Several minutes had passed since the mystery woman appeared, but few words had passed between them in that time. Sera remained hunched over, with the woman patting her back. She had been handed a canteen after the woman moved the corpse away, and was using it to wash her mouth out after a few more episodes of retching. Moving the body had helped, but there was still a fair amount of blood around, and the stench was enough to move her stomach until it was entirely empty.
Finally, after swishing some water around and spitting it out and then swallowing a few swigs, she spoke.
“What was that thing?” she asked, deciding it was the best question to start with. She had her suspicions amount the remaining ones she had, and wasn’t quite ready to hear the answers to them yet.
After all, the woman was an elf. A beautiful, blonde haired, green eyed elf, dressed in gambeson that blended into the forest, supplemented with metal vambraces and greaves. And that told her a lot on its own.
“No idea. This is uncharted territory; I think you might even have been the first person to see one. Since you were also the first to kill it, you get to name it!”
“Gobshite.”
“Pardon?”
“That’s its name now. Gobshite.”
“Well, good job killing that gobshite, then. All the mistwalkers I’ve heard of, at least the modern ones, just run away from things when they first get here.”
“You keep using that word…what does it mean?”
“Mistwalker? Means you got swallowed up by the mist and ended up here. That’s how everything gets here- land, oceans, people.”
“And where is…here?” she asked hesitantly.
“You’re in Omichlódis now. I’m sure this is all very confusing to you, but we should head back to base before we get to any other questions you’ve got. It’s not far.”
The woman helped Sera to her feet. She still felt a bit shaky from her ordeal, and her legs were unsteady, but she managed to walk well enough. The other woman set off like she knew precisely where she was in the forest, despite professing to be new to the area, and Sera followed her as if on autopilot.
The elf seemed to know exactly how to step and where to place her feet. She flowed through the forest, stepping sometimes with her whole foot and other times with only the balls of her feet, not losing her balance or slowing down no matter how rough the ground was. That said, Sera suspected she was actually moving slower than she was capable of out of consideration for herself, and she was silently thankful for it.
Though she was ostensibly safe now, Sera maintained a death grip on her trusty hammer, now baptized in blood. It was a tool no longer; it had become a weapon, her only means of self-defense in this new world. Her elven rescuer might be capable of protecting her, but it seemed unwise to trust the first person she met unconditionally, particularly when she didn’t even know her name.
Having company made the forest feel less dangerous, though, she had to admit. No longer did she startle at every alien animal’s calls or every rustle in the underbrush. Part of that may simply have been that she was coming down off an adrenaline high, however, and far to rattled to pay much attention as a result.
As much as she was spacing out, Sera lacked any real awareness of how long the journey back to the elf’s base took. One moment she was standing up and the next she was stepping into a clearing, within which stood a good half-dozen buildings that looked as if they had been plucked directly from the earth like adobe. The roofs were slanted wood, creating an odd architectural mishmash like she was looking at a mud hut capped with the roof of a log cabin.
Stories always compared the architecture in other worlds to a cultural equivalent on Earth, but there was no comparing this. The hardened mud walls were as precise as if they’d been formed from bricks along a wood frame, and yet they looked like they were formed as a single structure instead of assembled. Windows and doors broke up the walls with laser precision; Sera could probably compare the windows with a laser level and find them to be aligned to the millimeter and perfectly parallel to the ground and roofline.
To top it all off, the buildings looked as if they were made for giants, with even the doors being several feet above her head.
The elf led her into the largest building, which seemed like something of a great hall where everyone would come to meet and dine together. Although Sera expected to see a vaulted ceiling, the building actually seemed to have a second floor, and she spied a staircase leading up in the corner.
Her guide gestured for her to take a seat at one of the long tables and then disappeared into a door at the back of the room, reappearing shortly with some bread and cheese. After she set it down before Sera, she retrieved her empty canteen, unsealed it, and gestured, causing Sera to stare in amazement as water simply appeared from the air and flowed inside until it was full. She shouldn’t have been surprised, since her arrival here was itself clearly the result of magic, but here she was, watching an elf magic water into a bottle.
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She accepted the water gratefully and popped a bit of cheese into her mouth, feeling her stomach settle now that it was no longer quite so empty. Then she ate a bit of bread and chased it down with water before deciding to get on with it.
“I’m Seraphina, but please call me Sera,” she said, the implied question obvious.
“Nice to meet you, Sera. My name is Tiriana.” Having introduced herself, the woman fell silent, waiting for Sera to move the conversation along at her own pace.
“How did you know I was a…mistwalker, was it?”
“Because you’re atlantean, but you lack mana. Any atlantean your age would have a solid foundation as a mage or warrior that anyone could detect at a glance. It’s impossible to guess how strong someone is just from that, but it’s easy to identify the absence of any at all.”
