My primary continent is based on the general lore and environment of various ancient Mesopotamian dynasties and empires. In no way is it meant to be historically accurate, but I thought it would be fun. I had wrote a bit of story for flavor with the in game books, but decided to write it out a little more. Here tis. Let me know what you think, I may be posting more chapters soon.
1
It was a summer's day, the harsh rays of the sun tore over the fields of Eridu and across the back of Ulen. It had been three days and he had ventured long across the Akkadian dunes with his faithful ass in tow, Don Quixote. The nights were bitter cold, the days mercilessly hot. The desert was clearly a place fit only for merchants and madmen. Eridu was different.
Ulen felt the sun to be just about as spiteful here as in the vast emptiness of Akkadia, but somehow, the foreign vegetation held on under the solar tyrant. It was crumbly, dusty in places, crunched beneath his feet, and gave way to cracked mud here and there, but certainly held on. Here and there tiny natural ponds sat. Strange beasts unperturbed by Ulen's passing collected here, and Ulen did not approach. These great meaty hulks and shuffling creatures, dined on a hundred times, were unnerving met up close, and did not stir while Ulen refilled his waterskin. The grass was more pleasant near the ponds, and under the shade of the occasional grey barked trees. The great garden's of Uruk's palace seemed at once more meaningful, and sillier, with the endless fields of green and crumbling yellow of Eridu.
Ulen leaned his walking stick against one of the crooked grey trees for a moment, untied Don Quixote's lead for a moment to allow him to browse. The beast may have been excited to browse the wild greens, but the beast never showed anything, merely carrying out tasks with a resigned dispassion. Many farmers and caravaneers cursed their asses for their stubbornness, but it seemed Don and Ulen shared an understanding.
From the beast's saddlebag, Ulen retrieved a map. He drew with a stick in a dusty patch, calculating the factors of his journey, judging his direction, his time spent. He was not the ablest traveler but he judged himself with a fair degree of confidence to be in the midst of the known territory of the Lem tribe. He sought the tribe, who's mark he shared on his ankle. He sought his origins.
---
He had a good life, home in Uruk. He had even acquired the favor of Sargon, and shared with the nobility the wealth and privileges of their class. He could never be designated a true noble, as his blood excluded him from the distinction, and instead had earned the title of King's Own. His home was made in the palace, his window overlooking the great hanging gardens, where the poets looked for inspiration and the mystics spoke to Gods.
It was in these gardens he was found as a babe, by a priestess of Inanna. Eanna was barren, and it was her skill as a scribe that allowed her to retain her position as head priestess. She was the best and the fastest in the palace, favored by Sargon, and secretly despised by the jealous lower priestesses, who had all labored with births as a result of Inanna's rites. The role of High Priestess was an embodiment of the second of Inanna's phases, mother, and former priestesses nursed children even as they spoke to their faithful. The jealous among them whispered that Eanna was only befitting of Inanna's third... the *****.
Ulen had been a gift from Inanna herself to Eanna, who's credibility was challenged more each day. Eanna could finally be a mother. At first the priestesses laughed and ridiculed Eanna for the son she claimed as hers, a tiny dark skinned creature, plain to anyone as the spawn of the savannah tribes of Eridu, Eanna thought her position as the royal priestess was over, until the Head priest of Enlil, father of civilization, and wise men of Nabu, bringer of wisdom, hailed her as the purest example of Inanna. Godess of love, who's love extends to all, who is the mother of the motherless, the mother of us all. The priestesses had then felt shame at their transgression, and honored the pair, who had remained graceful whilst they had disgraced themselves. Though she loved him the moment she found him, Eanna's bond as mother to the strange child was now unbreakable.
Ulen spent his days as a lad exploring the vastness of the palace, the gardens, and playing with the royal children. He was novel and beloved by all of the palace. Outside of it's walls, the people of Uruk traded captured savanna nomads as slaves, and it's foundries and refineries ran on the sweat of the cheap labor. Lesser nobles built empires on their conquest of minor territories and the enslavement of their peoples, justifying these atrocities with false reports and the culture of the commons. As much as it disgusted Sargon himself, it was their "ancient right", and to outlaw it would only incite anger and push the slavers deeper underground. The palace had to lead by example, and beloved little Uruk was such an example.
