Category: Other Page 137 of 177

At the height of the power of the city of Abdazon, the great trade center between the world of men, and the world beyond men, arose a wealthy merchant, whose name was Delroy. Delroy owned vast store-houses in the rings outside the city (and a few in Sheb by the sea), into which all manner of goods were stored: foodstuffs for men and animals, treasures from far off nations won through clever trade deals, often priceless objects of whose value the current holders had no clue.

Delroy was a shrewd trader, who dwelt bodily in the House of Wealth, but who inwardly knew the secrets of the House of Sorrow, he and his wife Aiara having no children of their own.

After long years of despairing, a theriomorphic magician appeared one day at a local inn in Abdazon for Hypogean travelers, asking for the Lord of the Storehouses. Delroy was summoned, and there he met Morbat, who appeared to him then in the form of a peculiar small striped four legged creature with a long horse-like face, a little larger than a dog, and three hoofed toes to each foot. He spoke with the voice of a human man, though deep and otherworldly.

“Lord of the Storehouses,” he addressed Delroy.

“All life is impermanent. What is not stone will turn to tarnish or rot, according to its characteristics and essence. What is stone will one day crumble, the next turn to dust. This is the way of things. Turn from this path of hoarding. What has made you wealthy has laid you barren. Open your storehouses, release your surplus, and I shall grant you the one thing your wealth hasn’t bought you, a child.”

Delroy, holding back sudden tears, “Be it truly in your power to grant such a blessing?”

Morbat responded, “By the antlers of Anthuor, it is so. But be you forewarned, Son of Man, the cost of life is life itself. Upon her quaranteenth season, she will be my bride and dwell with me on the other side.”

Delroy responded, “It is a heavy cost. I care nothing for my riches, which can be rebuilt through labor. But I would sooner pay with my own life, than hers, for what will my life be worth having known her and lost her, whereas now, I’ve only known that empty space and longing?”

“Well spoken, trader,” Morbat said. “But knowing perfection exists, would you flinch away from it out of pride for the integrity of your suffering?”

“These thoughts weigh heavy on me, and you’ve only just proposed this trade. I shall need time to think,” Delroy replied.

“Of course. It being near sun-down, I extend my offer until sun-down tomorrow. You may meet me on the Great Bridge tomorrow with your answer.”

When Delroy went home and broached the subject of the magician’s offer with his wife, Aiara, he was surprised that she scolded him for not accepting on the spot.

“Are you daft, husband? To have a daughter, and for her to be betrothed to a powerful magician in the same moment? Of course we accept!”

For in those days, it was not unheard of still for humans to take up living with the theriomorphic or therianthropic magicians, and to form families of their own. But they usually did so in the Hypogean lands, far from human settlements, returning only at odd occasions, or on High Holidays, and then only briefly, and rarely in fleshly form.

When Delroy climbed at sun-down the next day first the Foot, and then the Stair and walked onto the Great Bridge, he found Morbat standing there, in therianthropic form, nearly twice as tall as a man, dressed in a thin white robe, with the head of a strange emaciated pale horse with glowing eyes.

“Greetings, mortal,” the magician greeted him. “I trust you have come to a decision.”

“I have indeed,” Delroy began. “With one condition…”

“We spoke not of conditions yesterday at sun-down. But let us hear it nonetheless. For trade is negotiation.”

“That she marry for love, not for power, or out of obligation to a contract in which she had no part in agreeing to. That she not pay for my mistakes and shortcomings. That if in her True Heart she comes to love you, and you her, then I accept your offer, and will forthwith on the birth of a healthy child open up my storehouses.”

“Be so it done,” Morbat said, and with a thunderclap, vanished from the bridge as the sun sank down behind the mountains.

Delroy and Aiara did then have a girl child, some nine months after. And as promised, Delroy opened his storehouses. The girl was named Delrin. And to the surprise of her father, his storehouses were not ransacked and emptied. They remained full. The people trusted him as steward, and in turn his riches grew, as did the loveliness of his daughter.

