Valiance: Manifold Palace

Sand. All around is sand, golden and drifting, broken up by white-gleaming ziggurats and their sprawling cities picked out in azure and jade, by fallen tawny ruins, by precious expanses of pale green growth ringed around pools of sweet water dark as the eternal night above with its rippling sky-vault and great electrum stars. The Sage Princes gather their hosts, raise festivals, bar doors and great white walls against the sable-coated hunting cats that prowl, singing, in the night.

Sea. All is sea, wine-dark, flecked with waves and foam, filled with coiling glass-clear arms of deeply things and the swirling bronze shoals of long-finned swimmers, dotted here and there with islands and island-citadels of pale sandstone spotted with precious orchards from which the fleets of the Reaver Commons sail their uncountable ships beneath the endless day, that golden dome spotted with turquoise moons.

Between, the thinnest wisps of cloud and mist, and the cloud serpents, and the flocks, the bridges of birds, a riotous rainbow of wings that have no care for where they began, the sand or the sea. The messengers who cross that Fulcrum with far more ease than the great speckled wicker-ships, the shimmering fishscale-ships, of the endless battles of day and night as they wing across to clash and contest against each other for glory and for memory.

So it has always been, so it shall always be.

* balance * duality * questing * opposition * heroism * opportunism *