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"You stand at the edge of the Red Plateau, and of Ferigozi lands as a whole, where a river meets a molten sea. Few ever get used to the cloying heat and humidity of these misty lands, but even here, there is work to be done."

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Roadway to Nowhere

Today I have a very particular tale, as it’s one from relative newcomers who’ve scarcely had time to have their own pre-Refuge culture drift, even as they develop a new one. Yes indeed, compiling this took me to some of the more inhospitable parts of the Great Dust Gyre, but other than the utterly abhorrent climate it was easier to gather than most. The most difficult part was getting past some unusual idiosyncrasies of the Troxi, as they don’t quite have proper historians and only developed archaeology in any meaningful form well past their arrival in the caverns. Indeed, I had to speak with record-keepers and even long lineages of scavengers to get the fragments needed to gather into a single story, though thankfully the pieces fit relatively well with one another. Curiously enough, however, even with the Republics’ shorter history they were utterly unable to tell me what the actual origin of the story could’ve been – everyone just registered it as something passed from further up the chain, even as they completely lost sight of where said chain came from. It’s an irritating and concerning common thread, especially now that I know even Nixia wasn’t spared.Death comes for everyone, we all understand that much. Everything that was alive must one day die, everything that once moved and spun must one day still, and so on, and so forth. It’s just how things work, here and everywhere, or so we understand. But assuming this is true, it only stands to reason that if there’s no life without death, then the reverse is true: There is no death without life. Whether it’s death as a simple background concept, as an unthinking force, or maybe as something with an actual face, so to speak[1], it can only exist when there’s something out there that can still die. And what happens when the last living thing dies? Then that’s it, that’s the end of Death, one way or another. In the end, the last thing it will ever process is itself. It only stands to reason, if the base of “no life without death” still holds. I say “if” because, all in all, it might not truly hold. Out there, in a corner of existence so distant from the rest that it needed a Death of its own[2], the cycles of life and death were winding down. Or so one assumes, as that corner is now gone, dead enough to be indistinguishable from all that never lived. That’s what awaits every last world, after all. This one lasted for a long time, longer than most, and it was a bigger corner than most as well. Bigger than this one for sure. But it ended nonetheless. Death came for all of it in the end. Accounting for every last land, every last place, every person and creature there was. Taking count as they passed away, and as the fragments of life they fed passed on as well, and the fragments from that, too, until everything had been processed. And just as I said, in the end, all that was left to process once the very world was dead and gone, was itself. And so, Death came to an end, just like everything else… Except for one insignificant, unremarkable little being it completely overlooked. What was it before this happened? No one knows. It had to be so unremarkable as to barely even have a mind of its own, to be missed, but no one don’t know how long-lived it was. But it wasn’t powerful, that much is certain, otherwise it wouldn’t have been overlooked. It would’ve left marks, well before the land itself passed on. No, this one was completely forgotten, neglected, and thus left to live. Not die, not even rot, just live. After all, everything that could make either of those happen was gone. Perhaps one couldn’t even call it life – after all, following the math, there is no life without death, and yet there it hung, stirring and breathing in spite of it all. One half of an equation where everything past the equals sign had been openly sliced off[3].

There it laid, forgotten by death, neglected by everything that had come and gone. Adrift upon the dust and fragments of all that had once been. It had no choice but to bask in the void, staring at the insignificant pieces of existence that the end needn’t account for. They gathered around it, through all those little forces that only become significant when there is nothing else to push against them[4]. Even with a semblance of a mind, all it could do for a long time was to act as the nucleus of reality’s debris. Thoughtlessly accreting something resembling the tiniest chunk of what was there before the end… But then, after some time, it wasn’t quite as thoughtless. What triggered it? No one knows. Maybe it was scarcely meant to have any thought at all, and the passage of more time than it could fathom forced it into sentience. Maybe it had simply been asleep all along, in one way or another, and since all sleeps must eventually end, it woke up. Maybe it had a sessile, unthinking attitude from the beginning that let it pass unnoticed by all, even Death itself, and when the end had settled in it had no choice, and every chance[5], to drop it. But the shift became clear once the amalgam that had accumulated around it started taking a crude, but unmistakably intentional shape. After all, straight lines don’t come natural in the void. And indeed, a line is how it started. One speck of dust, one fleck of debris, each in front of the other as they came. And as more gathered towards it over time, they were added to the line. As the line tried to curl inwards on itself as such things do when there’s nothing to straighten them out, it was flattened out by its efforts, and stretched a little more. It quickly learned how to keep it stable, too, needing less and less work to keep it in place, making it longer and longer. Stretching further and further into the void. Thin as it could be, so it could reach as far as possible… Soon enough, the line became a bridge. A passage through the emptiness through which it could reach the next little leftover, another fragment to collect, and to lengthen the bridge. And when it ran out, it would simply take the backmost piece, and move it to the forefront in whatever direction it chose. After all, when seen against nothingness, anything can be spotted eventually, even the tiniest mote of dust. It was a slow process, it would take ages upon ages for it to reach the next little piece to add, a tiny bridge crawling across the void one plank[6] at a time. But it had time enough. Waiting long enough could bring the pieces in already – this creeping construction was much faster than that. In time, every last piece of what had once been its world and existence had been gathered and made a part of its construction. Everything that it had once been connected to, everything that remained, had been gathered in a single line, a bridge that now led nowhere… A bridge that was now long enough that even the near-insignificant pulls of other masses across the void, no matter how distance, would make it curl and warp. It was subtle, invisible to the eyes of most, but its architect had spent long enough with it to notice where these pulls would bent it, and thus, where such masses would be. And so, setting one piece in front of the other, pulling from the back to bring them forwards, it began again, the bridge crawling through the emptiness once more. Upholding such a thin line took time and effort, of course, slowing all progress down, but time and effort it had aplenty, and the longer it stretched, the easier it was to reach for further material – and the bigger it was, the more material was drawn in. And so, one day, the crawling stopped. It was not necessary anymore. It was simply easier to build it further, even if it meant building sideways from the bridge until it became a network, a spider’s web of crossings in all directions. Creeping further into the void, further towards any and all materials. Until a few of those materials weren’t quite so dead anymore.

