Angelfire | The Whispering Wall #3

Fifty Seven: First Contact

In the beginning, the only life on Nictaven was demons and their smaller animal prey. People did not arrive until much later. The Isolation was not the first time Nictaven has been cut off, if ancient records have been interpreted correctly.

But even then, it was not settled. Habitation for people was impossible in a world plagued by demons so much stronger than they were. It was a long time before anyone tried to make a life here, driven here through natural portals out of desperation or academic curiosity. Those who settled rarely settled for long. It has never been an easy place to inhabit.

As is the way of all civilisations, sooner or later, the first attempt to settle permanently came with the death of a world – the Caelumese were far from the first. The records of what this world once was have been lost, or were never made. All we have of our earliest history are a few scattered buildings of strange and foreign stone, most in ruins or else buried by time. This story only survives through the Unspoken. There is no written record of the woman who made first contact with Nictaven, only our collective memory. Someone, sometime, must have been the first, and even our most fanciful legends often have a grain of truth.

Aria came from this dying world. She fled here through the last of a series of cataclysmic portals that ripped holes through the very fabric of Nictaven. She arrived to a world in upheaval, ravaged by the uncontrolled movements of magic. She arrived in a world where all but the sturdiest mountains were being shaken to rubble, and the ground shook and roared beneath her feet. Great rents had opened in the ground, and the sky turned green with the glare of seething, scorching depths.

We consider Aria the first Guildmaster. She was responsible for leading the people who had arrived with her to the sturdiest mountain and encouraging them to climb to safety, even though they all knew that they risked being crushed if their conviction was wrong. But if they stayed below, they were no safer; demons fled the land's flaming wounds in all directions, and they were vulnerable to being picked off from the air if they did not find cover. There were no more portals. If they could not find a way to survive here, they would not survive at all.

It is said that Aria was guided to the mountain that kept her people safe. In the back of her mind, through the clamour and destruction, was a guiding light she could not hear or see but only feel. When she looked up at the huge mountain above the plain, it glowed green in veins that pulsed like the blood through her own, and she felt a kinship with it, and had faith that it would shelter her. Aria's group found a cave halfway up the mountain that sheltered them from the worst of the destruction. Boulders shaken loose in the aftershocks rolled away from the sloping ledge outside. Demons couldn't find them in such a small opening. Aria kept her people safe for their first night as true Nictavians, and they spent it watching the walls of the cave dance with magic, and let it soothe their grief.

The next morning, they came down from the mountain. The air had cleared and the ground had stopped shaking. The wounds in the land were still open, but they were easily avoided and the green infernos of the previous day had receded. The demons were still sheltering, and the plains were littered with the rubble of toppled giants. Only the largest mountains remained, and Aria looked up at the chain they formed and decreed that the line of the mountains would lead them to safe land.

Even those who had trusted her to find them shelter during the quakes had trouble believing this, but that guiding light had not abandoned Aria. Those who chose to follow her faced a gruelling trek with no guarantee of food and water, but they soon found that Aria always knew where the springs ran from the mountains and where to find safe shelter. Though this baffled them, they grew to trust her judgement.

All except one. One man saw Aria's unerring judgement and felt envious. Glynn was sure she had a secret that she wasn't sharing with them, in order to keep control of their party. When she couldn't explain her knowledge, he became angry, and began to accuse her of dark arts and bewitchment behind her back. The others couldn't deny that Aria was strange; she spent many nights sat at the entrance to the caves they sheltered in, staring at the night sky and seemingly fearless of demons. She spoke of the land as if it spoke back to her. Her silences were long and intense. There was no natural way she can find safe land in this world we have never seen before, Glynn said, and the people agreed. If she finds it, then we must find out what she knows so that she cannot keep it to herself and use it to rule over us.