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In another world, there is no Hunger.
There is no Hunger, and there are no Relic Wars; there’s no town made of peppermint or hour-long time loop or tree in the middle of Goldcliff, no “pleasure room” on the Rockport Limited and no Bell ringing quietly from the inner chambers of Wonderland, there’s no Story and no Song and no Bureau of Balance.
Instead, there is just quiet, only occasionally broken by the rumors that float in with the wind; ones of magical power coming from places unseen that no one ever dares to approach.
There’s a tale of a cave on the outer reaches of civilization that almost seems lavish; it’s over-decorated with color-coded gems, cracks in the stone above creating perfect spotlights, the diamonds embedded in the ground making constellations of faces no one seems to know or remember. It’s said that if people enter for too long their bodies seem to change, their nails hardening into crystal and their eyes becoming wide and cat-like. They enter human and emerge as monsters; some with mottled ink creating moving, twisted patterns on their bodies, wrapping around their necks and suffocating them, others with a constant sizzling noise in the back of their heads that gets louder and louder until they go mad, others have their fingers turn into yarn that slowly unravels until they are nothing at all, or have a patch of chocolate spread across their chest until they can no longer resist the urge to eat themselves, or, if they’re really lucky, spend the short remainder of their life in a dream-like trance, muttering about “how wonderful he is” as black tentacles burst from their shoulders and hips and scalps and wrap around them until they’re nothing but a pile of goo.
Said “he” could be the voice that people claim they hear from the cave; it’s accented, yet soothing. It embraces them, encourages them to go back, saying it’ll make them into wonderful things, and eventually, those who have walked near it can’t resist it anymore.
Death finds them easily, after that, working to mend their souls. They say he lives nearby.
There’s an island far off the coast of the Stillwater Sea that’s made entirely of black glass. They say it rains fire there, each storm making the island tremble and crack only to quickly reform again, they say the island shivers as if it’s cold, despite the water surrounding it being hot enough to kill, they say those who look far down enough see burned corpses staring back at them, their agonized faces still intact; they say those who die there are lucky, those who are swallowed by what must have been earth once are blessed, because at least now they get to “keep her company.”
Said “her” could be the island herself, seemingly imbued with some sort of personality. It’s rumored that she hears everything, that those who aren’t pure of heart never make it past the fire that rains from above, that those who come there to escape evil find days of sunshine and make music with every step and hear her voice in their heads, telling them that they can be stronger. There are very few of those people that ever leave, instead choosing to die as the glass reforms over them, spending eternity in the island that offered them solace.
But there are others who say they’ve seen her, and she isn’t the island; rather, she’s the body of an elven woman wearing a gauntlet they’ve seen deep within the glass, smiling unnaturally at them, staring directly into their eyes. They say she wants them. Say they remind her of someone.
No one believes them.
There’s a myth about a triangle shaped space in the ocean between continents where no one can sail anymore. The few who make it back are filled with a constant rage, only telling stories when they break apart completely; they mention getting visions in their sleep and their crew-mates suddenly going mad, jumping into the water and letting themselves drown, they tell stories about landing on an island only to have the land beneath them disappear once they were on the other side, about huge shards of glass appearing in the water, tearing even the strongest of boats apart, about sparkling treasure chests filled with voids of black opal that suck in anyone around them, about people’s eyes suddenly filling with gold as they speak in unison, saying “how dare you enter my domain.”
Said “my” could be the former inhabitant of the small log cabin on the disappearing island, or the owner of the castle on a hill whose doors lock behind those who close it; they could be the captain of the ghost ships that float aimlessly around the water at night, or the voice of the disembodied gatekeeper to the space, the one that tells them to turn back, the one that tells them they’d only blame themselves if they didn’t. Or they could be the voice of the siren song, a booming tenor that starts off far away only to entrance every man on the ship at once, they could be the footsteps people hear behind them before dropping dead where they once stood, they could be the sea monster who kills people methodically, ripping them up limb by limb, or the multicolored bird that circles above every ship exactly 24 hours before a tragedy, or maybe they’re the writer of the notes that get posted on every ship just as it enters, cryptic and filled with haunting riddles.
Their handwriting always does seem rushed, as if they have better places to be. There are always more boats to sink, and other people to kill.
There’s an overgrown patch of woods in depths of the Felicity Wilds where the plants went wild and the storms became dangerous. It’s said that the forest itself is sentient, that it speaks with a haunting whisper, that the trees there grow taller and the flytraps hunt for their human-sized prey and the vines trip people and laugh, that the animals stare with unblinking eyes, leading those who choose to their new homes, that the corpses there never rot, instead being enveloped by colorful mushrooms. It’s said that those who pick the flowers die to silverpoint but those who smell them get high for days, that only those who wander don’t get lost, that the paths people once used to travel have long since been overgrown and those who stick to them walk into a never-ending darkness, and that despite the amount of people who enter there and never leave, no one who has made it out has ever seen a living person in there.
Those who come out of there tend to be healed and super-human, yet somehow changed; they’re more frantic, more paranoid, staying up for nights at a time, they speak to the animals and to the trees and to no one at all, they occasionally freeze and their eyes turn green, muttering things under their breath before laughing for hours on end, they don’t remember anything at all before the forest, losing even their names to the void. But some of them change physically, too; they bleed sap or turn green or have moss start growing from their bodies, they have trails of flowers grow from their feet or vines squeezing their chests, they cough out pollen or start to photosynthesize or shrivel up in the winter, sometimes becoming so dead that the only thing they respond to is the voice in their heads, the one from the forest who tends to them every morning as if they were his kids.
They love him. They owe their lives to him.
