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The Many-Eyes atop the Eastern Mountains, and the Monastery of the Ancient Gods

Slumped in a ghost-white asymmetrical pile near the Stepped Summit, south-southwest of the Ruins of Archaenimo, endures the eerily fully intact remains of a monastery constructed by ancient ogres. This biomorphic structure is approximately eleven-millennia in age and sits at 113 stories tall. Signature to ogrish design, this recent tourist attraction and site of worship scrapes the very stratosphere of the World, strong at the foundation and lumpy in its imperfect beauty at any passing Age. Erected primarily around the excessively large, but lite and flexible, ocular chitin of an extinct species of a gigantic arachnid that once dominated approximately three-fourths of the Realm. In the Forgotten Times and Before, giants made of flesh from the Yawning Dens in the Frozen South were locked into a perpetual continental war for domination with a species of spiders known today as the Palyzexx. These horrific eight-legged terrors were the fearsome, ruthless and blood-sucking archnemesis of the Ancient Gods who brooded primarily in the boiling swamps to the Northwest. These extinct spiders had a favorite and most plump food, and that were the ogres, who the overshadowing arachnids could drain for months or years after being cocooned. When the once numerous ogres won significant war victories over clutters in the North, they would tear the heads from the bulkiest arachnid corpses. They would stretch the enemy general’s sockets to its maximum point of elasticity without breaking the optic tract, and mix it with strong stones, lime plaster and reinforced concrete to make residences and shrines bulky enough for the smallest of their large proportions, and the masses of their armies, to sleep and pray within. While numerous archaeological ogrish sites of interest were constructed by similar means, the very largest of these sites is rumored to have been made up of most of the combined ocular cortexes of the largest of the Palyzexx, the Kings and Queens of the Countless Swamp. During their reign, it was here that the flesh giants would make religious pilgrimages to, in every direction within Atma’Zae. Even the pretender-Gods would travel hundreds of miles across desert rock and fresh forest to kneel, bow and pray to their own God, who was an entity known only as the Supreme Weaver.

Retitled hundreds of years ago to the much more eloquent-sounding Skyelorne after the seventh God-King and Great Writer, this was Skyelorne’s favorite site of antiquity and history to regularly visit and produce some of his finest and most historically impactful poetry and theatre plays. The God of Literature became legendary and worthy of his title for adding just over 1,700 words to the common tongue. He penned the World’s first stage plays and most of its greatest original written epics, which are still remembered and treasured even in the Days of Ash. An avid World traveller, this site of religious seclusion was his singular place on the continent to gather, as he referred to it, ‘the divine inspiration’ to create his most emotionally potent works of comedy and drama. Notably, when his entourage would catch him staring at the ogrish site from the Stepped Summit, they would have trouble removing him from a silent trance which could last several hours. Skyelorne opined that when you stare longingly at this clumsily but firmly constructed ogrish architecture for too long, it seems to stare right back at the depths of your soul. In the Days of Ash, only around 500 grizzled survivors of the Nemesis have managed to push through plasma tornadoes and toxic dust to the East, and melting glacial sheets deep South, to find themselves climbing up and chopping their way through the cliffside to reach the Many-Eyes, which is far above the permanent black clouds of acid and smoulder below. A scant few surviving technologists from the North have constructed a woven fibre wire mesh, a steel tower, a nacelle and rotor to generate a small amount of wind power for the needs of its few inhabitants. Farmers from the South plant seeds of yellow apples, plums, cherries and peaches to provide food and basic local agriculture. This is one of the few areas of the continent where the air is the absolute thinnest, and the snows are nearly pure, decontaminated from the toxins of the Ashfields below. Its cavernous and spired insides serve as impressively large quarters for its new residents, and there is an overgrown and aromatic moss garden contained internally that spills from the optical openings like evergreen tears.

Once known as Ugg-So-Zexx, the ogres believed their God could whisper to them from the eye sockets of a single spider, no matter how small, especially when bent to receive a specific cosmic frequency. By all accounts, the Palyzexx began the war with the ogres, and both species feuded over dominion of Atma’Zae until the Great Nest was burned and destroyed, leaving only Three Great Ogres in the aftermath, who became the Ancient Gods. Before and during their ultimate victory, they began building this very foundation high atop what was once the untraversable and uninhabitable snowy peaks of the temperate North, where the mountain chain rises far above the calderas of Mounts Eve and Eden. They built a spiral stairway and land bridge made of mudbricks, dirt and gravel from nearby quarries and riverbeds, and it became the original road connecting the continental North to the mainland South. The ogres believed that the Supreme Weaver demanded perpetual sacrifice for favorability, and the flesh giants engaged in a brutal conflict that lasted tens of thousands of years. For when the flesh giants first made their way to the North from their craggy dens to the South, they found the temperature and climate to be unbearably hot and inhospitable. Even more harrowing for ogrish explorers was the seemingly endless clutters of the Palyzexx, the original dominators of the Realm, who would easily stalk, capture and slowly drain their life’s blood over the course of several months. The flesh giants began a crusade to exterminate the spiders after discovering that most of the Realm was covered in sheet and tangle webs, which had taken the lives of most ogrish scouts and hunting parties that dared to venture too far High North. The Ancient Gods gathered at Ugg-So-Zexx before their final and most victorious campaigns. Upon his deathbed, a demented and irrational Skyelorne muttered his final words, “It still tells great inspirations to me, the Mother-Father Weaver. It whispers to me, from the shadows between objects, deep within the depths of the Faraway… waiting for us to worship its glory again! We must give it a willing sacrifice, so it will not dance upon the Great Web toward us ever-ever again. The Weaver demands a foot, a wing, a scale, a hand, a heart, and a life.”

Lore Entry # 6 (click here for art)

#story time #lore #art label #companion piece #museum label #experimental art #fantasy #storytelling #Skyelorne #Many-Eyes #mythology #legend #mountains #holy site #writing #paint and lore series #The Supreme Weaver #Gods

Your name is [REDACTED]. You’re about to make the worst decision of your life.

You say your name is Colors, for the ever-changing colors of your hair. You drape yourself in iron and try to follow the rules obediently, but you still catch Their attention. Your iron drops away day after day, and no one notices.

You say your name is Silver. Some speculate that it is short for Silver-Tongue, others guess otherwise. You only smile when asked. You have attended revels and lived to tell the tale, though there are whispers about why.

You say your name is Reverie. It doesn’t feel as bad as you expected when you make your first important deal, but you can’t remember if it is your first. “I can protect them,” you promise her. She doesn’t look convinced.

You say your name is Larkspur. Those with the Sight flinch when they see you, now. It doesn’t bother you when it should. It hurts to touch iron, but maybe it always did.

They say your name is Many-Eyes. No one remembers when you were a student. You don’t either.

-anon

#stories #colors #silver #reverie #larkspur #many-eyes #hell of an opening line #submission