After that, the two of us spent about ten more minutes in the vault, flipping through the rest of the book, and then searching for any other sort of secret passage or compartment. But neither of us were able to find anything more, and each of us were starting to become a little worried about what Roger and the children might think if we put off our return for too much longer. So after we had finished exploring, we stepped out through the door, and back out into the cold waters of the lake.

I had the black orb in my pocket, and the two of us had committed the illustration of the world to our memories as best as we were able. There was no way to bring the book back with us for now, but we knew where the vault was at least, and so we could return there again if we ever needed to. For now though, the two of us stepped back outside, and began to float up towards the surface of the lake.

The effects of the spell had worn off a little while ago by then, but it still took us about a minute or so to re-surface.

When we did, we found the three of them sitting there a little nervously, as they looked around, and wondered why it was that we had yet to return.

But then they noticed us… and each of them seemed more than a little surprised to see Praxa and me bobbing our heads up out of the water, with a look of deep, and profound excitement.

For a moment, there was a kind of silence among the group. Then, the three of them pulled us up onto the boat as quickly as they could, as the two children threw their arms around us, and asked us about a million questions at once.

The first question that they asked, of course, was what had kept us beneath the waters for so long… and what exactly we had managed to find.

I probably could have come up with some sort of story right about then, if I had really tried. But at that moment…

… I felt as if the time was finally right to stop concealing myself any longer, and to really let them know just who I was, and what I had found.

And so, without thinking too hard about it at all, I told them the truth – all of it, at once.

I told them where we had been, and what had happened, and who I was, and where I had come from.

I told them about the mark on my hands, and about the orb, and about the creature that we had found, and about the book.

For about half an hour, I told them everything, as they listened to my words.

And then for a while after that, the five of us sat there and talked together, as we tried to make at least a beginning towards understanding what was going on.

Kalia was just another name for the world, and a name that had been forgotten a long, long time ago.

And yet, Kalia had spoken to me quite clearly, and had summoned me to this world… or… had summoned me towards her, I guess.

That seemed to mean that the world itself was alive, and that it could speak in some way.

And yet, for as long as anyone could remember – for the whole history of the world, as it had come down to us – Kalia had been silent, and inactive.

There were a lot of different ways that you could explain that. But I knew, somehow – by means of an intuition that must somehow have been coming from my Insight – that she was the world, and that she had been muted for all of these years.

Of course, how she could have brought me here, then, I couldn’t have told you. But I wondered if the fact that she hadn’t said a single thing to me about her condition was some sort of clue… like she had been reaching out to me from the past, somehow, before everything had happened? Or from the future…?

At any rate…

That was beyond me right then. But, if that was right – and for some reason, I felt very confident that it was – it also only seemed to open up a whole new set of questions.

If Kalia had been muted, and perhaps enchained… then, who could have done so, and why?

That, too, I could barely even begin to fathom.

The vaults were her temples.

They were the ancient temples where the followers of Kalia had once worshiped the world itself, as the mother of all life.

They were the bastions of the ancient religion, and they seemed to have existed in a much happier time, when each of the races had been flourishing.

At the same time, I knew with certainty from the history that had come down to us that, immediately before the arrival of the prophet Lucian, the world had been enslaved by the mages, and their rule had been a source of tremendous tyranny and of evil. There were enough contemporary accounts that went into enough details of some of the crimes that had been committed to leave no doubt of that.

That meant that the “official” history of the world must have been a lot closer to the truth than I had realized. There had been something like a golden age, where the world itself had spoken to man, and looked after him… and that age had been followed by a horrific period in which mages had tyrannized their subjects, and only been overthrown through the heroic deeds of the prophet Lucian.

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But that still left quite a few questions unanswered.

At some definite point in time, there had been only three towers, and there had been no Great Lake, and no Great Forest, and the landscape of the world had been quite different in a number of other ways.

Then, at some further point in time, all of that had changed… and it had changed so long ago that there was no written or oral record of what had taken place, and of what the world had once been like long ago.

But then, if the Blue Tower had been created, who had created it? If that huge, sprawling canyon had been filled with water, what happened to cause that to take place? If the Great Forest had risen up in a land that had only been plains before, then why had it risen up?

Maybe these things weren’t at all connected. Maybe the topography of the world had just changed, and maybe the system had just created a new tower, for some reason – to balance up the flow of things, perhaps.

But a part of me had a strong, and almost invincible sense that all of these changes had been quite intentional, and had been conducted for the sake of burying the secrets of the past.

That book that I had found in the vault… it must have been much, much older than any of the books that had come down to us in this world.

But it didn’t seem like a special book. Probably many other copies had been made, and probably there were a lot of other books that had been just like it in the distant past.