Delrin, it seemed, had the Song and the Touch, the sense with animals of intuitive understanding, and wordless communication. She would hum, and sing a few notes, and the beasts would come out of the woods to stand and stare at her. Her mother worried at this, and when this communication eventually developed into her young daughter following these animals off into the woods for forays into the unknown.

“It’s not right,” her mother said. “She should have human children as friends. Some wrong will come of this.”

Delroy replied, “You’ve seen how the beasts cherish her. And if she is to be the bride of a powerful magician, then she will need the wisdom of the beasts. No harm will come to her, for I will set my Best Men at a distance to track and follow her unawares.”

So he did, and thus many years and many adventures passed as Delrin grew up between two worlds, the wild wood below the Great Forest, and the city of Abdazon and her father’s world of commerce, in which she showed precious little interest.

“I will marry a woodsman,” she told her father, from the age when she started to comprehend what marriage was. “Tall and brave, a tracker. I do not wish to become a merchant or a merchant’s wife.”

Her father smiled gently, “Your future is yours to decide, in your True Heart. Just promise to marry for love, whatever happens.”

“I do father. I will.”

So it came to pass, when she was of about marriageable age, that her father began to send Delrin away on what he called diplomatic missions to other lands, in the secret hopes of preventing her betrothed magician from easily finding her and trying to collect on his debt.

Delroy ordered his daughter first to Sheb, to check on his storehouses there, and thence on to the Threx Gate, where they were to skirt the edge of the Great Forest all the way up to the city of Threx. If possible, they were to rendezvous there with certain Buorthern mariners, and to negotiate a trade visit to those strange lands.

Delrin was excited, as she’d never left the Cleft before. Her father had forbade her even from climbing the Foot, let alone the Stair, or mounting the Great Bridge, and she had never disobeyed him.

Sheb turned out to be a bore. Like Abdazon, only smaller, and by the sea. She wasn’t sure she cared for the sea, nor wanted to cross over it, but Threx was far away still. Her traveling party consisted of the four Best Men of her father, who had her life long acted as silent secret guards on her adventures, and a host of birds and animals from forest and glen, whose fidelity to her knew no bounds, and who shadowed their movements in secret, from the cover of rock and flora.

Passing through the lower part of the Threx Gate, as the journey commenced in earnest, her animal friends bade her silent farewell, as they too never left the Cleft, and were wary to climb the long, winding, and exposed trail up to the plateau. Delrin cried, and the animals wept bitterly, and even some of the Best Men teared up at this farewell. Some of the birds, however, flew on up to watch over her. And thus they passed up out of the lands of Abdazon, to the plateau where the Great Forest began.

Newsletter # 01

Dear Friends & Colleagues,

According to legend, the way to Quatria is different for each voyager. Though two travelers might set off side-by-side on the same road for that ancient mystic land, one might reach it shortly while the other might wander in circles forever. Tradition says the place itself must want to be found, or the quest is doomed from the start.

My own route to Quatria has been the very definition of circuitous. I will not attempt to unravel that long and tangled skein herein, as the shifting signposts and detours I followed might never appear to whosoever comes seeking this mysterious continent after me.

Instead, I will let the discoveries of my past year spent amongst the relics of these remarkable peoples speak for themselves. I have not yet had time to properly process and organize my extensive research and field notes, and so must humbly ask your forgiveness in presenting what I do have in jumbled form at the hyperlink below (I felt it of the utmost importance to simply share my findings posthaste in the furtherance of the work):

https://www.timboucher.ca/quatria/

Please bookmark, as future research & analysis of this amazing culture will be posted regularly at the above address, supplemented by occasional email updates, from which you may unsubscribe at any time without offense.

I remain your humble servant,
T.B.

