Remember Tantavel
Jun. 13th, 2011 11:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hwrnmnbsolI am Merxis, the High Geometer of the World of Tantavel. This is part of the history of the world that I am writing, for reasons that shall soon be made clear.
Tantavel is a beautiful place, a rectangular strip of wooded lands some four hundred miles across, east to west, and exactly three thousand miles long, north to south. We are bounded on east and west by mighty and endless seas, which are flat close to the land, but which slope away with increasing steepness the further one goes from shore; ships that dare go too far out of sight of land cannot claw back uphill and are lost. Only the sun can travel there, rising above the eastern ocean and setting above the west day after day. In a previous treatise I have speculated that Tantavel is shaped like a toroid, that is to say a tube joined upon itself at the ends, with the sun passing through the hole in the middle during the night. But I digress, which I am unfortunately inclined to do, being of advancing years.
We are bounded on the north and south by the Veil: a curtain of infinite blackness, rising as high as the eye can see. All living or organic matter that touches the Veil is disintegrated, so one must take great care with it. This is made more complicated by the fact that the Veil moves. Every year the Northern Veil marches three miles southward, consuming all in its path. But similarly, every year the Southern Veil marches south at the same rate, revealing new lands. Thus does the World of Tantavel remain exactly three thousand miles long. I have made numerous measurements to verify that it is so.
An important feature of the World of Tantavel is the Dark Spire. It is a peak of black rock, impossibly steep, upon which no plant will grow and no bird will nest. It thrusts almost twelve hundred feet tall, a height I have estimated by measuring its shadow at various times of day. The Dark Spire draws close to the Northern Veil; it will not be long before the two collide. Nobody knows for certain what will happen, but I have a theory. When Spire pierces Veil, I believe it shall spell the end of the world.
Our history is difficult to piece together. We know for certain that our ancestors came to reach enlightenment living in the ruins of a much older civilization. It is certainly true that many hundreds of years ago, great stone ruins from a culture alien to ours emerged from the Southern Veil. Minerals and stones appear capable of piercing the veil without damage, although plant and animal matter, and even worked metals, crumble and corrode. Our people learned to read and write sheltering in the Dome of the Centuries, a structure that we lacked the craft to build until relatively recently. Who were the builders of these things that predate our culture? And why have no more such ruins emerged for many centuries?
We have found primitive cave paintings that our ancestors made. They are close to the Dark Spire, and they show that peculiar mountain with the Southern Veil in the background. Almost a thousand years ago, not long after the Dark Spire emerged from the Southern Veil, our precursors lived in barbarism. They looked like us, these primitives, but they had no knowledge, no learning. By dint of their own native cleverness, plus any secrets they might have gleaned from the ruins of the ancients, they rose to produce the civilization that we enjoy today.
I have for many years been fascinated by the veils. It is of course tremendously dangerous to work near the Northern Veil; it marches southwards at a pace of about twenty yards per day, so one must not be careless and allow one’s self to become absorbed in one’s studies. Once, when I was young, I placed a small table near the veil with a book of notes upon it, then carelessly walked away; when I returned, that curtain of oily blackness had consumed two of the table legs, and the rest fell into the veil and vanished. My work, utterly lost! Now I set up a comfortable distance away, and when I walk up to the veil, I make sure to keep my wits about me.
One of my duties is to manage the orderly migration of farmers from the north to the south, for as the lands are consumed, unlucky crofters must necessarily emigrate to the new lands opened up by the Southern Veil. This is a process that the learned organize, to avoid the violence and inequity that used to plague such matters. One time, as I was so engaged, I needed to uproot a number of stone road markers which I no longer had use for. I therefore placed them in a stack close to the veil and allowed it to swallow them. I was amazed to discover, an hour later, that one of the stelae had been shoved back through the curtain! Furthermore, certain new markings had been chiseled upon it!