Uruk was made to participate in the education of the young princes, princesses, and high noble children. Unlike his peers, his lessons fascinated him, and he took to learning eagerly. When Eanna found his room littered with tablets near a small pile of dust, she knew he too would become a scribe. She praised him for his practice of the cuneiform characters, and had to remind him to be polite and ask before taking chisels and tablets.
As Uruk began sprouting his first meager beard, he was already a capable scribe, with the skill and swiftness of his adoptive mother. Already Sargon relied on him to compose palace correspondence. At his mother's urging, he became part of a priesthood as well. His gender prevented him from serving Inanna in any respectable capacity, but he studied Enlil's gift of civilization to humanity, and studied the rites performed to send the fallen peacefully to Irkalla for their final rest. He learned the importance of burial rights, the failure to properly release the dead resulted in their recruitment by Nergal. Many were the victims of Nergal's horde, the spawn of darkness. The foul soldiers ravaged the dunes and plains alike every night, making their home wherever darkness reigns. The only mercy Nergal knew as god of plague and war and husband to the queen of Irkalla, was the mandate of Shamash that his foulest spawn know annihilation from the sun's light. Nergal was forced to agree, but gained the sun's destructive capacity as his weapon...
It was that very weapon that killed the only mother Uruk had ever known. Atop the highest point of Inanna's temple, Eanna communed with her goddess. A sudden heat surge struck, and Eanna succumbed to heatstroke. The dizziness that followed worked her body against her, she tripped and plummeted from the temple roof.
In the catacombs of Ereshkigal's gateway to Irkalla, tears fell from Ulen's eyes as he prepared his mother for Irkalla. She had been good to Ulen, and his prosperity, he owed to her love.
Ulen's mind was a storm of questions, as the grief for his mother drove him to questions of his birth parents. Who were they? What life did they live? Why did they abandon him in this city, so far from the Savanna of their home?
One question was answered as Ulen made his way through the market for supplies. A lineup of dark skinned men in chains proceeded through the gates. It was not Ulen's place to do anything about the practice, though it made him sick. He imagined shackles around his own wrists, welts left by a driving whip, being driven over dunes like cattle, or being packed tight into a wagon that reeked of and human misery. Ulen turned away, but his eyes picked up something he could not ignore.
One of the slave men had a distinct mark upon his ankle, a sheperd's crook, and a bow. He realized suddenly, though he'd never seen this before, that all the nomads had such a mark. There were several different marks and this man was the only with this particular mark...
Which matched his own marked ankle.
While the slavers were busy talking to the guards at the gates, Ulen questions the dark skinned man. "Who are you?"
The captured man glanced briefly at Ulen before returning his gaze to nothing, staring directly in front of him. Ulen attempted to ask several more times but the man would not respond. Finally, in frustration, Ulen shook the slave about the shoulders.
"We have the same mark! The same mark! Where is it from! Tell me!" The slave's face registered a comprehension for a moment, and his lips parted as if to speak, only to shut, and for his face to return to it's blankness.
"Oi! Hands of, you!" The slaver readied his whip, about to crack this near noble citizen like one of the men he viewed only as profit. The guards grasped his hand before he could bring it down, and a struggle ensued. Two more guards came and grasped Ulen, who continued to shout at the chained man. As they drug him away, the slave turned to him and said just one word. "Lem".
Having explained his outburst to the guards, as well as his position, they let him go. They had no right to hold anyone of noble blood, or a friend of the king. Ulen spent the next weeks pouring over the library's meager charts and maps to learn as much as possible about Eridu and it's tribes, which had hardly been studied by anyone. Sargon himself way away on a journey to Lyonfall Isle, and had no need for his favored scribe. The mausoleum devoted to Ereshkigal had plenty of priests to perform the all too important rites, and Ulen himself couldn't bring himself to face another dead after the loss of Eanna. His only goal now was to find the tribe of Lem. He didn't know what he would do when he got there, or understand why it mattered. He knew only that he had to go.
