spriteguard

[spriteguard]

Hunter Gray and the Fox

(listen here)

A hunter spied a noble fox

Her fur as red as red could be

Sat nobly atop some rocks

He drew his bowstring, then did see

Into a lady she transformed

Her hair as red as red could be

And spoke to him, and sternly warned,

"Because you would have shot me dead,

Into a lady I transformed

"I'll put a curse on you," she said,

"A curse you well deserve to bear

Because you would have shot me dead

"To wander endlessly seems fair,

And never rest nor reach your goal

A curse you well deserve to bear"

Away from him his life she stole

For how can one go on that way

And never rest nor reach your goal?

"I did not shoot, that's all I'll say.

This curse I don't deserve to bear

For how can one go on that way?

"You can't just say 'beware, beware!'

A hunter did what hunters do

This curse I don't deserve to bear!"

So who was right, and what was true?

What trouble came to pass because

A hunter did what hunters do

A lady or a fox there was

Sat nobly atop some rocks

What trouble came to pass because

A hunter spied a noble fox

Her fur as red as red could be

Sat nobly atop some rocks

[spriteguard]

One recurring motif in the Epic of Antissa is that each Antissa gives instructions for recreating a memento of someone who was important to her.

While not every Antissa recreates every memento, whether due to lack of resources or simply the overwhelming number of them (totalling 5999 by the time of the Last Antissa) there are some that are more commonly recreated than others.

The first such memento is a reminder of the First Antissa's husband: a white feather stained with a single drop of blood. The exact origin of this tradition was not recorded, but several folk explanations have arisen over the years. The most enduring of these is that her husband used a quill and some blood to write something important, but this is contradicted by the fact that the stain is usually placed at the top of the feather, not the tip.

The most commonly recreated is a chain, representing a chain she removed from a dear friend who had been imprisoned, and placed around her own waist to carry with her as a reminder of their escape together. It then became common in future generations to hang other mementos from this chain.

[spriteguard]

The Blue Haunt

The Blue Haunt is a mysterious entity that is usually found in the Mountains of Knowledge around the Valley Low. It is said to be utterly unknowable, even by those who have looked upon it and tried to understand it.

Witnesses consistently report that it emits or is associated with a bright blue light, but otherwise differ wildly and tend to be vague and incoherent. Many witnesses will refuse to describe it at all, on the grounds that it cannot be described.

Stories of encounters with the Blue Haunt usually involve the person who sees it being overwhelmed by fear and fleeing from it, but there are some stories of people who managed to stand in its presence and even ask it questions about its nature.

The Blue Haunt is surprisingly talkative, as far as unknowable horrors go, and has shown a willingness to answer any questions it is asked. These answers are uniformly unhelpful, misleading, confusing, or simply nonsensical.

[spriteguard]

The Pain Eater

The Pain Eater is a cryptid that lives in the mountains above the Sea of Sadness. It feeds on pain and suffering, and has become a much loved symbol of the surrounding area. As the sea rise caused by Jingwei has driven humans into the surrounding mountains, sightings have become more common, but people who have seen it routinely refuse to describe its appearance out of a sense of respect.

The Pain Eater wanders around more or less randomly, but because of its important role in human culture, many rituals have been created to try to summon it whenever someone is in pain. Over time these rituals have developed and evolved, and whenever the Pain Eater appears, people ascribe its arrival to whichever ritual they had most recently performed.

Many villages of the area hold Pain Eater festivals. These are generally on a different date for each village, since as far as anyone knows, there is only one Pain Eater. It does seem to be aware of these festivals, as it does appear fairly consistently, knowing that at certain times in certain places, it will find an abundance of food.

Pain Eater festivals are as diverse as they are numerous. Some involve ritual infliction of pain in order to provide a feast for the Pain Eater, but in most areas this is seen as unnecessary.

Some people consider some of their pain too meaningful to feed to the Pain Eater, so a common part of the festival is the sharing of pain, where people tell each other the stories that give their pain meaning, and decide which pain to give up and which pain to hold onto. It was at one of these gatherings that Beatrice told the story of the Six Thousand Lives of Antissa.

