31
No one is sure when exactly the events took place, another story that starts with 'long ago' and nothing else.
The content itself is more or less up for speculation than it is for fact. Mariners can only tell stories of what they think might have happened, inspired by the glittering scales of fish just beneath the surface of the water, the glint of light off polished block edges from the sea cucumbers that grow in clusters nearby the ruins.
Stories are rarely the exact same. Some think the glowing lights are spirits of the dead, phantoms doomed to remain in their cities sunk by angry gods. Others think it is the playful dolphins who were cursed, programmed by someone or something of immense power as some sort of punishment. Similar, and at the same time very different.
The sinful city is always a popular theme, usually greed that leads to treasure still hidden within the confines of granite and diorite, the only things left to mark the footprint left by these underwater settlements. This one detail became so widespread across different cultures and people that it drew out a breed of sailor who was more adventurous than smart. Too many times has a ship passed by a derelict vessel, only to find it has long since been deserted and the glint of polished stone far beneath the waves tell them the owner and crew will not be back to reclaim it.
The phenomena of stories and exploration stays alive, drawing only on shared musings over shining stones and the occasional success of someone infiltrating the desolate landscapes below to dredge up something from hidden decrepit chests of goods. A wave of adventure brought on by nothing more than folktales told by old seamen on docks around the whole of Minecraftia.
There is hardly truth in the matter, any and all documents lost to the test of time.
Creatures both bound to land and sea -living and dead- flit through ruins half-buried in the ocean floors now, and they will not know the truth. No one living thing remembers anymore the whats and whys and whens.
But the stone remembers. Crusted with saltwater between seams not moved for centuries or millennia, home to swollen water-logged zombies and fish that catch the light from above to trick the eye, they still hold the histories unheard and never recorded.
The stones remember better than anyone, even more ancient than the people who built the cities. From the time they were mined to when they were polished and carved. The clink of picks and full stacks of blocks being handed off to those who would build dazzling magnificence. The sound of tools finishing stone, shoveling coal into furnaces, the clack of stone meeting stone in intricate patterns to withstand the test of time. The roughened hands of constructors, placing and setting them, sinking them to build a better foundation for the weight above of their brethren and of wood.
The land was drier back then, raised above the sea level but still so near that the waves could be heard lapping on the beaches and against stone walls that kept the surf from eating the compacted dirt and sand of newly-founded harbors. Those came first, supports sunk into the waters to stabilize the wooden piers and platforms where buildings would grow on the wharf. Fishing was an abundant market here on the coast, supporting much of the economy that would be used to jumpstart development.
The roads that lead to the center of small fishing villages were dropped one block down, settled into shallow trenches to keep them from moving with the weather changes. Foundations for houses, the supporting beams for grandiose buildings to add structure and accent both, filled with wood and cornered with lanterns made from the sea. One storefront, two. One house, one block. Piece by piece, a small village became a town became a city, sprawling and encompassing.
The cities thrived, networked together with smooth roads that curved and coiled over the terrains to connect with other such cities in other such places. A crisscrossing network that shone like daylight after dark and kept the creeping monsters away. Trade was prevalent, carts and horses and caravans of llamas moving goods back and forth and with them went people. For a while, the world was almost utopic.
It takes a lot to build and maintain a city of any size, and the consuming of resources will evidently leave a void in the space around the hustle and bustle. Such was a catalyst that began the end for an island what supported four grand cities.
The stones felt it first, foundations sunk into the earth of land and sea noticing with shuddering anxiety the minute tremors that began, beneath them and distant at first. These were different from the usual activity of the populace above, and could stones speak, they might have warned those they supported of their worry. But stones cannot and do not speak to those who do not listen and cannot hear, so no one knew until the first hard tremor felled a general store in one of the much older cities.
Had it not destroyed lives as well as infrastructure, then maybe it would have been ignored. The devastation of the first real quake sobered people to their mortality, proving that it wasn't always mortal means that ended a paradise. Their attention was not only on the losses, but to the cause of it. While the masses mourned and buried their dead, councils were held within wooden walls bordered with solemn stones. They heard and maintained memories of the words and arguments that raged behind glass and wood, some saying nothing was wrong while the majority fought for their right to the reasons why. Eventually, the latter won out.
Four explorers were suited up accordingly, prepared for a journey into old abandoned mines where the epicentres of still-grumbling shakes were felt. The stones in the walls that kept the city safe and snug saw them leave the gates and down the road, whispered a silent farewell and good luck to them, and listened to their road-born brethren whisk them away to further places out of their ethereal gaze.
The stones cannot talk to those who cannot read the retained code in them, as meshed and woven with them as their BlockIDs are. If they could, they would transcribe what happened beneath the topmost layers of dirt and sod, told to them from their raw brothers down below. A tragic recount, to be sure. A horrible accident.
The explorers went far from the city, to such a point not even the side-line haze could reveal vague outlines and shapes. The mines were a fair distance outside to keep common folk from falling into accidental holes. Of course, these caves and mines had long since been abandoned, stripped of anything useful and closed as the miners who worked the land here moved on to provide for their city. After a day of preparation to meet whatever lived in those tunnels, they entered them at the main entrance.