-------
"Ow!!" Ulen was awoken by a yank to his hair, and a loud series of brays. He saw on the horizon the clouds were aglow with oranges and pinks, as Shamash relinquished the sky to Sin. Ulen cursed under his breath as he stood up, putting the map back in Don's saddlebag. His faithful friend had awoken him from the nap he had slipped into, but it was already too late. The land was darkening, and his shelter was not set up, nor his lights to keep the monsters away. He would have to press on through the night. From beneath his traveling linens, he produced a long dirk. More for defense against robbers, it would now be the tool of his survival.
"I'm sorry, friend" Ulen quickly mounted Don, climbing into the saddle. Don Quixote did not enjoy being ridden and would only tolerate it in circumstances such as this. He kept any protest to himself for now, understanding the implications of the dark. Ulen rode over to the tree and retrieved his staff, and pressed on over the dry grasses.
2
Already they were "spawning". It was understood that most of the dead did not wander from caves or places, but materialized out of the darkness itself under the eye of Sin. Ordinary spiders became beastly with dark energy. With every blink there seemed to be more emissaries of Ishkur. The bones and rotting hulks of the long dead roamed and wandered, unhindered, unthreatened. The dark was their realm and they turned their gaze, eyeless or otherwise, on the trespasser.
The rotten ones found him first, training their eyeless sockets on the pair as they approached. Ulen steered Don away from the danger, but Don already knew to steer from these creatures. The rule for underarmed travelers at night was to keep moving.
His staff in his right hand, Ulen jabbed at the shuffling corpses that neared too close. Knocking them off balance onto their backs or into pits and ponds. Mercifully, the condition of Nergal's most common footsoldier left them more frightening than threatening. Yet, if they caught you...
Suddenly a great weight dropped on Ulen from a tree as Don passed under, knocking him out of the saddle. The beast panicked for a moment, braying loudly as the fuzzy mass stabbed into Ulen, hissing madly. Ulen struggled and thrust his dirk desperately into the hulk, which screamed with injury. He became aware of blood between them and a horrible pain in his right shoulder as the many eyed beast met his shocked-wide eyes. It's many legs seemed to pin him to the ground, and the spider screeched into his face where he saw the stabbing mandibles that would soon gouge his eyes. Adrenaline surged and Ulen wrenched free his dirk wielding hand, thrusting upward into the creature's head with a roar. Foul ichor dripped from the critical wound, and with his legs and uninjured arm he wrenched the creature off of him and stood.
He rose to meet the eyeless, slackmouthed face of a corpse inches from his own.
Don Quixote came to the rescue with his mighty hooves, he crashed into zombie, knocking it to the ground where he then stomped it's rot-softened head into pulp.
Too shocked to feel grateful, Ulen immediately moved to Mount Don Quixote, when a feathered shaft appeared in his rump with a muffled 'thwump'. An ear-piercing bray erupted from Don's mouth, as the spooked beast tore through the fields away.
His best hope of leaving gone, Ulen turned to make his stand as another arrow whizzed past his ear. Atop a small hill, under a tree, a full skeleton of animated bones operated a bow with astonishing form.
Taking what was likely his only chance, Ulen let out a furious battle cry he would have never thought himself capable of, and ran full tilt towards the monster with his dirk in hand. Coming to the top of the hill just as the arrow was notched and drawn, Ulen lept with all of his might towards the monster, still roaring at the top of his lungs as if to intimidate the dead. The arrow left it's bow, the twang of the instrument rippling through the scream in the air...
Ulen collapsed upon the skeleton, dirk striking true, directly into the eye socket. The eerie dark light left the creature's empty eyes, and it collapsed into a pile of inert bones with Ulen atop, it wouldn't get up again.
Ulen rolled over onto his back and onto the dry grass. He also didn't get back up. He crawled over to the tree, and sat up against it, clutching his chest. The arrow caught him, and it was momentum alone that felled the monster. He was wounded, his vision grew hazy. He wiped the filth of combat from his face, gasping, adrenaline no longer surging, strength used up. He felt the wound, the arrow was deep, but the shaft had broken from the fall and there was no way to know how deep. Hearing the groans of the approaching dead, Ulen closed his eyes, and surrendered himself to unconsciousness.
