Maelora69

Chapter Three: Never To Rest ‘Til Your Heaven Is Won The Near Now: March 2023 And so the company of tomb raiders descended into the depths. The corridor beyond the side arched off the main entryway was comparatively narrow, barely a hundred meters wide at most. It was just as tall, however, the ceiling rising far above them. It did not take Nisha long to discover the purpose of this otherwise empty side-chamber: each wall was covered, floor to ceiling, in beautiful, intricate murals. The back wall was covered entirely in a giant sunburst, hundreds of the same crystals that dotted the walls of the entry hall woven between the graven light-beams. The centre of the sunburst was only a dozen meters off the ground, oriented directly behind a massive, spherical gemstone, which floated free just above a tall, thin pedestal, in the same nested-diamond motif, spinning slowly in mid-air. The gem was nearly perfectly round, and had to be over six meters in diameter. Most of the gem was

Chapter Two: A Thousand Snake Mouths Open Wide The Near Now: March 2023 The expedition had come far from the banks of the Nile, from Mysterious Cairo, that bright glittering jewel of the desert, wicked and sinful and inviting. The Mysterious Lady had come seeking otherworldly riches – artefacts, mystical implements, any thing that fed her hungers for the hidden world of sorcery and spellcraft. And she cared little who had to suffer that she might slake that thirst. But this felt somehow different, she mused. If the rumours she had heard were true, they were the first – aside from the primitive tribals who called the Living Land home now – to know of the existence of this place. Her agents and intelligence operatives indicated that none among the squabbling Earth factions – the Reality Choir - knew of the place. The so-called ‘Wonders’ came and went with some frequency after all, some come and gone before word of them could get out. And the tribes guarded these places with fanatical

Chapter One: We Threw Away Paradise And All We Know Is We Dreamed It The Near Now: September 2022 It had once been called ‘America’, but now the tribes who inhabited its ruins called it ‘Takta Ker’ – the Living Land. In the depths of the verdant jungle that had once been Earth-realm’s mightiest nation, the land seethed with life, nature red in tooth and claw. Life came at you quickly here, the twinned cycles of predator and prey, new lives born from the deaths of the old. Pregnant with possibilities, new forms of existence came into being, hybrids of creatures that could not exist in other worlds. The Land shaped you into your idealised self – strong, swift, vital, sexual – or it destroyed you and swallowed you whole, and your essence fed the stronger life-forms that feasted upon your remains. At the heart of this strange, primeval world, was the Goddess, known by the saurial Edeinos and humans as ‘Lanala’. She was a part of her creation – she wandered through it, at one with it