There are a couple of us collaborating for a game later in the year. It's been a blast exploring our own little world. Not sure what we're gonna do for a web presence, but we're gonna put something together. Here's a little intro:
“Quiet, child,” the old man said. “Quiet your thoughts and look ye to the north.
“There, across the inkblot inlet, you see? The tower rises far into the heavens, where the Gods themselves once lived. There you must never go, child. A darkness has been descended upon it for thousands of years. There, do ye see the light that flickers from within it? Even here, we all see it.
“Your friends are right when they tell you it is daemon-breath. When the Ancients built their buildings, they built them too tall and big, child. They entrusted the spire buildings to machine spirits and gave them free reign, and they built metal monsters that ran from their silvery spires to the lands and dug up the Favors of the Aunts. They kept digging, child.
“And when there was nothing left to dig, when the Favors of the Aunts were nought but slipper eelfins, they sent their metal monsters to dig more, and gave them machine spirits as well. And those spirits, as we all know, child, became daemon-borne.
“That’s what that light is, child. That is the daemon-hole. When the Ancients had crushed the world, the Gods came down into that tower, child, and they lived there for a thousand years, deciding what would become of the Ancients. Every night they feasted, child, but they had no seas the way we do now, child. They feasted on the spirits that the Ancients had put into their machines. And the Gods became mad.
“They flooded the world, child. Back then, water was slippery and blue, and it spread forth from the Tower, the Daemon-Spire, rushing and roaring like wind through the tunnels of the float-caves. And they covered the earth in it, child. The Ancients were not strong the way we are, were not strong the way the Pellups are, or the Fishfolk, or the Stitchmen or the Claude’s Kin or even the Cave Scuttlers. They were weak, child. Their food and clothing came from the land, and their machines had used up everything on the land. So when the Godflood hit them, they all died. They could not breathe water like Clan Kerry, and their boats were given the same machine spirits the Gods ate. They died, child. The Ancients died.
“And the Gods wept, child. They wept because they knew what they had done was right, and they wept because they knew that those same spirits the Ancients had given the machines now bore daemons, and they wept because they knew that their very home was now haven to a Rip. And they wept because they were quite, quite mad.
“We are strong. Child, ye must hear me, and ye must look to the north at the Spire and the flicker of the daemon-hole and know that ye are strong, for ye are part of our clan. We came forth from the Godsflood, we dragged the Ancients’ scrap into Craft and Homesteads, we fish and clothe and wash ourselves in the inkblot seas. For a thousand years we have kept the daemon-hole at bay by not frolicking the way the Ancients did, by harnessing and enslaving the machine spirits and the daemon-borne. We are strong, child.
“But ye must never go across the inkblot sea, to the tower that rises far into the heavens. Child, there the Gods themselves once lived.”