1
It was a summer's day, the harsh rays of the sun tore over the fields of Eridu and across the back of Ulen. It had been three days and he had ventured long across the Akkadian dunes with his faithful ass in tow, Don Quixote. The nights were bitter cold, the days mercilessly hot. The desert was clearly a place fit only for merchants and madmen. Eridu was different.
Ulen felt the sun to be just about as spiteful here as in the vast emptiness of Akkadia, but somehow, the foreign vegetation held on under the solar tyrant. It was crumbly, dusty in places, crunched beneath his feet, and gave way to cracked mud here and there, but certainly held on. Here and there tiny natural ponds sat. Strange beasts unperturbed by Ulen's passing collected here, and Ulen did not approach. These great meaty hulks and shuffling creatures, dined on a hundred times, were unnerving met up close, and did not stir while Ulen refilled his waterskin. The grass was more pleasant near the ponds, and under the shade of the occasional grey barked trees. The great garden's of Uruk's palace seemed at once more meaningful, and sillier, with the endless fields of green and crumbling yellow of Eridu.
Ulen leaned his walking stick against one of the crooked grey trees for a moment, untied Don Quixote's lead for a moment to allow him to browse. The beast may have been excited to browse the wild greens, but the beast never showed anything, merely carrying out tasks with a resigned dispassion. Many farmers and caravaneers cursed their asses for their stubbornness, but it seemed Don and Ulen shared an understanding.
From the beast's saddlebag, Ulen retrieved a map. He drew with a stick in a dusty patch, calculating the factors of his journey, judging his direction, his time spent. He was not the ablest traveler but he judged himself with a fair degree of confidence to be in the midst of the known territory of the Lem tribe. He sought the tribe, who's mark he shared on his ankle. He sought his origins.
---
He had a good life, home in Uruk. He had even acquired the favor of Sargon, and shared with the nobility the wealth and privileges of their class. He could never be designated a true noble, as his blood excluded him from the distinction, and instead had earned the title of King's Own. His home was made in the palace, his window overlooking the great hanging gardens, where the poets looked for inspiration and the mystics spoke to Gods.
It was in these gardens he was found as a babe, by a priestess of Inanna. Eanna was barren, and it was her skill as a scribe that allowed her to retain her position as head priestess. She was the best and the fastest in the palace, favored by Sargon, and secretly despised by the jealous lower priestesses, who had all labored with births as a result of Inanna's rites. The role of High Priestess was an embodiment of the second of Inanna's phases, mother, and former priestesses nursed children even as they spoke to their faithful. The jealous among them whispered that Eanna was only befitting of Inanna's third... the *****.
Ulen had been a gift from Inanna herself to Eanna, who's credibility was challenged more each day. Eanna could finally be a mother. At first the priestesses laughed and ridiculed Eanna for the son she claimed as hers, a tiny dark skinned creature, plain to anyone as the spawn of the savannah tribes of Eridu, Eanna thought her position as the royal priestess was over, until the Head priest of Enlil, father of civilization, and wise men of Nabu, bringer of wisdom, hailed her as the purest example of Inanna. Godess of love, who's love extends to all, who is the mother of the motherless, the mother of us all. The priestesses had then felt shame at their transgression, and honored the pair, who had remained graceful whilst they had disgraced themselves. Though she loved him the moment she found him, Eanna's bond as mother to the strange child was now unbreakable.
Ulen spent his days as a lad exploring the vastness of the palace, the gardens, and playing with the royal children. He was novel and beloved by all of the palace. Outside of it's walls, the people of Uruk traded captured savanna nomads as slaves, and it's foundries and refineries ran on the sweat of the cheap labor. Lesser nobles built empires on their conquest of minor territories and the enslavement of their peoples, justifying these atrocities with false reports and the culture of the commons. As much as it disgusted Sargon himself, it was their "ancient right", and to outlaw it would only incite anger and push the slavers deeper underground. The palace had to lead by example, and beloved little Uruk was such an example.
