his flesh, melt his very eyes within their sockets. Yet it does not. Instead, his eyes brim, and tears spill freely down his face. For before him lies a sight no man has ever beheld, nor dreamed of in his boldest fancy.

Palom sinks to his knees, weeping, trembling, for he knows with all the certainty of his soul that he stands before the Eye of God.