"It was there! In the vast expanse beyond the hills and valleys, a city once stood. The grandest city in this entire land, a testament to all of civilization! It couldn't have just disappeared out of nowhere like that!"
I overheard the man say to his companion over a drink. With the eastern winds blowing through the sandstone cut streets of Babylon, a cool weather slowly sets in. He wasn't wrong though, a city did exist there but no more. Even though I don't know fully why it disappeared I do know it did exist and was a thriving city, one that could rival that of Babylon in the South. If it wasn't for a gift a friend had sent me some time ago I would've never even known that a city as grand as that existed.
Nomads, if you can call me that, aren't usually the type to be in the know when it comes to this type of news but in this case, I happened to be. I suppose that it is important to learn about these types of things after all. Cities, especially stable ones, are few and far between. Most troubling is that we've been receiving word that the Western cities have begun to collapse due to supposed "Sea People" raids.
My family has always been these strange Nomadic people wandering these lands for generations at this point, I still don't know why we haven't settled but after the death of my Father, who I never really understood deeply about but knew he was a decent man who kept me fed, sometime earlier this year, I was able to leave that life behind mostly. I still largely travel Nomadically but that's usually because I'm selling goods from one city to another.
I suppose that's not important, the thing that does intrigue me are these collections of letters I had received from a distant friend of mine, who worked as a scribe in a city library and was cleaning out old sections of it when he found these letters. Supposedly it details the story of a man named Ador who, as far as I could tell, was an ancestor of mine many generations ago. I wondered what these collections of letters were about so I began reading them during the nights when I had to be out in the lands between cities.
As far as I knew no ancestor of mine was named Ador. How my family typically named each other was based on our people's heroes and kings. For example I was named Tou, after the king who conquered immortality. My father, Bole, after a king who seduced one of the gods before being punished, and so forth. Ador isn't associated with any king or hero or even our language or people at all.
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Even now after I had read the letters I am still filled with many more questions than answers as to what these letters truly detail. One thing for sure though that I can confirm is that detailed in these letters is the location of this supposed lost city and when I had the opportunity to go visit the place of this city, I did. I was quite surprised to see how well-detailed it was.
The city was not there but the surrounding area was on the point similar to that described in the letters. It was eerie to see how detailed the description of it was; A Grand mountain range to the north that stretched to and from great masses of water, Rolling hills to the West, and the gradual transition of desert to the east and south. The letters spared no details.
Still, something felt off as I wandered through the supposed location of this city. As if the ground I was setting foot on was not meant to be trampled, the clear air I was not meant to breathe in, even the lush beautiful landscape I was not meant to look at. It feels as if this place which I was in was never meant to exist, with it punishing those who got too curious to explore it. Even if it "disappeared" it should've left some trace of its existence, some ruins maybe, but nothing. It was almost as if the very existence of a city in this area was scrubbed away meticulously by some force of nature. Even if that were the case it surely must have been documented or even detailed in full yet in all of the libraries of the civilized world there is simply no trace of such, no letters or manuscripts detailing its existence.
Only poorly passed tales spoke of the mention of it, and most of the time those tales get it wrong. Which makes me wonder why these letters even exist, why out of all people do I hold the only records of this great civilization? It's a question that I ponder even now after I have read them several times over yet I am no closer to finding the answer to them.
The city of Rosidum. The supposed center of this grand civilization and mystery which I have barely begun to fully understand, what do you hold in your forgotten history? What tales have you yet to tell me because I am not as educated as the scribes who work tirelessly in the grand libraries? I may not know them now or ever but I hope someone else can.
Because if the story you have told in these letters is true, Ador, then I pray that whatever beast you encountered on that night that knocked on Rosidum's gates doesn't come again. For I believe that even the gods which we have prayed to cannot, with all their might, save us from it.