Old maps helped them navigate the winding corridors, held aloft by groaning aged wood supports. Surprisingly, nothing but bats frequented the shadows below-ground, but they did notice with increasing nervousness the sound of rushing water and the weighty moisture in the stifling air. Eventually, they made it to a point that not even the bats would follow and spawn, for good reason. They turned the last corner to come face to face with an awesome and terrible sight.
For those in Minecraftia who have never seen a curtain of water, it can be a monstrous sight to behold. This was what the explorers came upon and beyond it, a vast and awful void. Checking the map, they determined it to be beneath their fair coastal city and if their guesses were correct, also beneath a good portion of their island nation. Guess were all they had for even though they knew they were near their hometown, the walls and floor and ceiling of the immense chasm before them could not be seen.
While they debated what to do in dim torchlight, a cracking crumble that reverberated through the water was heard. Splashing noises echoing, and when they looked, a blinding beam of light illuminated a pinprick of space in the cavity, enough to see blocks sinking through the water at a distance with something a little more worrisome. A cart of goods was in the chasm, though no outline of people with it was a small relief. Another crack, more blocks fell and the ground opened up a little more above, light spearing through the gloom.
The addition of natural lighting did little to soothe the explorers' fears in seeing the void lit for the first time, and in their horrified awe, they realized the stone that was supposed to support the ground above had eroded away to gravel over time, likely from the constant battery of the water below. Now, a combination of natural corroding and the constant of noise echoing almost tangibly in the airspace above, the crumbled gravel was falling away in chunks. The quakes were making sense now, but the revelation was short-lived as the edge of the tunnel they stood on crumbled away with their combined excess weight and swept one of them into the watery maw of the earth.
They watched helplessly as their companion was tossed by an unseen current around and up toward the nearer skylight, a bigger hole that was now surrounded by the wavering outlines of people peering cautiously into the abyss. They saw him kick and swim, regain himself and make his way up to the surface. Then they heard him yell, a garbled warning to evacuate the city.
Breaths held as the echoes faded, muffled to his companions still in the caverns below. The world was still. Silent, waiting. The crack that came next was loud, overpowering even the ambient rush of water. The cascade of the gravel layer was heart-stopping, the cacophony of crumbling snaps and splashing as the blocks hit the surface of the water in that vast and terrible void displacing roiling waters so that the dry caverns that surrounded it were injected with seawater and filled almost instantly.
Five sinkholes opened within a day's time, three days after their explorers left to find the source of their recent disasters. Several small quakes had been felt in those three days, but the last brought many more. The stones whispered silent warnings, sagging with the loss of support beneath them and then falling unceremoniously down into the yawning abyss below.
A food cart on the edge of the market square was the first victim of the last day, falling into a hole a few blocks wide that had no visible bottom and emitted the deafening echo of rushing water. People crowded around to see the hole, and when someone else mentioned another one opening that was decidedly bigger, they moved to that one instead for a view of what lay under their feet.
As they stared into what looked an endless gulf of water, a familiar face popped up unexpectedly. One of the crew they had sent out to investigate, though the look of panic on his face and the yelling cry to evacuate changed relief to fear. People scattered, heeding the call and spreading it as best they could, unaware that they were already out of time.
There was a resounding crack!, one that could be heard above the activity of the alarmed population. The ground rocked violently, sagged downward at the loss of the gravel layer that had helped keep them precariously supported for decades. The seams between blocks began to give way, a fissure slicing through the center of the city, pulling the rest of the now-unsupported ground with it. The city, magnificent and gleaming in the sun and moon, collapsed with a collective shriek of its people into the boiling torrent below. Any who managed to survive the fall and float were met with falling masonry as the last edges of the city were dropped, entire chunks of city blocks falling whole and sinking.
The first abundance of light to touch the cavern below in decades played spotlight to a horrific scene, people and structures and luxuries floating as one, being pulled down in an overpowering current one and all with no hope of escape. In less than an hour, a grand scale of life and achievement was silenced forever and set events into motion that would guarantee the people of the first city were not alone in their requiem.
The fissure traveled, an insatiable monster. Chasms and abysses both man-made and natural honeycombed across the island nation collapsed, put under strain by the first sinkhole falling. Vibrations destabilized carefully-balanced rock and dirt, cracking and plunging into cavities of their own.
The finely-planned network of highways played appetizer to the beast that chased weight like a dog chases a bone, and before nightfall, another city had fallen into yet another sinkhole that left a handful of survivors staring traumatized into ground that was no longer there. Entire chunks of island crumbled and disappeared into a gush of water pouring in from the broken harbors of two cities, covering shattered livelihoods and extinguished lives crushed beneath fallen structures.
By morning of the next day, the third city had fallen completely, swirling into a maelstrom eddy from a drain that emptied into the Voidspace beneath bedrock. By evening, barely a sixteenth of the fourth survived, built on the very edge of the cavity that stole friends and family from them. In little more than two days, a nation that took centuries to build was gone, reclaimed by earth and water.
