@mournwatchweek
Wyrmhole, Part 1
Romertus Cheng Ingellvar had just finished the last of his spring plowing when he noticed a strange light, moving through the fog on the Hunterhorn Mountains. His breath hitched. "Dragon!" he thought, but alas! What he saw was not the dragon of our tale. It was far too slow and silent, drifting his way like a feather on the wind.
As it passed directly overhead, Cheng saw the gleam of metal...in the shape of an arrowhead with fins. Clearly, of all the places it might have been going, it had singled out his family's farm. That was not good. Such a visit could only herald...attention.
"Please don't land on the barley," he implored. As if it heard, the object lowered stilts with rounded footpads, on which it settled at the border of the fresh-plowed field. There it sat, waiting. At least it was polite.
Approaching warily, Cheng walked all the way around the...whatever it was, to examine it closely. What in the name of all the ancestors was it? A memory, half-forgotten from his apprentice days, chose that moment to resurface. Though it wasn't visible just then because of the fog, there was a constellation called The Ship. According to local legend, the name recalled a long-ago vessel that sailed the stars.
Of course both Chantry and Magisterium ridiculed the idea. How would a tribe of hunter/gatherers...who at most built skin coracles or burnt-log canoes...know anything of ships? As for a ship that could traverse the stars...Bah! That fable about a lackluster grouping of stars recalled naught but a halfwit fisherman, attempting to describe the Vinsomer.
Cheng glared at the offending object. "Why me?" he demanded. As if in reply, there came a creak and a clank...followed by a long metallic groan. And then a passageway opened, a gangplank lowered, and light spilled through the doorway onto the field.