Uruk was made to participate in the education of the young princes, princesses, and high noble children. Unlike his peers, his lessons fascinated him, and he took to learning eagerly. When Eanna found his room littered with tablets near a small pile of dust, she knew he too would become a scribe. She praised him for his practice of the cuneiform characters, and had to remind him to be polite and ask before taking chisels and tablets.
As Uruk began sprouting his first meager beard, he was already a capable scribe, with the skill and swiftness of his adoptive mother. Already Sargon relied on him to compose palace correspondence. At his mother's urging, he became part of a priesthood as well. His gender prevented him from serving Inanna in any respectable capacity, but he studied Enlil's gift of civilization to humanity, and studied the rites performed to send the fallen peacefully to Irkalla for their final rest. He learned the importance of burial rights, the failure to properly release the dead resulted in their recruitment by Nergal. Many were the victims of Nergal's horde, the spawn of darkness. The foul soldiers ravaged the dunes and plains alike every night, making their home wherever darkness reigns. The only mercy Nergal knew as god of plague and war and husband to the queen of Irkalla, was the mandate of Shamash that his foulest spawn know annihilation from the sun's light. Nergal was forced to agree, but gained the sun's destructive capacity as his weapon...
It was that very weapon that killed the only mother Uruk had ever known. Atop the highest point of Inanna's temple, Eanna communed with her goddess. A sudden heat surge struck, and Eanna succumbed to heatstroke. The dizziness that followed worked her body against her, she tripped and plummeted from the temple roof.
In the catacombs of Ereshkigal's gateway to Irkalla, tears fell from Ulen's eyes as he prepared his mother for Irkalla. She had been good to Ulen, and his prosperity, he owed to her love.
Ulen's mind was a storm of questions, as the grief for his mother drove him to questions of his birth parents. Who were they? What life did they live? Why did they abandon him in this city, so far from the Savanna of their home?
One question was answered as Ulen made his way through the market for supplies. A lineup of dark skinned men in chains proceeded through the gates. It was not Ulen's place to do anything about the practice, though it made him sick. He imagined shackles around his own wrists, welts left by a driving whip, being driven over dunes like cattle, or being packed tight into a wagon that reeked of and human misery. Ulen turned away, but his eyes picked up something he could not ignore.
One of the slave men had a distinct mark upon his ankle, a sheperd's crook, and a bow. He realized suddenly, though he'd never seen this before, that all the nomads had such a mark. There were several different marks and this man was the only with this particular mark...
Which matched his own marked ankle.
While the slavers were busy talking to the guards at the gates, Ulen questions the dark skinned man. "Who are you?"
The captured man glanced briefly at Ulen before returning his gaze to nothing, staring directly in front of him. Ulen attempted to ask several more times but the man would not respond. Finally, in frustration, Ulen shook the slave about the shoulders.
"We have the same mark! The same mark! Where is it from! Tell me!" The slave's face registered a comprehension for a moment, and his lips parted as if to speak, only to shut, and for his face to return to it's blankness.
"Oi! Hands of, you!" The slaver readied his whip, about to crack this near noble citizen like one of the men he viewed only as profit. The guards grasped his hand before he could bring it down, and a struggle ensued. Two more guards came and grasped Ulen, who continued to shout at the chained man. As they drug him away, the slave turned to him and said just one word. "Lem".
Having explained his outburst to the guards, as well as his position, they let him go. They had no right to hold anyone of noble blood, or a friend of the king. Ulen spent the next weeks pouring over the library's meager charts and maps to learn as much as possible about Eridu and it's tribes, which had hardly been studied by anyone. Sargon himself way away on a journey to Lyonfall Isle, and had no need for his favored scribe. The mausoleum devoted to Ereshkigal had plenty of priests to perform the all too important rites, and Ulen himself couldn't bring himself to face another dead after the loss of Eanna. His only goal now was to find the tribe of Lem. He didn't know what he would do when he got there, or understand why it mattered. He knew only that he had to go.