* * *

Recent Highlights

• A Brief History of the Shape Wars, Vol. I — Curious about Shape societies but were too afraid to ask? Here’s (almost) everything you need to know. (And don’t forget this and this.)
• Only just catching up on the curious case of Tob Gobble? No problem. Start here, then go here, here, and here.
• Quatrian Encyclopedia entries are filling up. Let me know what your most pressing areas of concern are, and I’ll be happy to address them in future entries.
• A Quatria-inspired cartography brush pack for Photoshop is now available for sale on Gumroad. Get them now before “Big Brush” censors them!
• A raw research feed of interesting links is available 24/7 at r/quatria.
• Fellow researchers from the Society for Liminal Cartography were profiled recently in this VICE article. Highly recommended!

Thanks for reading, and don’t forget to share this newsletter with a friend!

During the Second and Third Quatrian Diasporas, surviving legends tell of fleeing Quatrians who were able to escape into the Hypogeum, and from there passed through complex networks of natural tunnels, emerging into caves spread across the globe.

So-called “prehistoric” cave art reflects the traces they left on the cultures which they were eventually absorbed into, and in some cases came to rule over.

One such remnant artefact can be found in the Cave of the Three Brothers (Δ) where a half-man, half-animal figure might be seen on the walls, who has been perhaps appropriately named ‘The Sorceror’ by modern historians.

For this figure is one which would have been a common sight to denizens of Abdazon or surrounding regions during the time it was the Anti-Node of Quatria and the capital of the House of Wealth. From humble beginnings, the village was famous already for its hospitality and accomodations, but as construction of the Grand Passage was completely Abdazon solidified its reputation as a hub for all manner of embodied and partially embodied Hypogean visitors. No matter where an entity might fall on the scale between human, therianthropic, theriomorphic, or “other,” Abdazonians did their very best to transform xenophile inclinations into a sublime art form by welcoming passersby both magical and mundane in accommodations cleverly suited to their needs.

As a result, many types of animals, beasts, gods, heroes, and magicians would pass through the Abdazon Gate, and visit Quatria for a time. Those who found acommodations, climate, and general living conditions agreeable often would stay and settle in the surrounding countryside. And this is the reason for the many interesting contributions made to the fossil records of animals such as the Dawn Horses, nuralagus, and the famous Hypotherium americanum and many others — thanks in no small part to pre-diaspora Quatrian fondness for animals, and a natural understanding of how to live together.

Later Quatrian diasporan High Holy Days, such as the celebration of the House of Sorrows, and the Welcoming of the Earth Destroyer at the Quatrian New Year can be aptly said to hold living half remembered remnants of these ancient beliefs and cultural practices when magicians still walked the Earth in human and more-than-human form.

In the original Quastrian, Abbadon might be perhaps more properly transliterated as Abdazon, the Place of the Weeping Waters. Thus was this settlement situated during the Second Age of Old Early Quatria.

Abdazon began as a small village at the foot of the Cyrcic Cleft, where the Weeping Waters poured out of the Hypogeum. The people fished in that river, and hunted in the lower remnants of the then Great Forest. And their position made them tenders of the way-point for those beings who flowed from time to time out of the current whose source lay somewhere hidden in the Hypogeum.

Hospitality for these visiting entities formed the basis of Abdazonian culture, and the city became a lively trading spot, with clear roads out to Sheb and the Cyrcic Sea, and the city of Hundredth, then capital of the House of Wealth.

As the people of Abdazon grew prosperous, they undertook massive earthwright projects, to raise a tall hill called Foot, a Stair rising up from it, and meeting an arching Bridge up to the plateau of the Cyrcic Cleft, alongside the upper falls of the Weeping Waters.

Though it took them generations to complete this project, it turned the one-way traffic out of the Hypogeum (by way of the Weeping Waters) into a two way channel which humans, beasts, and wagons could pass in either direction from the Lower Plain up to the Cyrcic Cleft, and thence onto the Safe Passage into the Hypogeum.