So… where did all of those books go?

If Kalia was muted, and overpowered, then who could have had the power to do that? And the person, or the group, who could have done it…

… who were they? And what had happened to them? And, if they really had brought about the end of the Golden Age, and had turned upon the world itself… then… why? What could have possibly led someone to commit a crime like that, and for what purpose?

And why, then, had they changed the landscape of the world so dramatically – if the same person, or group, had been responsible?

Could the Great Lake have been created just in order to conceal the vault that lay within?

Could the vault have been concealed just in order to conceal the knowledge that it contained – the knowledge of a world that had once existed long ago?

All of that seemed almost unimaginable. But without knowing what had taken place, and why, I felt like there were almost no limits to what might have taken place, or to what might be happening in this world even now, in the darkest, and most secret corridors of the City of the Blue Tower.

That thought terrified me somehow… and the more that I thought about that city, the more that I felt horrified of it, yet eager to travel there someday, and to see what it might contain.

Still… even apart from all of those questions…

… there was one more thing that had been weighing on my mind.

What was that black orb, exactly?

Roger had spent a little while examining it, and trying to make some sense of it. But as far as he could tell, it didn’t seem to be humming with any sort of magical power, or to be doing anything special at all. If that was right, then that meant that it probably wasn’t enchanted, and that it was just a normal, spherical orb of a black color.

That seemed more than a little bit hard to believe, though. And it certainly didn’t explain why that creature had offered it to me, or what purpose it might be able to serve.

For now, we agreed that we would just keep studying it, and keep trying to discover what sort of secrets it might unlock.

But, in the meantime…

… we each realized that, whatever was going on, the Blue Tower must be the key to all of this – and the city that contained it must have the answer to at least some of the mysteries that we were grappling with.

We each had a lot of questions for Roger about that, of course. But, as far as he knew, there was no record in the Guild of Knights about any of the secrets that we had just uncovered, and there was no sort of secret group, or cult, or teaching, that had any connection at all to what we had found.

Of course, it was possible that there was a faction of the Guild of Knights that he hadn’t known about, buried in some part of the city or another. But, as a man who had been the head for the entire organization – and as a man who had spent his life in or around that guild for nearly forty years – it seemed improbable that a conspiracy could have been rooted there without him having had at least some inkling of the truth.

That meant that the likeliest culprit in everything that was going on was the Guild of the Pen.

Why that organization would have wanted to have done any of these things, exactly, I truly had no idea. But, as the organization that had been placed in charge of the recovery and the preservation of the ancient texts of the past, they were also the organization that was most likely to be concealing the past, and to be destroying the records of what had come before.

Of course, coming from a liberal democracy, it was hard to imagine that a group of scholars would be consciously covering up the truth and deceiving the people who they claimed to wish to inform. But I had already seen that things here were quite a bit different than they were back home… and, in some way or another, it was beginning to seem to me as if there really might be a group of men and of women who had gleaned a deeply important truth, but who had then decided to keep that truth from the rest of the world, and to strive to their utmost to bury it forever.

At the very least… it didn’t seem very possible, or likely, that I was the only one who had discovered these things in the last few thousand years. Even though it had been very difficult to enter into the vault, it certainly hadn’t seemed insurmountable.

… which only raised the question of what had happened to the other people who had found out the truth – and why their insights had never made it into any of the official histories of this world.

Of course, the more that I thought about all of these things, the more confused I felt… and even after all of the progress that I had made – after finally breaking into the vaults, and discovering a few of the secrets of the past… I still felt just about as lost as I always had.

But… now, at least, I knew quite a bit more about where to look, and where to begin to go from here.

More than that, however…

… I just felt tremendously glad to finally be able to discuss all of these things, with Roger, Aaron, Lily, and Praxa – and to still have everyone be safe and sound.

After everything that we had gone through, in these last few weeks… that was enough for me to be quite happy, right then – even if I had no idea what was going to happen next, or where this whole thing was really going to take me.

And so, after talking for a bit longer about everything that I had found, each of us just took up our stations on the boat once again, as we began to row our way forwards, and to make our way towards the other side of the lake.

We were still right over the center of the lake, and so we had about half of the distance left to go.

Once we arrived at the shore, it would be about an hour’s hike through the hills and valleys… and then, after some time, we would at last arrive at the town of Riverdale.

From there, we could each take a bit of time to rest, and to recover, before we convened again, and decided what we would do next.

There was a lot to think about, and a lot to do.

But, right then… I was looking forward to it quite a lot, if I’m being honest.

And so, with quite a bit of good cheer, and with a real sense of warmth, and of affection… the five of us just rowed our boat along the surface of the waters, as we drifted on ahead, and made our way out towards the shores that lay beyond.