Bytopian Insights

"Endless toil - and with the end of each day, a new lesson and a new pace. I was born on Shurrock, saw many things and many beings. The land has not been tamed. Its passions run deeper than the streams, and the storms shadow the very soul. The minerals yield huge harvests, touched by a supernatural light.

For cycles I inhabited and harvested an arid plain, by a dark gathering of pines. A rivulet crossed the path, crystalline and sweet, flowing with the heartbeat of the primal mother. It ran from a tiny grotto that lay by the side of a great dark rock, covered in moss, like the true tissue of the land, shrouded by mists that stemmed from Oceanus' shore.

In the harshest times of drought, while most moved their herds elsewhere, I told my brother to take ours and let me be. I would not leave the land. I lived in seclusion near the spring, and devoted myself to keeping the water from abandoning the clearing, keeping moist the stone that the ones who came before me venerated so highly.

Dothion - land of enterprise, crowded by too many people migrated there. I imagined the courses of the rivers, the ranges of mountains, the logic of the plane. The tension in the water, the dreaming rumbling beneath the earth, and the breeze in the afternoon that announces the close of the day's labor. I whispered to the forest animals and made an offering of my own blood to a great tree, to be rewarded by the restoring humidity of dew.

Today, the mists wander less often through the land, and the crops are pulled harder downwards, though they grow within a balanced soil. The land is not gentle. It beats its rain like swords on a shield and hardship is common. But necessity is always overwhelmed by hope, and the rain dies and returns again, and the mountains and spires bleed water once more, as heavenly volcanoes."