Thus during this time, men and entities of all kinds could traffic bodily between Quatria and the Hypogeum, and Abdazon grew in wealth and power. In time, the Rulers of Hundredth came even to pay tribute to the Merchants of Abdazon, and the capital of that House of Abundance shifted to the Place of the Weeping Waters.

All who commerced with Abdazon became themselves wealthy too, from Hundredth to Sheb (formerly a small fishing village — like so many in Quatria — which thereafter became a hub of sea-faring mariners), on up through the Threx Gate (the only other land passage to the upper level of the Cyrcic Cleft), to the city of Threx itself, which renewed ties with Buorth across the Far Sea. Abdazon, born of the House of Sorrow, at the Place of the Weeping Waters, had transmuted these tears into life-giving water which flowed outwards into its many tributaries. And the Hypogeum was contiguous with the Land of Men again for the first time since the Fall of Sad Ederron, cast into the sea.

It was in this time that Aszenju the Betrayer arose across the Ederren Mountains, somewhere in the Vast Desert. Some said he came from Old Qisuth, or from Sloath itself, deep in the faraway heart of the House of Silence. Wherever his origin lay, slowly but surely, he made his way towards the glittering jewel of the city of Abdazon.

To understand the past, one must understand the future. In all and in each, the echoes of the other. Destination, origin, and route; as flower, leaf, branch, trunk, and root. So on through fungus, soil, insect and all those who dwell and toil in the dark below.

On one such branch, of one such future, the Hypogeum lies submerged and all but forgotten. What was once a ring of guarding mountains is now an atoll, whose opening amongst the salt sea into fresh waters within faces two Houses whose names or purposes few now remember. A deadly current winds out around from the former Breakwater, a cloak and shield against the foolish, apart from a tiny narrow safe passage where once the bridge of the city of Abbadon stood, cracked, and eventually crumbled.

Any lucky or unfortunate enough to pass through the eye of this needle find themselves in waters where lost and broken are the pilots’ instruments, and a song not heard for many ages can be once heard again as new. And in the center of whose inner sea might be called forth by one skilled enough in that Music, an island and small mount, atop jutting forth a humble temple, a gleaming wet jewel to be reclaimed. And in this temple, a well which knows no bottom, and whose deep dark memory reaches back before even the ages of Quatria, to which we presently return…

Upon arriving in Elum proper, the Pentarch sailors found themselves greeted by those people as long lost cousins. The missing thumb of their outstretched hand. The children lead the way, followed by the Silent Figure, in turn followed by the three sailors themselves, Benda the Brave, Tendar the Tall, and Ofend the Round. The villagers took them by the hands, gripped their shoulders, and touched their faces in ritual greeting. They offered them sweetdrink and dried cakes made from mashed salted fish, berries, and fermented grains, and the empty bellies and aches suffered by the sailors on their long voyage at sea were soon forgotten, replaced with rejoicing and the powerful unshakeable feelings of homecoming.

They slept that night in the loft of the family home of Garth Daub Al Elum, father to two of the children who had found them on the beaches by the docks, store-keeper of Elum, and member of the Elder Council which governed with great wisdom and prudence that village, and the surrounding region of the foothills below the Temple Mount.

Meanwhile, on that blessed mount, though the sailors themselves were fast asleep and did not hear, a high fierce note of one lone singer cried out in the night, signalling the close of the first day of the Dark Dance Cycle. Dressed in the flowing black robes pinned full of flowers associated with the part, the young virtuous woman playing Delrin the Beautiful, sad mate of Elum, fell silent upon the parapets of the Great Arch. And after a held count of emptiness, the waits blew their lesser horns in response, and all torch fires burning still in that city and in Elum far below were extinguished.

The first people of Quatria to welcome the three stranded Pentarch sailors were children playing on the beaches near the docks of Elum. The small Pentarch fishing vessel sat in a few feet of turquoise water when they arrived, and the children swam out to it. The sailors greeted them, bewildered still from the storm-at-sea they suffered and from the shock of their arrival on these strange shores. Heeding the insistent beckoning of the children of Elum, the sailors pulled their boat ashore, and followed the children back to the docks. Upon arriving there, the children quickly vanished, leaving the sailors alone again for a time.