Fascinated, I began to study this phenomenon. Objects of stone sent through the veil were returned, with new markings upon them, and often crude pictures. I detailed a group of young apprentices to monitor the veil around the clock and bring me anything that came through. Piecing together the clues sent across the boundary, I realized that there was an intelligent mind on the other side that was attempting to communicate. We did not share the same language, but by pictograms we managed to convey that we were both human and were curious about each other.
A beautiful correspondence followed. Her name was Ktan-Shul, an alien name, for her culture was utterly unlike ours. While we have parliamentary rule and a technological elite ruling class, Ktan-Shul was a part of a priesthood that considered the pursuit of learning to be a higher spiritual calling. They had a rigid caste system, and in many ways were quite barbaric, performing human sacrifice atop queer inverted pyramids, and other rites I found distasteful. And yet we were very similar too. We had a burning desire to learn more about our worlds. Also, our worlds were very similar. Ktan-Shul, too, lived in a world four hundred miles wide and exactly one thousand miles long. And she, too, had a Black Spire that was rapidly approaching a Northern Veil.
We realized that anything crossing the Northern Veil of Tantavel, if not disintegrated, emerged from the Southern Veil of Ktan-Shul’s world, which they called Mhau. I carved elaborate maps of the coastlines which the Veil swallowed, and Ktan-Shul verified that the bays and inlets of my world were unchanged when they entered hers. By carving notches on stone slabs, we established that the Veil was only about a foot thick. How I wished I could reach across that void to touch my correspondent on the other side, who I rapidly grew to hold great affection for. But I knew this would only cost me an arm.
It was Ktan-Shul who had the brilliant idea: what if she put a tablet through her Northern veil; would it emerge out our Southern one? She dispatched runner-slaves to make it happen, and I sent message by carrier-swallow to my brethren in the South to look for Ktan-Shul’s carving. But we were disappointed; nothing but dust came through the Southern curtain. We confirmed via the coastline mapping method that the land lost by Mhau was not entering Tantavel.
This, of course, introduced many new questions. If Mhau’s lost lands weren’t coming here, where were they going? And where were Tantavel’s new lands coming from? I postulated that there might be a chain of worlds, each separated by Veils. But if that were the case, that meant there should be a world on the other side of our Southern Veil, hopefully with somebody in it to correspond with. Why did they not pass messages through the curtain? And why would nobody speak with Ktan-Shul from her North?
I decided that it was important to research a method of piercing the Veils – if not to travel across them, at least to see through them. Ktan-Shul, meanwhile, busied herself with studying the nature of the disintegration that contact with the Veil caused. We set about our various projects with great energy.
I experimented with shoving various stone tubes through the Veil. The tube itself went through, and I found it amusing that when I felt somebody holding up the far end of it, I was feeling the movements of somebody a world away. But when I looked through the tube, the curtain of blackness penetrated the center, and there was no way to see through.
Ktan-Shul sampled the soil on her end when I had shoved organic materials through my side. Examining the matter carefully under magnifying lenses, she concluded that the effect of passing something through the Veil was very similar to the process of aging and decomposition. In brief, metals rusted and corroded, and organic matter denatured and crumbled, exactly as if many centuries elapsed all at once. Mhau was therefore living in the ruins of Tantavel, aged artificially a good thousand years.
Ktan-Shul’s talk of lenses intrigued me. We were able to pass the ground bits of glass back and forth across the Veil. Lens crafting was never a technology we had learned to great effect, but under Ktan-Shul’s tutelage I quickly intuited the basics of it. Studying the interaction of the lens with the Veil itself, I decided that a lens large enough to penetrate the entire Veil might just be able to see through. I set my craftsmen to work building me an enormous lens on a stone frame. It took them five years to create, but eventually it was done.
I was nervous as a bride on her wedding day when the teams of oxen laboriously maneuvered the lens into place and thrust it through the Veil. It was just thick enough that I had a window the breadth of my hand through which I could see. I had to stand on a platform twenty feet in the air, so large was the lens we had made.
Through the blurry aperture I finally beheld Ktan-Shul. She was exotic in her silks and many swaths of beads. I found her beautiful, and told her so, and she blushed. Peering through, she laughed and told me I was hideous, which was true, and then we both laughed. We were both two elderly academics who could never touch, and yet we enjoyed a romance of a sort.
