The Great Lantern of the Ever Reaching Deep
⤷ Limspace Systems ⤏ Crimson ⤏ Limspaces
Foreword
The attached image, like all "photographs" of the crimson system, is an artist's rendition of our best guess of the Reaching Deep, based on drawings and the gifts we have been given by the Porter. It becomes obvious then that nothing presented in these archives should ever be considered the absolute truth or by any means infallible. It is easier to digest this impossible world if we consider that all we have seen truly is fiction, our records wildly misconstrued.
But, perhaps they are not.
Suppose it's true, all of it. The scraps of unearthly parchment, the relics and shards of bone gifted from the crimson world. If so, then a great Lantern (brighter than any soul by an impossible magnitude) occasionally shines through the crack of the Ever Reaching Deep: it brazenly glides across the opening between the river-streaked plains above and the angry sea below; rising from the waters and slipping behind the distant foothills of the great shield plains. At its zenith does it boil the oceans, churning supercells of torrential rains. One fleeting hour of daylight it shines holy and bright — until the long night swallows the land once more.
The Great Lantern
of the
Ever Reaching Deep
Seventy-two hours of darkness pass here between a single hour of sunlight. Imagine being born on the shores of a wine-dark ocean bathed in pitch-black, deep within the valley of two tectonic shield plates known as the Ever Reaching Deep. The air here is cold and damp and carries a powerful briny taste, from your first waking moments of existence you know the flavour of salt and the chill of ocean winds. All your life you will know the sound of waves swelling their aggressive tides. From your first steps of adolescence you will walk a coastline dense with small fishing hamlets, within whom the citizens light fires great and small to stave off the shadow. You will navigate these shores by blazing fires atop weathered towers and well-worn roads engraved through generations of traffic.
The Great Lantern rises in the maw of the Illustrious Horizon.
One hour every three days, it graces the Reaching Deep.
If you are well-travelled you would take up sailing and learn dozens of dialects, likely making a living off the sea. You would learn to cast nets against the frenzied tides. Should you grow to be homebodied, staying comfortable in your birth hamlet, the most prestigious trade to pursue would be mastery of woodwork and shipbuilding. Never would you venture inland through the thorny brambles of the Scarlet Woods, for that realm is home to the Gods, where mortals are not welcome. From the sea did mortal life come, and around the sea will your entire life revolve. Fish, brine, and the ebb and flow of tides will fill the meaning of your years until you are given back to the waters for your final rest.
Throughout your days you would pass by shanties decorated in totems, and likely would buy many, as superstition and prayer are currencies of their own here. Hand-carved idols of fish, women with gills, and tridents with wings are commonplace symbols of luck, made of whale bones or gnarled driftwood. You might pray to the sea, you might pray to the blinding lantern, or perhaps even revere the dark Gods of the forbidden woods, offering them gifts to keep their bad karma from leaving the treeline.
Those who do this, however, are often considered strange miserable folk who do nothing but coax the beasts out of the woods. Curses are rampant in this realm — as are miracles — and people here see in black and white regarding both. Blessings come from the sea, so the sea is good. Curses come from inland, so the forest is evil. Salt preserves food, sustains life, and comes from the sea: so it is holy. The bloodstained soil of the deep woods brings nothing but misfortune, and as such anything that grows of soil is an entity which thrives on sin.
It is a simple life, but not an easy one. Success is brought upon by hard work and skill; for night fishing is dangerous work. Then, when the blinding light of the lantern shrieks into the Reaching Deep, winds, rain, and torrential storms often rise from the superheated waves, blasting steam upon the shores alongside hot, dazzling sunlight. For creatures used to darkness, the lantern is blinding — many who gaze upon the maw of the Illustrious Horizon have their sight taken by the raging dawn. So in darkness life is sustained by the mild, warm light of fire, provided by crimson wood soaked with blubber and fish oils. The night is cold. The night is long. Yet all of a man's work must continue through it. Prayer and totems are sometimes all one can rely on for comfort… and the blessings of the sea.
> Stellar Body, or Soulfire?
One curiosity noticed in the Porter's gifts, however, are depictions of the sky. During the calmer late hours of the night, one can expect the Reaching Deep to be frigid and quiet, and if one were to gaze up at the sleeping Illustrious Horizon, one would see the stars. Not the cursed eyes of Vraxus that cry salt from the heavens of the Wastes, either; but the true astral bodies of the crimson world: where Baxa the great fish swims through the inky heavens, their flowing fins and tail colouring the abyss in faint hues of orange, pink, and gold. With this knowledge, two popular possibilities exist. We can conclude that the great lantern of the Reaching Deep is truly a star, the first we've heard of in the Crimson world. If true, it raises many questions about the macro nature of the system while simultaneously bringing a comfortable familiarity to the surreal landscapes recorded here.