It came upon one world, then another, and another. Worlds that were still whole, still alive. Too large and too whole to add to its construction. It could not get close, for what if the Death that yet stirred there claimed it? The thing was smart enough to know this now, after so many eons of artifice. But it could watch. It could linger, observing how it was to exist, to truly live, something it had long forgotten. And between constructions, as time passed and these worlds decayed? It could collect the motes of lifeless, deathless dust that flaked off them as entropy took them, until there was nothing left to do but add the fragments to its crossroads. One, after another, after another, the worlds died too, as they all do, leaving nothing but more material for the bridge. And so it roams, to this day. Perhaps it is watching us, too, right here and now. And perhaps, if Death forgets you too… You may get to meet it. [1]The versions I found were often divided on how a potential representation of death would look, including the ones that acknowledged the possibility of multiple such figures. However, the two most common choices were either skeletal figures, or beings with a mask of some kind or another, which is why I chose to put it this way. [2]The more story-minded scavengers here went into longer tangents that sprung from the previous principles, assuming that since true emptiness was bereft of life, it was bereft of death too, and thus would act as a barrier for a hypothetical roaming incarnation. While I can somewhat see the logic, any such emptiness would immediately cease to be one if a living being started crossing it, and the idea of living beings acting as bridges for their respective avatars of death was a point of contention that I needed to avoid if I wanted to get the actual story. [3]You may have noticed by now a heavy use of mathematical concepts as literary allegories. This was something I kept for the sake of accuracy, and is in fact common in Troxi culture and storytelling. Equations and all that compose them are common in their literature, and have always been; even in the oldest texts I could find, the oldest piece of pre-Refuge writing I could get my hands onto, there were multiple references to such, with the balance of an equation being a fundamental metaphor. This almost leads me to think that the Troxi developed standarized mathematics either before they developed the written word, or at least simultaneously. The latter appears more likely, as unwritten mathematics can only get so far, but the Troxi themselves had no answer to this particularity when directly asked about it. [4]Several of the original texts referred to this as either “a gravity of sorts” or directly as gravity. I did not include it as such thanks to other texts contradicting this with the idea that even gravity itself had been erased, leaving only weaker, insignificant forces as easy to miss as the protagonist of this tale. And while I know, technically, gravity can play such a part, and will indeed pull even the tiniest of bodies together at great distances when working “properly”, I preferred not to include this, as it’s one of the ambient laws and energies that does not necessarily work properly in the underground. It can be reached into and manipulated just like any other. [5]Adding both possibilities here was my own choosing, as no version actively pondered both. Either it was an unthinking, immobile thing by nature and it chose to do otherwise, or it was a wilier entity that simply passed itself as a thoughtless, unremarkable object so well that the end mistook it for something that could be disregarded.

[6]Remarkably, all versions of the story used wording and comparisons that implied a more timber-made bridge than anything cast or carved. I say remarkably because the Nixian Republics are perhaps one of the nations that least rely on any kind of wood, fungal or otherwise. And from what I’ve managed to gather on their pre-Refuge existence, this has been so for some time, even back then stone and metal played a bigger part, being joined by glass once they made it to the Gyre. Both the scholars I spoke to and I remain uncertain of why this is, but it seems to be a common particularity of tales that I believe concern the Lord(s) Below. -Excerpt from “Who is the Lord Below? A Treatise on the Radiant and Cthonic”, authored by ‘the Ever-Restless Nirrhamidh’ (confirmed pseudonym; author not yet identified and under active investigation. Any information regarding his identity is to be forwarded immediately.)