Ktan-Shul, I said, I will loan you this lens to look through your Northern Veil, but first I must take it to our South. I had to know why only dust and desolation emerged from that Veil. This meant leaving the Northern Veil. Ktan-Shul took the news hard, for travel with the heavy lens to the south would take many months. But she was first and foremost a woman of learning, and if anybody in two worlds would understand why I must go, it was she.
I took a fast caravel by sea, hugging the coastline with our precious cargo, not daring to leave sight of land lest we be swept off the edge of the world. We arrived at the Southern Veil and the oxen teams pushed my window into position. I looked through that interface and was amazed by what I saw.
Through my little portal, I saw a kind of no-mans-land of desolation on the far side of the veil. The zone of emptiness extended a clear mile from the Veil, but beyond that was considerable sign of activity. Great crews of people were frantically tearing down structures, casting stones to the ground and smashing them into dust. Others were burning all vegetation, leaving the soil blasted and blackened. Meanwhile, holy men were shouting at the veil, making warding signs and performing rituals that I took to be curses or abjurations. I divined that the culture on the far side of the Veil saw the curtain of blackness as an enemy, a devourer, and they were determined not to give it anything to consume. This explained why nothing ever came through to our side.
One of the holy men caught sight of the lens thrusting through the curtain and appeared to have some kind of heart attack. The other witch doctors converged, and there was a great deal of pointing and jumping up and down. I ordered my crew to hastily withdraw the lens; I worried that a thrown catapult stone would pass through the Veil just fine despite the artificial passage of years.
But I was deeply troubled by what I had seen. There were many sorts of structures that the deconstructors were dismantling on the far side. Some of them were plainly newer, with blocky and functional uses and a clean appearance. Others were older, and one of them at the far edge of my vision bore a distinct resemblance to the inverted pyramids that Ktan-Shul had described. But of the greatest concern was the object near the foreground – a towering spire of black rock, resisting all attempts at demolition, inexorably nearing the Veil.
I returned with the lens to my Ktan-Shul, and we reunited (in a sense) joyously. I made her a gift of the Great Lens, and she vowed to use it wisely in the north.
I asked her what she knew of the history of her people. Their history was similar to ours – they grew up in ruins and built their own civilization. However, their writings were no older than ours; the people of Mhau arose around the same time as did the people of Tantavel. It was then that I formed my theory. I explained it to Ktan-Shul thus:
What if, I said, every world has a Black Spire that intersects the Veils every thousand years? And when this happens, something occurs that causes people to lose all culture, lose all sense, lose the ability to reason as civilized human beings? What if this event throws every culture back to primitivism? Then each culture has a thousand years to regain their footing. Each time they come back a little differently; each time they regain the old skills, the old tools; but they only have a thousand years, because at the end of that time things will reset again.
This is a depressing theory, Ktan-Shul told me. If it is true, what should we do?
I thought on that for some time, and I have come to my conclusions. So it is that I am writing this history of the world. But I am not writing it on paper; I am having it carved on plates of stone. Furthermore, it is being carved both in the writing symbols of Tantavel, the sigils of Mhau, and in pictograms that hopefully will be simple to decipher, once people with the ability to think come back into existence.
We will leave such objects in sturdily built vaults for the next generation to find. Our goal: give the next culture as good a head start as possible. Maybe, if our children are able to stand on our shoulders high enough, they will rise as high as possible within their thousand year allotment. And perhaps, if they rise high enough, they will learn to stop the black spires from resetting civilization.
My love Ktan-Shul has departed for the north. Through her veil she will attempt to make contact with the next world over, using the Great Lens to help. Our time is short, but it we spread the word as far as possible, we increase the chances that some culture, at some time, will gain the learning they need to avoid their thousand-year fate.
I mourn for my beloved Tantavel. It is a beautiful world, and I wish it did not have to end. But we will leave many fine structures behind, and dig useful wells, and leave clues for curious minds to feed upon and grow strong and wise. And perhaps, I hope, they will learn to remember Tantavel well, and remember Tantavel forever.