-------
"Ow!!" Ulen was awoken by a yank to his hair, and a loud series of brays. He saw on the horizon the clouds were aglow with oranges and pinks, as Shamash relinquished the sky to Sin. Ulen cursed under his breath as he stood up, putting the map back in Don's saddlebag. His faithful friend had awoken him from the nap he had slipped into, but it was already too late. The land was darkening, and his shelter was not set up, nor his lights to keep the monsters away. He would have to press on through the night. From beneath his traveling linens, he produced a long dirk. More for defense against robbers, it would now be the tool of his survival.
"I'm sorry, friend" Ulen quickly mounted Don, climbing into the saddle. Don Quixote did not enjoy being ridden and would only tolerate it in circumstances such as this. He kept any protest to himself for now, understanding the implications of the dark. Ulen rode over to the tree and retrieved his staff, and pressed on over the dry grasses.
2
Already they were "spawning". It was understood that most of the dead did not wander from caves or places, but materialized out of the darkness itself under the eye of Sin. Ordinary spiders became beastly with dark energy. With every blink there seemed to be more emissaries of Ishkur. The bones and rotting hulks of the long dead roamed and wandered, unhindered, unthreatened. The dark was their realm and they turned their gaze, eyeless or otherwise, on the trespasser.
The rotten ones found him first, training their eyeless sockets on the pair as they approached. Ulen steered Don away from the danger, but Don already knew to steer from these creatures. The rule for underarmed travelers at night was to keep moving.
His staff in his right hand, Ulen jabbed at the shuffling corpses that neared too close. Knocking them off balance onto their backs or into pits and ponds. Mercifully, the condition of Nergal's most common footsoldier left them more frightening than threatening. Yet, if they caught you...
Suddenly a great weight dropped on Ulen from a tree as Don passed under, knocking him out of the saddle. The beast panicked for a moment, braying loudly as the fuzzy mass stabbed into Ulen, hissing madly. Ulen struggled and thrust his dirk desperately into the hulk, which screamed with injury. He became aware of blood between them and a horrible pain in his right shoulder as the many eyed beast met his shocked-wide eyes. It's many legs seemed to pin him to the ground, and the spider screeched into his face where he saw the stabbing mandibles that would soon gouge his eyes. Adrenaline surged and Ulen wrenched free his dirk wielding hand, thrusting upward into the creature's head with a roar. Foul ichor dripped from the critical wound, and with his legs and uninjured arm he wrenched the creature off of him and stood.
He rose to meet the eyeless, slackmouthed face of a corpse inches from his own.
Don Quixote came to the rescue with his mighty hooves, he crashed into zombie, knocking it to the ground where he then stomped it's rot-softened head into pulp.
Too shocked to feel grateful, Ulen immediately moved to Mount Don Quixote, when a feathered shaft appeared in his rump with a muffled 'thwump'. An ear-piercing bray erupted from Don's mouth, as the spooked beast tore through the fields away.
His best hope of leaving gone, Ulen turned to make his stand as another arrow whizzed past his ear. Atop a small hill, under a tree, a full skeleton of animated bones operated a bow with astonishing form.
Taking what was likely his only chance, Ulen let out a furious battle cry he would have never thought himself capable of, and ran full tilt towards the monster with his dirk in hand. Coming to the top of the hill just as the arrow was notched and drawn, Ulen lept with all of his might towards the monster, still roaring at the top of his lungs as if to intimidate the dead. The arrow left it's bow, the twang of the instrument rippling through the scream in the air...
Ulen collapsed upon the skeleton, dirk striking true, directly into the eye socket. The eerie dark light left the creature's empty eyes, and it collapsed into a pile of inert bones with Ulen atop, it wouldn't get up again.
Ulen rolled over onto his back and onto the dry grass. He also didn't get back up. He crawled over to the tree, and sat up against it, clutching his chest. The arrow caught him, and it was momentum alone that felled the monster. He was wounded, his vision grew hazy. He wiped the filth of combat from his face, gasping, adrenaline no longer surging, strength used up. He felt the wound, the arrow was deep, but the shaft had broken from the fall and there was no way to know how deep. Hearing the groans of the approaching dead, Ulen closed his eyes, and surrendered himself to unconsciousness.
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Thanks for your feedback! I'll be sure to write more. Probably tomorrow.
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