Or we can believe the lantern is like any other in this realm: a post-death manifestation of a human soul. A grand one, a life force so unfathomably bright and pure that it could humble the most revered of kings and holy men. A God's soul. No wonder the people of the shores offer it prayer, and praise its fleeting, overwhelming presence. Those graced by its light could be changed by it, led to be better by it, inspired by the contact of such a grand light and made holier men by it. This could be the reason things that live under the canopy of the inland forests are such terrible creatures, for they have been shielded from this blessed light, left to corrupt and pervert under the shade of the trees.
> Beasts and Superstition
Known beasts of the woods that do occasionally leave the canopy are pained by light and deterred with fire, furthering the theory that those in contact with the lantern's light are saved, and those who live in darkness are cursed. There is one creature recorded that hunts from the skies; wide of wingspan, long of claw, and sporting a bony ridge along its skull akin to a hammerhead shark. They hail from roosts deep inside the forest but soar toward the sea to hunt, terrorizing anything that moves. There are boar-like monsters that prowl the underbrush, weak of eyesight but with an incredible sense of smell, known to snatch up young children who stray too far from their hamlets. There are owls that speak in human tongue who drive men mad, cursing them to live in waking hells.
Terrifying things, and they guard a precious resource the people here need. Wood. To obtain it for their boats and fires, the people here organize lumber parties: very dangerous ordeals that camp on the fringes of the forest, kept safe by bonfires. The preparation for a tree-felling always happens at the latest hours of the night, just before dawn, as lumber parties make use of every minute of sunlight they can manage. When the bright disk begins to slide above the sea and the shadows of the forest shimmer with tendrils of first daylight, the lumber parties frenzy upon the treeline in dutiful, organized action, hacking and sawing at what they can before shadow swallows them once more. Some logs are sent downriver towards the sea, others are roped and dragged on tracks and sleds pulled by field oxen. The lumber grows from the red blood sin of the soil, but lumber parties, by felling the trees, sanctify the wood. As it is shaped by human hands the trees are cleansed of that sin and given purpose, the best lumber sent to shipyards, and the most unruly and gnarled of logs set to flame atop lighthouses, or sent to market to be transformed into carvings of luck and prosperity.
Superstitious totems are carved to ward away the creatures of the woods, and countless thousands of them dangle on fences lining the mainland on strings of waxed hemp rope, and more are placed on the outskirts of towns with every generation in the hopes of keeping evils at bay. When the daylight storms scrape across the lands these totems hold fast and collide like windchimes, playing a holy song of clacking wood and bone that people hope is heard through the forest, a clattering thought to terrify the beasts of the deep. Wood and bone chimes of this kind are sported on many sea-faring vessels for good luck and the clattering of totems strung from market stalls and across the doorways of every homestead are so commonplace and comforting that many adventurers string wooden beads and totems from their clothes, satchels, and steeds to carry the clattering sound with them. Where humans are in this realm, their superstitions always follow closely by.
But just as superstitions are comfortably human, so too is wanderlust. In many of us — certainly moreso in times of old when the world was larger — there lies a spark of madness rooted deep in one's soul to leave home. Surely it is insanity to risk misery and death beyond comfortable and safe lands in search of the unknown. Some men are simply born with it: tormented by an everlasting itch for things remote. A Paleolithic need to sail forbidden seas and set foot on barbarous coasts. And, since the Scarlet Woods of the dark inland realms are taboo and impossible to traverse, only the great expanse of the sea is left to satiate that madness of human wanderlust. Those born in the valley of the Reaching Deep who carry that itch may find themselves madly sailing outwards towards the Illustrious Horizon, to depths of the sea untold, across the bulwark of the ocean to the literal edge of the world. Perhaps in hopes of finding new lands beneath the eternal light of the Great Lantern, perhaps not. Only knowing one thing: that their voyages are destined never to return.
> Beyond the Horizon
One thing we had difficulty transcribing to the archives were stories of Aziz, a name highlighted with import on many pieces of literature given to us. While abstract, we've concluded Aziz relates to folklore describing what awaits sailors at the edge of the world where the ocean ends and meets the illustrious horizon, describing either a singular being or an enigmatic people who reside in these unreachable pelagic lands.
