Chapter 63

A Glimpse Into Eternity

It was the first time Leo encountered uphill terrain in the forest--well, beyond the slightly slanted part eastward, where the exit lay. This one, however, was a legitimate climb--steep, with roots and jagged rocks decorating every visible inch of earth. Though, the roots were treeless--in their stead were strange steles, white like marble, rectangular and narrowed toward the top. In some way, it reminded Leo of a graveyard; though there were no etchings in the stone of any sort, no markings, and the steles seemed too close to each other to be tombstones, it was just the feeling he got.

As the kids were busy with bringing the iron ore, and having seemingly encountered some issues that made excavating process a bit harder, and as he decided not to hunt just for the sake of hides, that left only one item on his agenda--the Well, rooted deep in the forest.

It was one of the 'silent' rewards that he got for shearing Soul of the Forest, and it appeared not at the time with the rest of the rewards, but later at night, in his dreams.

He dreamed he was tiny feline, scurrying between the trees and roots with grace and nimbleness of a fox, and speed of a rabbit. The colors were vivid and blinding, but somehow nonobstructive at the same time. He wasn't in control of himself, but more of a passenger to a will beyond his own; it was as though he was following a predetermined path, and that path led past the trees and flowerbeds and the canopies, and up this very hill, past the macabre steles, and over beyond.

At the end of a path was a well--in his dream, Leo never approached it, staying outside the mini cirque. It was a bit larger than an 'average' well, cast in gray, old stone, though that was all there was to it--it didn't seem to have been built for the purposes of getting water, but something else entirely.

He soon reached the top of the hill, but he was still far from his destination--a dip awaited into yet another hill, though the steles themselves grew scarcer. The reason he assumed they were steles and not just a natural rock formation was due to the smoothness of the stone and the fact that they were all practically identical, sans an occasional slight difference in height.

Strangely, his flanks extended into another set of hillsides with identical composition and, had he not dreamed the exact route and committed it to memory, he would have likely gotten lost in this place. There were subtle differences here and there, and certain markings that created distinct appearances of different hills, but they were rather minor and easily missed. More and more, he wondered, just how large this forest was--and just many different terrains it contained within the confines of the trees.

Unlike most other times he ventured out, he was now alone--a couple of animals followed him for a while, but it seemed they stopped once they realized where he was going.

The wind and the sun were the only things accompanying him, though he didn't mind it terribly. He'd always 'known', in a sense, that there were differences between loneliness and being alone, even if he never internalized them. Now, however, he understood--likely as ever he would. There was budding alacrity inside of him toward the entire ordeal, a desire to both bespangle the woods with friends, yet also have a corner to himself, one entirely invisible to others.

A word lit up inside the deep reaches of his memory--peregrinator. It was an old, outdated, and virtually never used way to call someone a traveler. He couldn't quite recall where he heard or even how he remembered it, but it was seared into his memory. Over the years on Earth, a sense of irony developed--despite travelling the globe, as it were, he never considered himself a traveler, per se. Even if he could never explain it, in his heart he felt that the way he saw the world did not earn him the title of a traveler.

Perhaps it was the predetermined roads he'd taken, always staying within the bounds and never exploring out further, or perhaps it was just some dismal naivety that budded within him a long time ago: whichever it was, it had been curbed by now. He was a peregrinator, even if he only ever saw the trees and what arose between them.

There still lingered parts of him deep within that yearned to return, especially now, bolstered with a new mindset. But he feared he'd regress into his old self swiftly if he was shorn of this world and all within it. Thus, he buried those parts even deeper, so that they were as silent as the world around him was now.

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It was six long hours since leaving the camp that he finally came atop the final hill--the steles were scattered to the point of there only being a few, and the hill sloped down into a narrow bend before opening out into a round cirque. The rock was dry, as though it hadn't tasted water in centuries, and there were no living plants anywhere around. Sharp, jagged pebbles littered the ground, and the surrounding walls heaved steep toward the sky, though with just enough protrusions to make them climbable.

Leo carefully descended and walked up to the edge of the fall, looking down at the round maw--it was just about four hundred yards across, evenly flat with the exception of the far other side and the small indentation around the well itself.