“I’m not an atlantean, I’m a human. In my world Atlantis is just a myth.” Tiriana smiled like she knew something Sera didn’t, although Sera supposed Tiriana did in fact know a great many things she didn’t.
“Omichlódis was created when two continents were drawn here by the mist: Atlantis, from your world, and Hy-Brasil, from ours. Since the atlanteans were the first of your species to come here, you’ll just have to get used to being called an atlantean, or you’ll never finish correcting everyone.”
“I’m going to have to stop being surprised by every reveal too, at this rate,” Sera shot back bitterly. “How did I get here?”
“The mist brought you…or, well, that’s the simplified version, anyway. The long version is that mana is used in magic to warp reality, and when enough mana sits in one spot for too long, reality starts to break down. The boundaries between worlds collapse, and eventually something falls through, scattering the ambient mana and closing the pathway. You fell into one of those holes.”
That last sentence was said gently, as if to convey sympathy for her situation. Sera didn’t feel very comforted.
“You sure know a lot about this,” she said, unable to hide her suspicion. It seemed odd that the first person she met here would know so much. But Tiriana shook her head, unfazed at the accusation.
“It’s common knowledge. Anyone that grew up in the inner ring would know that much; it’s taught in school when we learn about the origins of Omichlódis. In your case, the hole was big enough for one person, but for thousands of years, Omichlódis has been expanding when entire villages, countries, and even continents fall through. I told you earlier that this area is unexplored. That’s because it’s only been here for a few decades- and there was nothing here worth exploring until a new region popped up adjacent to it with signs of civilization.”
“How does new land just appear on a planet? Does the planet just get bigger to make space, or is it mostly empty?”
“Ah, I see the problem. One moment.” Tiriana stood and darted upstairs, returning quickly with a rolled up piece of paper. She spread it out on the table, revealing a series of concentric circles with land masses outlined inside them.
“This isn’t a projection map. It’s literal. Omichlódis is a flat plane, and new landmasses form around the rim piece-by-piece, appearing out of the mist like they were there all along. The outer rim is an impenetrable wall of solid mist. We call this section the outer ring,” she explained, pointing first towards the edge of the map, which looked jagged where Sera assumed the newest extensions were. Tiriana pointed towards the next circle.
“Next is the middle ring. It’s separated from the outer ring by a continuous arctic landmass, like the ice caps on a normal planet. Then there’s a series of continents between that wall and the inner ring, where another wall of ice separates the two. And there, we’ve got the inner continents, including Atlantis and Hy-Brasil, which have been here the longest.”
Sera was absolutely dumbfounded now, realizing she was looking at a fucking flat earth map. She’d seen a million flat earth debunks on YouTube and dismissed it as a fantasy, out of touch with reality, only to find out they were right all along, they were just right about the wrong world. Her consternation momentarily overrode her distress at being displaced.
“But that makes no sense. Why are the ice walls cold? How do seasons work? How does the sun work? Are there more hours in a day towards the edge than in the center, because the circle is bigger? Does each ring have its own sun? What is the land sitting on, and what keeps the atmosphere in?”
Tiriana’s face lit up at Sera’s apparent understanding, and she whipped a finger in her direction with a grin on her face.
“Exactly! None of it should work! Out best alchemists have been trying to figure it out for thousands of years, and they have no idea! Everything behaves like it’s on an ideal globe. Days are exactly 36 hours long, divided into sixty minutes of sixty seconds each. The years are exactly 360 days. Seasons pass in precisely 90 days, and flip at the equator of each ring, like they’re on a globe. Even the appearance of the sun is subjective!”
She indicated two points on the map in the middle and inner rings.
“On a flat plane, these two places should be able to see the sun at the same time, but mapped to two separate globes, they obviously wouldn’t. And they don’t. Even the gods have said they have no clue why it works!”
“…the what?”
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Codex Entry: Gobshite
The unfortunately named gobshite is an ambush predator discovered in a frontier region by a recently arrived mistwalker. Subsequent encounters, as well as investigations by scientists in the following years, have found them to be a curious creature with unique adaptations even among the varied biomes of Omichlódis.
Gobshites are the size of a midweight dog and bear a resemblance to certain breeds, but with far stronger hindlimbs and a facial shield exclusively used for ramming. Their hunting strategy is to circle around their prey and hide in the underbrush along their path, often taking advantage of natural pathways to funnel their target in the right direction. While young, unpaired gobshites hunt alone, mated gobshites hunt in pairs, with one hiding in wait and the other driving the prey towards its mate.
When the unsuspecting prey animal comes close, the gobshite launches itself from cover with its powerful legs and shatters their legs with its hardened skull, incapacitating it without a fight. Gobshites are also known to exhibit this behavior when startled, and due to an unfamiliarity with bipeds, seem to perceive a standing person as a single giant leg, aiming for center mass instead of their actual legs. While this does lower the threat level gobshites pose towards people, a well placed headbutt can still cause significant damage, so caution is advised when traveling through their territory.