He controls them.
There’s a legend about a mountain surrounded by a bubble, impassable and unmoving. It looks almost like a snow globe with a constant blizzard, but the glass is by no means fragile; it’s never been broken or climbed or bypassed. It only sits there, imposing in its massiveness and the eerie quiet it leaves in its wake and the rumored sightings of a shadow moving quickly through the snow, its face never truly to be seen. It’s said that those who stare at it for too long become entranced; some lose the oxygen in their lungs or the heat in their bodies while others are stuck with the vision of it in their heads, unable to see anything else anymore. Some are left speechless by the sight, unable to form words or think thoughts, while others become recklessly inspired, spending their entire lives writing poetry about a girl and the moon and the mountain peak where the two meet; they start to fall in love with every woman they see, start devoting hours and hours to a passion, forgetting to eat and to sleep until their death finally stops them.
And there are some who go and see it and never return, some who aren’t found dead on the riverbank nearby and aren’t buried in the snow on the edge of the barrier, and they say they’re let into the picturesque bubble, that they find a door or a spell or something, but no one knows for sure. They say the shadow from inside chooses people, takes them in, but whether it loves them or kills them is left up for debate; some speculate that said shadow is the girl that everyone writes about, but instead of falling for the moon she picks lovers like sacrifices, while those who have seen it will swear that’s not true, eyes glazing over and voices going stiff as they all say, in unison, that the mountain is empty.
There is nothing to talk about.
Nothing to fear.
There’s an oasis in the desert where people swear time doesn’t pass. The towns around it — and there are a few — live in some sort of stasis, swearing things tend to go more slowly; people die at older ages, watching tragedies happen and then reverse themselves in an instant; buildings collapse only to freeze themselves as people leave them, wagons pause before they run someone over, people live the same day over and over and over again, knowing they made the right decision when they’ve moved on. Sometimes, they’ll wake up and their water flows more slowly, or the sun stays at its blistering peak for what should be days and days on end, while other times everything freezes over and the sun never rises and there’s the constant howling of a wolf in the distance and one brave soul walks over to the log cabin on the edge of the oasis’s lake and knocks quietly on the door. And it’ll always open soundlessly, the hinges polished, and everything will be frozen in midair, carpenter’s tools still falling to the floor and dogs being mid-bark and a man, a man with cloudy white eyes sitting on the edge of his bed, his head and his hands and him quietly muttering a possible future under his breath.
Well — to call him a man would be inaccurate, because he is no longer a man. He is a man with ornate etchings in his skin matching the chalice that sits on his kitchen table, a man with tapestries on his wall depicting every possible apocalypse, a man who hasn’t spoken to anyone in centuries, in millennia, because he fears telling them the future, a man who occasionally dissolves into nothingness, the very fabric of his soul breaking, a man who jumps from moment to moment in an instant, a man who sees everything, a man who regrets everything, a man who cries over a world where he could have had a wife, and a shop, and a home. He is someone beyond time, with knowledge beyond human comprehension, whose touch will tell you when and where and how you die, and yet he still needs comforting, still needs to be brought back to reality, and will still smile and stand up and soundlessly make a cup of tea and a wooden duck for those who are brave enough to face him.
Everyone knows him, by now, but no one knows him well enough.
No one remembers his name.
There’s a barren field, tucked in a small valley, where nothing can grow and no one can live. It’s said that those who listen closely can hear past the eerie silence, hearing the soft sound of someone crying from miles away in every direction, hearing the sound of a bell ringing and the shifting of dirt and bones putting themselves back together only to quickly fall apart. But no one knows where those sounds are coming from, if they’re even real; not even those with the strongest eyes and the most powerful spells can see the red-robed figure huddled in the middle without stepping foot in the valley, immediately becoming one of the skeletons littered in the dirt.
Only the gods know about him and the way he mourns, the way he remembers the name of every person who’s stepped into the valley and the type of every plant his necromantic magic has killed, the way he works to dissolve the flesh of his victims himself because even micro-organisms die in his presence. Only the omniscient know the way he loves with a passion that almost grants him feeling again, the way he knows every moment of his past like the back of his hand, the way he wishes he heard the stories about everyone he used to know how to love, wishes he heard the way they killed their victims, wishes he didn’t gain power from the death of others, wishes he knew how far his domain would expand, because he was not one for destruction until the bell rang in his ears and whispered in his brain and consumed in until he went feral, his magic growing and expanding and feeding on the life around him.
Besides the faint rumors of sounds, no one knows him.
No one tries to tell his story.
In another world, there is no Hunger.
There are the Seven who saved the world and the Relics they made, but no one knows them as such, no one knows they exist, they just know the stories they hear and the fear they hold deep in their hearts.
They know about the cave, and the island, and the triangle-shaped space on the ocean, they know about the forest and the mountain and the oasis, and while they know very little about the field in the valley they almost know that too; but there is one more place they tell about.
On the north pole, once a year on a very specific date, seven beings find each other, and share their stories. It’s said that the Northern Lights on that day are beautiful, shining in different colors, it’s said that power collides in a way that no one’s ever seen it, it’s said that finding the origin of this power grants immortal life — though no one has ever come back to tell that last one.
Little do they know that the seven who meet feel slightly more mortal, on that day, breaking through their power to laugh with each other, their voices no longer instilling fear in the hearts of those they speak to; little do they know that they enjoy the stories, laughing about the people they met and squabbling over who gets to kill the occasional explorer who finds them, taking notes about how their power has been developing and holding each other tightly until the break of dawn…
And then they slip back into place, losing consciousness once again, becoming the power the stories detail.