Fantastical interpretations of Aziz tell of a colossal chariot that rides over tumultuous waves. At its helm; a giant no less than fifty feet tall, garbed in robes the colour of the dark sea and carrying a shimmering net woven of the finest silver mesh. This impossible vehicle is pulled by black mares in black barding who match the giant's great size, and the crashing of their hooves upon the waves is that of thunderclaps in a storm, and all around them do the souls of lost sailors float upon the waves as phantoms. Aziz, we believe, is the curator of the dead; he who carries drowned sailors to their resting place beyond the horizon to the place where sunlight shines eternal and bright — unbroken by the long night.
Other interpretations suggest that Aziz is not a singular giant, but a collection of chariot riders who patrol the elusive shores of faraway lands. They likely are not chariots at all — but misinterpreted experiences of encountering other boats built by different nations across the great ocean. As what commonly occurs with folklore and legend is a stretching of the truth into wild and fantastical events and stories, so too might have happened with the tale of Aziz. Instead of a god of death riding on top of waves on the high seas, the phenomenon witnessed at the horizon could have been one of a dark corsair; a close encounter of a more familiar kind, twisted by the imagination of storytellers after generations of word-of-mouth accounts.
While we cannot be entirely sure of the truth behind Aziz, one thing is for certain. The people of the great crimson ocean believe something awaits beyond the visible horizon towards the illustrious maw of the ever-reaching deep, and likely have encountered it before. The imagery of ocean chariots leaves room for cynicism, but the reality is that we don't know what is possible within the crimson realm, and the existence of a towering god of the far seas pulled by a fleet of black horses cannot be ruled out entirely.
Surely, if human souls can manifest into the ever-watchful lanterns that protect places like the Commonwealth, and if the solar body that blazes through the reaching deep on the horizon of the great crimson ocean was such a coalesced soul, then it would not be surprising to think other fates were awaiting the people of the crimson world — such as a Davey Jones parallel of eternal ocean bound servitude to Aziz and his grand chariot.
What's more, the legends we have been given suggest that joining with Aziz and his collection of phantoms is a sought-after goal for many of the sailors of the Reaching Deep, who engage in twilight cruises off the map to be taken into his care. It is a solemn last voyage and a beautiful way to pass, and we believe many — if not all — who live on these shores engage in the tradition. We know for certain that they do not bury their dead at least; as the coffins of those who never lived at sea are still given to it after their deaths, delivered to the ocean, accompanied by hundreds of tiny floating fires.
Beyond the tales of Aziz which are documented in one way or another multiple times, there are more sporadic mentions of sea-bound beasts and experiences in the deep crimson ocean that sailors maintain as folklore. If you are to believe it, and should you have grown to sail these seas yourself, you may one day encounter the Kubri, — slender humanoid figures taller than the ocean itself — and other assortments of strange and mysterious leviathans and creatures.
> A Note on Record Keeping
Some of this information has been extrapolated by the imagination of our archivists to paint a clearer picture of what we believe life is like within the Reaching Deep. Much of it is pieced together by scraps of culture and indecipherable writings. We only can record what we can understand, and as such we view the crimson world through a lens thrice removed from reality. First removed from our physical distance — all of us likely will never set foot inside the crimson world itself. Secondly through the gifts of the Porter, which we receive in scraps of information that each give us more questions than answers. And lastly through our own imagination: assuming that our experience on Earth can have any parallels at all to life in the strange red realms upheaved by the Witch Queen. Assumptions, like the residents of the Reaching Deep are human, seem comfortable and help us wrap our minds around such a place. The truth may be different. The people here may be completely alien to us physically and only share similar minds. But our assumptions and our perceived truths are the best we can manage to imagine what life is like here, a wonderful glimpse into a realm so different and strange.
In many ways, we find it comforting to record it at all. Without us, the people of the Crimson World would never be known by anyone. Immortalizing their lives, struggles, and accomplishments is the only thing we can do for them. It's the only way we can show them that we see them, and will remember them. That's all any one of us could ask for, too. To be remembered, our history preserved even long after we are gone. So that daylight may shine on them once more, even for just a moment, keeping at bay the long night of true death — when you are finally forgotten, your name uttered last. A fleeting blast of light from the illustrious horizon of recognition before a cold, vast, and potentially uncaring universe swallows you in shadow once more. We see records like this one as lights in the darkness, burning on the fuel of crimson wood and fish oils, guiding and offering comfort to all those who seek it.