Tantavel is a beautiful place, a rectangular strip of wooded lands some four hundred miles across, east to west, and exactly three thousand miles long, north to south. We are bounded on east and west by mighty and endless seas, which are flat close to the land, but which slope away with increasing steepness the further one goes from shore; ships that dare go too far out of sight of land cannot claw back uphill and are lost. Only the sun can travel there, rising above the eastern ocean and setting above the west day after day. In a previous treatise I have speculated that Tantavel is shaped like a toroid, that is to say a tube joined upon itself at the ends, with the sun passing through the hole in the middle during the night. But I digress, which I am unfortunately inclined to do, being of advancing years.
We are bounded on the north and south by the Veil: a curtain of infinite blackness, rising as high as the eye can see. All living or organic matter that touches the Veil is disintegrated, so one must take great care with it. This is made more complicated by the fact that the Veil moves. Every year the Northern Veil marches three miles southward, consuming all in its path. But similarly, every year the Southern Veil marches south at the same rate, revealing new lands. Thus does the World of Tantavel remain exactly three thousand miles long. I have made numerous measurements to verify that it is so.
An important feature of the World of Tantavel is the Dark Spire. It is a peak of black rock, impossibly steep, upon which no plant will grow and no bird will nest. It thrusts almost twelve hundred feet tall, a height I have estimated by measuring its shadow at various times of day. The Dark Spire draws close to the Northern Veil; it will not be long before the two collide. Nobody knows for certain what will happen, but I have a theory. When Spire pierces Veil, I believe it shall spell the end of the world.
Our history is difficult to piece together. We know for certain that our ancestors came to reach enlightenment living in the ruins of a much older civilization. It is certainly true that many hundreds of years ago, great stone ruins from a culture alien to ours emerged from the Southern Veil. Minerals and stones appear capable of piercing the veil without damage, although plant and animal matter, and even worked metals, crumble and corrode. Our people learned to read and write sheltering in the Dome of the Centuries, a structure that we lacked the craft to build until relatively recently. Who were the builders of these things that predate our culture? And why have no more such ruins emerged for many centuries?
We have found primitive cave paintings that our ancestors made. They are close to the Dark Spire, and they show that peculiar mountain with the Southern Veil in the background. Almost a thousand years ago, not long after the Dark Spire emerged from the Southern Veil, our precursors lived in barbarism. They looked like us, these primitives, but they had no knowledge, no learning. By dint of their own native cleverness, plus any secrets they might have gleaned from the ruins of the ancients, they rose to produce the civilization that we enjoy today.
I have for many years been fascinated by the veils. It is of course tremendously dangerous to work near the Northern Veil; it marches southwards at a pace of about twenty yards per day, so one must not be careless and allow one’s self to become absorbed in one’s studies. Once, when I was young, I placed a small table near the veil with a book of notes upon it, then carelessly walked away; when I returned, that curtain of oily blackness had consumed two of the table legs, and the rest fell into the veil and vanished. My work, utterly lost! Now I set up a comfortable distance away, and when I walk up to the veil, I make sure to keep my wits about me.
One of my duties is to manage the orderly migration of farmers from the north to the south, for as the lands are consumed, unlucky crofters must necessarily emigrate to the new lands opened up by the Southern Veil. This is a process that the learned organize, to avoid the violence and inequity that used to plague such matters. One time, as I was so engaged, I needed to uproot a number of stone road markers which I no longer had use for. I therefore placed them in a stack close to the veil and allowed it to swallow them. I was amazed to discover, an hour later, that one of the stelae had been shoved back through the curtain! Furthermore, certain new markings had been chiseled upon it!
Fascinated, I began to study this phenomenon. Objects of stone sent through the veil were returned, with new markings upon them, and often crude pictures. I detailed a group of young apprentices to monitor the veil around the clock and bring me anything that came through. Piecing together the clues sent across the boundary, I realized that there was an intelligent mind on the other side that was attempting to communicate. We did not share the same language, but by pictograms we managed to convey that we were both human and were curious about each other.