[spriteguard]

Games for Gods and Patient Mortals

There is, in the place where the immortals and the divines come together for recreation, a game which is known as Lernaean Nim, for its gameplay resembles the cutting of heads from the Lernaean Hydra, causing more to grow in its place, and its rules mirror those of Nim, in that the winner is decided by who cuts the last head, thereby slaying the hydra. The game board is a tree diagram, in which the ends of the branches are considered heads, and they all meet at the hydra’s body, and everywhere two or more necks meet is called a segment. Whenever a head is cut, if it is connected directly to the body, then it is cut and no more grow, but if it is connected to a segment, then all of the segments and heads grown from that segment are regrown again from the next segment lower. The number of copies that are grown is decided by the player making the cut, and can be as large or as small as they wish. It is rumored that one particularly brash mortal, attempting to intimidate the god he played against, once grew twenty million copies of a large and complex grouping of heads. In response, his opponent created a number so large that it has no name in any human language. Even with such rapid growth, it is mathematically proven that this game will always end. This was originally described as a single-player game by the mathematicians Laurie Kirby and Jeff Paris, who showed both that the game would also end, and also that it is impossible to prove that the game will always end without using certain advanced mathematics. For more information, see this post: https://markkm.com/blog/killing-the-hydra/ Since the game will always end, it’s possible to apply the combinatorial win conditions: the last player to make a move either wins (normal rules) or loses (misere rules). This makes for a strategy game that has some very deep similarities to the game Nim. The idea for Lernaean Nim is one that I’ve had kicking around in my head for many years, and motivated me to learn a lot about mathematics, but it was never my end goal. The game is interesting in that it can go on for any length of time, but not forever, but the game is not actually interesting to play. The strategy is both shallow and opaque, and many moves end up being strategically identical. My quest to create or discover a game with these particular properties that is actually fun and interesting to play is ongoing. The really tricky thing is that since no human could ever actually finish playing one of these games, the act of playing itself must be an enjoyable one. The player has to be able to reason about their position and come up with a move that will clearly bring them closer to victory even though they will never reach that victory. But this is a fundamental design principle of games in general. I believe that games should be fun to play in the moment, regardless of whether one will ever reach the end. It’s a difficult bar to meet, but to me it is a very important one.

[spriteguard]

Timeline of Major Events

Mirabella is born from a flower

The Insect King awakens Mirabella

Mirabella destroys the World Light

The River of Light forms

The Clockwork Golems find the Gods

The Gods make The World

Mirabella creates humans

Antissa is born for the first time

The Cedar Kingdom is founded

The Cedar Kingdom falls

Jingwei begins filling the sea with stones

Old Wander dies, Melmoth and Gloria are born

Dante and Sophia meet

Melmoth and Gloria torment Dante and Sophia

Dante and Sophia flee to the wilderness

Sophia helps Molly complete Magine

The Shining King is driven into exile

Lord Keeper reaches the bell, but cannot ring it

Warbride rises to power

Philo and Beatrice pursue the bell

Philo and Beatrice cross Magine with Princess Molly

The Shining King is restored

Dante and Sophia meet Mirabella

Dante is given Mirabella's Commission

Sophia passes on the Epic of Antissa

Sophia dies

Dante becomes Beatrice

Jingwei causes global sea rise

Franklin opens his Home for Misfits

Jingwei fills the sea with stones

Construction begins on the Tower of Hope

Construction begins on the Road to the Tower of Hope

Beatrice meets the road builders

Beatrice reaches the Tower of Hope

100 years of planning the mural

Beatrice paints the mural

Sophia's briar leads Beatrice back to her grave

Beatrice dies

Legends arise about Beatrice and Sophia

A lush garden is planted around the base of the Tower of Hope

[spriteguard]

Mirabella

Mirabella is at the heart of Perpetual Dawn, the shared universe that my stories take place in.

She is the god of stories, who makes up all the stories we live out, all the beautiful and terrible events of our lives.

She is the still waters, the daughter of Father Sea and Mother Sky, who hides from her brothers, the Waves and the Currents, and while she hides, she makes us up to keep herself company.

She is the eternal child, born from a flower atop the tallest tree in the valley of the Insect People. She was brought from the top of the tree down to the forest floor by the Insect People, where she awoke and brought all kinds of chaos into the world.

She is the patron of all storytellers, and her great commission to us is to create stories that she has never heard before. Good, bad, clean, dirty, clever or blunt, our stories delight her.

She is the first of the gods of creation, born before the river of light ever flowed.

She is the last of the gods of creation, the third generation, born upon the stage they had created, there to fill it with stories.