At length, a lone figure appeared, clad in the dark cloak of his Order. He approached the sailors who had been waiting there since the children disappeared. He stopped a few feet from them, and held up his left hand, palm open before them in ritual greeting. The sailors did likewise, and one cleared his throat to speak in his own language.

“Good sir, we have landed on these shores, of which we have no knowledge. What land is this?”

The cloaked figure touched a small ornate disk of metalwork below his throat, which acted as brooch and clasp for his garment, and insignia of his rank. An arch between two columns, surmounted by solar disk, and the two crossed paths signifying Clarity and Confusion, all under the wings of Silence.

The sailors looked one to the other, none recognizing these symbols, nor the authority of this costume, though they sensed the gravity of the presence of their bearer.

The cloaked figure held up again his left hand, palm out, purposefully tucked in the thumb, and splayed the remaining four fingers wide. His right hand came up, palm over the top of the other in confirmation, right elbow thrust out in front of his body. He crouched, right arm coming to rest on his knees, and the left dropping heavy to touch the earth. Then he stood back up, letting both arms come to rest naturally at their sides.

The Pentarch sailors looked again at each other for a long silent moment, until Benda, the self-elected leader faced the figure, lifting up his left hand in imitation. Instead of folding the thumb in, however, he folded down the four fingers, and left his thumb jutting out. With the index finger of his ring hand, he touched his thumb, and then pointed off in the distance over the horizon.

“We are the fifth, and come from over the sea,” he said aloud. “Our legends speak of these lands, though none living now have voyaged here. Our people were once great friends and allies.”

The cloaked figure pressed his palms together as in prayer, nodded once, and then crossed his arms in an X in front of his body, hands balled into fists.

“Until the bond was broken,” Benda said, recalling to mind tales heard in his youth of ancient far away Quastria.

He paused a moment, adding, “Let, then, the bond be forged anew between our peoples. We pledge ourselves, within our capacities, in service of this mutual good.” He looked then at the other two sailors, Tendar the tall, and Ofend the round. Each nodded once in agreement.

The cloaked figure held up both hands, palm out, then pressed them together again and bowed low from the waist.

Thus the bond which had been sundered began anew, though the true test of its strength was yet to come. And as the Listeners of Temple Mount received the news from the bell-ringers of Elum below, the High Augur gave the signal for the Dark Dance Cycle to begin.

Throughout the course of this re-telling of the Pentarch Cycle of Classical Quastrian pre-history, readers may notice something of a semantic, linguistic, and lexical drift through the progression of the tales. This is intentionally done, an effort to align more perfectly with the fluid nature of what is known about the early history of Quastria, a nearly exclusively oral tradition, and later millenia of Pantarctican priestly and scholarly interpretation — and misinterpretation — across the diversity of proto-pantarctic sources.

For example, Redgraves in his Quatrian Codex renders the city we here transliterate as Abbadon (“gift of the father” — i.e., Anthuor) as “Abaddon,” from the Hebrew for “bottomless pit,” of which Bucks used the Latin equivalent instead, “Exterminans,” (for destroyer) on account of the vicious destruction unleashed upon the landscape by the fall of that eponymous city. (See also: Wild Waste, Dead River, Death of Eldrin, Wormwood/Assenzju)

Similarly, various scholarly traditions have each transliterated the ideo-tonal cluster associated with the name of the land itself into a multitude of different stylings including, among others:

Quatria
Cuatria
Kwatria
Quastria
Quâstria
Quaztría
Quastrie
Quastry
Quatrilla
Quaestrea (supposedly for their equestrian prowess)
Questry (origin of the modern word ‘quest’)
Quaïz
Kestry
Kestria
Kellstria
Kaestrie
Kastria
Kuaýstria
Kuaťtrea
Kwetuor
Kwetwor

And so on. To list all the variations for the nomenclature of this rich and storied land would fill volumes in itself (and has: see Fuller’s incomparable Complete Names of Quastria). The author here chooses generally Quatria, as it is the most widely known to modern Pantarctican audiences, as well as Quastria, or occasionally Quâstria — where appropriate — for literary or poetic reasons, fully comprehending, accepting, and encouraging the many other valid alternate variations of names — just as we see evidenced by the countless variations in characters, locales, and events in the tales themselves as later sources preserved them for us.