A beautiful correspondence followed. Her name was Ktan-Shul, an alien name, for her culture was utterly unlike ours. While we have parliamentary rule and a technological elite ruling class, Ktan-Shul was a part of a priesthood that considered the pursuit of learning to be a higher spiritual calling. They had a rigid caste system, and in many ways were quite barbaric, performing human sacrifice atop queer inverted pyramids, and other rites I found distasteful. And yet we were very similar too. We had a burning desire to learn more about our worlds. Also, our worlds were very similar. Ktan-Shul, too, lived in a world four hundred miles wide and exactly one thousand miles long. And she, too, had a Black Spire that was rapidly approaching a Northern Veil.
We realized that anything crossing the Northern Veil of Tantavel, if not disintegrated, emerged from the Southern Veil of Ktan-Shul’s world, which they called Mhau. I carved elaborate maps of the coastlines which the Veil swallowed, and Ktan-Shul verified that the bays and inlets of my world were unchanged when they entered hers. By carving notches on stone slabs, we established that the Veil was only about a foot thick. How I wished I could reach across that void to touch my correspondent on the other side, who I rapidly grew to hold great affection for. But I knew this would only cost me an arm.
It was Ktan-Shul who had the brilliant idea: what if she put a tablet through her Northern veil; would it emerge out our Southern one? She dispatched runner-slaves to make it happen, and I sent message by carrier-swallow to my brethren in the South to look for Ktan-Shul’s carving. But we were disappointed; nothing but dust came through the Southern curtain. We confirmed via the coastline mapping method that the land lost by Mhau was not entering Tantavel.
This, of course, introduced many new questions. If Mhau’s lost lands weren’t coming here, where were they going? And where were Tantavel’s new lands coming from? I postulated that there might be a chain of worlds, each separated by Veils. But if that were the case, that meant there should be a world on the other side of our Southern Veil, hopefully with somebody in it to correspond with. Why did they not pass messages through the curtain? And why would nobody speak with Ktan-Shul from her North?
I decided that it was important to research a method of piercing the Veils – if not to travel across them, at least to see through them. Ktan-Shul, meanwhile, busied herself with studying the nature of the disintegration that contact with the Veil caused. We set about our various projects with great energy.
I experimented with shoving various stone tubes through the Veil. The tube itself went through, and I found it amusing that when I felt somebody holding up the far end of it, I was feeling the movements of somebody a world away. But when I looked through the tube, the curtain of blackness penetrated the center, and there was no way to see through.
Ktan-Shul sampled the soil on her end when I had shoved organic materials through my side. Examining the matter carefully under magnifying lenses, she concluded that the effect of passing something through the Veil was very similar to the process of aging and decomposition. In brief, metals rusted and corroded, and organic matter denatured and crumbled, exactly as if many centuries elapsed all at once. Mhau was therefore living in the ruins of Tantavel, aged artificially a good thousand years.
Ktan-Shul’s talk of lenses intrigued me. We were able to pass the ground bits of glass back and forth across the Veil. Lens crafting was never a technology we had learned to great effect, but under Ktan-Shul’s tutelage I quickly intuited the basics of it. Studying the interaction of the lens with the Veil itself, I decided that a lens large enough to penetrate the entire Veil might just be able to see through. I set my craftsmen to work building me an enormous lens on a stone frame. It took them five years to create, but eventually it was done.
I was nervous as a bride on her wedding day when the teams of oxen laboriously maneuvered the lens into place and thrust it through the Veil. It was just thick enough that I had a window the breadth of my hand through which I could see. I had to stand on a platform twenty feet in the air, so large was the lens we had made.
Through the blurry aperture I finally beheld Ktan-Shul. She was exotic in her silks and many swaths of beads. I found her beautiful, and told her so, and she blushed. Peering through, she laughed and told me I was hideous, which was true, and then we both laughed. We were both two elderly academics who could never touch, and yet we enjoyed a romance of a sort.