He covered his feet with Qi and leapt--unlike more natural cirques, this one wasn't terribly deep or large, with the wall's side only being about fifteen feet tall at the highest. There were no waters feeding it, though there were remnant channels that almost seemed like hand-carved blade points.

Landing silently, he swallowed a knot in his throat before taking a step forward. He didn't know why he dreamed of this place, or what he was supposed to do with it--in fact, he was beginning to regret coming here a bit. He was still inordinately weak, and his effulgent personality was not meant for this atramentous place.

The well gave him somewhat of a similar feeling to when he first met Chilly--not quite as cold and despondent and indifferent, but more... eldritch, in a sense, unknowable, confusing. He didn't think C'thulu would spring forth in all its tentacled glory, but he could have sworn there was a backdrop of some horror music playing in the distance, just beyond the reach of his ears.

He stopped by the well's side, not daring to peer over the edge, instead focusing on the aged, weathered stone. Crouching down, he saw a thousand cracks web out, and he saw granular bits of sand occasionally be blown of by the scattered bouts of wind. Nothing, it seemed, had been here for hundreds, if not thousands of years. It once again raised the question he'd been grappling with for a while now--whether this forest was natural... or built to bury and hide whatever stood here before it.

He reached out with his hand, gently touching the stone. It was oddly warm and cold at the same time, and as he moved his fingers, he created a dusted-off trail on the surface. Frowning, he stood back up and stepped over, looking into the black abyss. By now, he expected the system to signal something, or at least tell him what this place was. But... there was nothing.

Furthermore, he could only see some ten-ish feet into the well, and it was just the stone and nothing else. There were no sounds coming from it, there was no bucket that he could lower to try and fetch some water... there was nothing.

Just as he began fearing he'd been pranked by a tree of all things, the ground quaked rather unnaturally. The surrounding cliffs began to bleed ash and dust while the surrounding ground began to crack. The sounds were deafening, and though he wanted to bolt out with all the speed he could muster, he found himself (unwillingly) glued to the ground, watching in abject horror as the world around him began to open up like a maw of a beast.

The cracked, dry ground fractured outward from around thirteen individual points--the tiny lines radiated out into circles, and almost as though groundhogs were digging out, he watched white steles arising.

They were different from all the ones he'd seen before--they were thinner, taller, ashen-gray in color rather than marble-white, and, most importantly, weren't naked and bereft of symbols.

He quickly counted thirteen and prayed that this would be the end of it--but it wasn't. Above them, just as they seemed to have been 'born' fully, motes of blinding light appeared and began fluttering about like mad fae, taking a few moments to converge toward the well. Leo felt a sudden burst of energy push into his chest as he fell down, gasping for breath. It was then that it happened, the briefest of flashes. It was shorter than the blink of an eye, so short that, were he not a cultivator... he would have probably missed it.

An image was layered over his current surroundings--rather than decrepit stone and washed-out well, he bore witness... to life. Beautiful, milky-white buildings sprawled outward from the well, cut inwardly like spirals and rising upward over thirty feet. The cracked, dry ground was instead paved with perfectly smooth limestone, and the steles... were nowhere to be found. Instead, there were people--young, old, smiling, laughing, crying, clothed in breathtaking garments that seemed entirely out of this world.

Robes were spangled with adorning gems, golden embossing of the clothing shimmering visibly even in daylight. Everyone wore seeming mountains of jewelry, from the mother-cradled babes to the old and hunched-over. Beautiful, gracious animals littered the streets--animals... he recognized. His friends.

Milky was playing with a young, copper-skinned, white-haired girl.

Blackie was drinking from a shimmering cup that an old man was giving him.

Hoot was frozen with his wings spanned out, beak pointed toward the sky and opened, as though he were in the middle of relaying the greatest story of all time.

Red was holding hands with two young boys, identical in face and body, hanging between them with a wide grin.

It was just a flash... but he saw it. The aforetime born world. Was it just an illusion? Was it a glimpse into the past forgotten and lost? Or was it his mind playing tricks on him?

"No..." he mumbled with a shaking jaw. His eyes caught sight of the words on the stele just by his side. There were rows and rows of letters he could not recognize, but he could those at the very top.

Here Layeth Avun'van, Our beloved Second King

He who sheltered Humans, and shielded them from the cruel World