One Quatrian year before a storm-at-sea caused the three amnesiac Pentarch sailors to breach the Bay of Erasure, Wormwood had spoken.

Wormwood the Wordless. Wormwood the Changer. Speaker in mist and dust had issued forth from the Hypogeum in daylight plain and full in a turbulent columnar mass. A thick swirling fog, bounded as if by a single concentrated will, a will to change the world.

Since the High Augur was aware of the signs of His emergence pending for three weeks, the Hymn of Elimination (composed during the Shape Wars) was duly being performed at or about the time of emergence, as anticipated by the signals. They played and sang in the amphitheatre facing the Hypogeum Walls across the Chasm.

This was not a subtle emanation, as sometimes the minstrel priests claimed they alone could sense. This was an embodiment even a commoner could see, and it shot up into the sky, which pooled and filled as though cloudy water poured upward into a retaining basin. And after what seemed like an eternity of held-breath waiting, spooled off toward the cusp of the Houses of Song and Silence.

All of Quatria observed the trail in the sky that day as that spool, having reached the sea, sent down a finger to gently caress the water’s surface. A low rumbling, almost the sound of waits blowing their deep horns, but subtler. A calm below a reflected stormy sky. And then a bubbling, a mist rising up from the deepths and joining the finger extending from the sky. A darkening. And then, an island. Rising up, slowly, majestically, like a sea dweller coming up from the depths for air.

The place was named Ovarion after a meeting of the Bardic Council. Though the High Augur protested formally the use of what was, technically, a Singulone name, the Council over-ruled, finding Ovarion was a fitting and right name, after its bearer who fought honorably for the Mysterium during the Shape Wars.

Since this time, however, Ovarion had sat empty, as following the taboo after additive modifications are made to the landscape by the Changer. As the songs taught: On grounds newly laid, one must wait for the Dweller to enter the Palace. This dictum served a both potentiating mystical reflection on intent and purpose and an utterly practical use: in case the Changer should reappear and happen to change his mind, and reclaim what had been called forth. The songs told it had happened before, but not in recent living memory.

This knot made from two inter-twined ropes dates back to the ancient times when the Celtic sailors who spent long months at sea would remember their sweethearts and weave rope mementos for them. The sailor’s knot is actually two entwined knots and so, symbolizes harmony, friendship, affection and deep love. Denoting the union of two into one, the knot stands for the blending of individual lives into one with a common purpose. Though quite simple to tie, it is one of the strongest knots there can be and is representative of a bond that grows stronger with time and under pressure.

Source: Celtic Knots – History and Symbolism

An itinerarium (plural: itineraria) was an Ancient Roman road map in the form of a listing of cities, villages (vici) and other stops, with the intervening distances. One surviving example is the Peutinger Table (Tabula Peutingeriana); another is the Antonine Itinerary.

The Romans and ancient travelers in general did not use maps. They may have existed as specialty items in some of the libraries, but they were hard to copy and were not in general use. On the Roman road system, however, the traveller needed some idea of where he or she was going, how to get there, and how long it would take. The itinerarium filled this need. In origin it was simply a list of cities along a road: “at their most basic, itineraria involve the transposition of information given on milestones, which were an integral feature of the major Roman roads, to a written script.”[1] It was only a short step from lists to a master list. To sort out the lists, the Romans drew diagrams of parallel lines showing the branches of the roads. Parts of these were copied and sold on the streets.

Source: Itinerarium – Wikipedia