Ktan-Shul, I said, I will loan you this lens to look through your Northern Veil, but first I must take it to our South. I had to know why only dust and desolation emerged from that Veil. This meant leaving the Northern Veil. Ktan-Shul took the news hard, for travel with the heavy lens to the south would take many months. But she was first and foremost a woman of learning, and if anybody in two worlds would understand why I must go, it was she.
I took a fast caravel by sea, hugging the coastline with our precious cargo, not daring to leave sight of land lest we be swept off the edge of the world. We arrived at the Southern Veil and the oxen teams pushed my window into position. I looked through that interface and was amazed by what I saw.
Through my little portal, I saw a kind of no-mans-land of desolation on the far side of the veil. The zone of emptiness extended a clear mile from the Veil, but beyond that was considerable sign of activity. Great crews of people were frantically tearing down structures, casting stones to the ground and smashing them into dust. Others were burning all vegetation, leaving the soil blasted and blackened. Meanwhile, holy men were shouting at the veil, making warding signs and performing rituals that I took to be curses or abjurations. I divined that the culture on the far side of the Veil saw the curtain of blackness as an enemy, a devourer, and they were determined not to give it anything to consume. This explained why nothing ever came through to our side.
One of the holy men caught sight of the lens thrusting through the curtain and appeared to have some kind of heart attack. The other witch doctors converged, and there was a great deal of pointing and jumping up and down. I ordered my crew to hastily withdraw the lens; I worried that a thrown catapult stone would pass through the Veil just fine despite the artificial passage of years.
But I was deeply troubled by what I had seen. There were many sorts of structures that the deconstructors were dismantling on the far side. Some of them were plainly newer, with blocky and functional uses and a clean appearance. Others were older, and one of them at the far edge of my vision bore a distinct resemblance to the inverted pyramids that Ktan-Shul had described. But of the greatest concern was the object near the foreground – a towering spire of black rock, resisting all attempts at demolition, inexorably nearing the Veil.
I returned with the lens to my Ktan-Shul, and we reunited (in a sense) joyously. I made her a gift of the Great Lens, and she vowed to use it wisely in the north.
I asked her what she knew of the history of her people. Their history was similar to ours – they grew up in ruins and built their own civilization. However, their writings were no older than ours; the people of Mhau arose around the same time as did the people of Tantavel. It was then that I formed my theory. I explained it to Ktan-Shul thus:
What if, I said, every world has a Black Spire that intersects the Veils every thousand years? And when this happens, something occurs that causes people to lose all culture, lose all sense, lose the ability to reason as civilized human beings? What if this event throws every culture back to primitivism? Then each culture has a thousand years to regain their footing. Each time they come back a little differently; each time they regain the old skills, the old tools; but they only have a thousand years, because at the end of that time things will reset again.
This is a depressing theory, Ktan-Shul told me. If it is true, what should we do?
I thought on that for some time, and I have come to my conclusions. So it is that I am writing this history of the world. But I am not writing it on paper; I am having it carved on plates of stone. Furthermore, it is being carved both in the writing symbols of Tantavel, the sigils of Mhau, and in pictograms that hopefully will be simple to decipher, once people with the ability to think come back into existence.
We will leave such objects in sturdily built vaults for the next generation to find. Our goal: give the next culture as good a head start as possible. Maybe, if our children are able to stand on our shoulders high enough, they will rise as high as possible within their thousand year allotment. And perhaps, if they rise high enough, they will learn to stop the black spires from resetting civilization.
My love Ktan-Shul has departed for the north. Through her veil she will attempt to make contact with the next world over, using the Great Lens to help. Our time is short, but it we spread the word as far as possible, we increase the chances that some culture, at some time, will gain the learning they need to avoid their thousand-year fate.
I mourn for my beloved Tantavel. It is a beautiful world, and I wish it did not have to end. But we will leave many fine structures behind, and dig useful wells, and leave clues for curious minds to feed upon and grow strong and wise. And perhaps, I hope, they will learn to remember Tantavel well, and remember Tantavel forever.