Only then was the eldritch abyss' hunger slaked.
That is what the stones would tell, leaving tales of mysticism behind. A story of arrogance and also of ignorance. Their recollections are fleeting, not knowing what happened to those who survived, a few straggling ruins pocked here and there on beaches where the island once sat to show anything was there at all, the rest covered by water.
Bodies disappear, wood dissolves. But stones do not.
Stones hold secrets. That is their treasure when their history lies forgotten.
The content itself is more or less up for speculation than it is for fact. Mariners can only tell stories of what they think might have happened, inspired by the glittering scales of fish just beneath the surface of the water, the glint of light off polished block edges from the sea cucumbers that grow in clusters nearby the ruins.
Stories are rarely the exact same. Some think the glowing lights are spirits of the dead, phantoms doomed to remain in their cities sunk by angry gods. Others think it is the playful dolphins who were cursed, programmed by someone or something of immense power as some sort of punishment. Similar, and at the same time very different.
The sinful city is always a popular theme, usually greed that leads to treasure still hidden within the confines of granite and diorite, the only things left to mark the footprint left by these underwater settlements. This one detail became so widespread across different cultures and people that it drew out a breed of sailor who was more adventurous than smart. Too many times has a ship passed by a derelict vessel, only to find it has long since been deserted and the glint of polished stone far beneath the waves tell them the owner and crew will not be back to reclaim it.
The phenomena of stories and exploration stays alive, drawing only on shared musings over shining stones and the occasional success of someone infiltrating the desolate landscapes below to dredge up something from hidden decrepit chests of goods. A wave of adventure brought on by nothing more than folktales told by old seamen on docks around the whole of Minecraftia.
There is hardly truth in the matter, any and all documents lost to the test of time.
Creatures both bound to land and sea -living and dead- flit through ruins half-buried in the ocean floors now, and they will not know the truth. No one living thing remembers anymore the whats and whys and whens.
But the stone remembers. Crusted with saltwater between seams not moved for centuries or millennia, home to swollen water-logged zombies and fish that catch the light from above to trick the eye, they still hold the histories unheard and never recorded.
The stones remember better than anyone, even more ancient than the people who built the cities. From the time they were mined to when they were polished and carved. The clink of picks and full stacks of blocks being handed off to those who would build dazzling magnificence. The sound of tools finishing stone, shoveling coal into furnaces, the clack of stone meeting stone in intricate patterns to withstand the test of time. The roughened hands of constructors, placing and setting them, sinking them to build a better foundation for the weight above of their brethren and of wood.
The land was drier back then, raised above the sea level but still so near that the waves could be heard lapping on the beaches and against stone walls that kept the surf from eating the compacted dirt and sand of newly-founded harbors. Those came first, supports sunk into the waters to stabilize the wooden piers and platforms where buildings would grow on the wharf. Fishing was an abundant market here on the coast, supporting much of the economy that would be used to jumpstart development.
The roads that lead to the center of small fishing villages were dropped one block down, settled into shallow trenches to keep them from moving with the weather changes. Foundations for houses, the supporting beams for grandiose buildings to add structure and accent both, filled with wood and cornered with lanterns made from the sea. One storefront, two. One house, one block. Piece by piece, a small village became a town became a city, sprawling and encompassing.
The cities thrived, networked together with smooth roads that curved and coiled over the terrains to connect with other such cities in other such places. A crisscrossing network that shone like daylight after dark and kept the creeping monsters away. Trade was prevalent, carts and horses and caravans of llamas moving goods back and forth and with them went people. For a while, the world was almost utopic.
It takes a lot to build and maintain a city of any size, and the consuming of resources will evidently leave a void in the space around the hustle and bustle. Such was a catalyst that began the end for an island what supported four grand cities.
The stones felt it first, foundations sunk into the earth of land and sea noticing with shuddering anxiety the minute tremors that began, beneath them and distant at first. These were different from the usual activity of the populace above, and could stones speak, they might have warned those they supported of their worry. But stones cannot and do not speak to those who do not listen and cannot hear, so no one knew until the first hard tremor felled a general store in one of the much older cities.
Had it not destroyed lives as well as infrastructure, then maybe it would have been ignored. The devastation of the first real quake sobered people to their mortality, proving that it wasn't always mortal means that ended a paradise. Their attention was not only on the losses, but to the cause of it. While the masses mourned and buried their dead, councils were held within wooden walls bordered with solemn stones. They heard and maintained memories of the words and arguments that raged behind glass and wood, some saying nothing was wrong while the majority fought for their right to the reasons why. Eventually, the latter won out.
Four explorers were suited up accordingly, prepared for a journey into old abandoned mines where the epicentres of still-grumbling shakes were felt. The stones in the walls that kept the city safe and snug saw them leave the gates and down the road, whispered a silent farewell and good luck to them, and listened to their road-born brethren whisk them away to further places out of their ethereal gaze.
The stones cannot talk to those who cannot read the retained code in them, as meshed and woven with them as their BlockIDs are. If they could, they would transcribe what happened beneath the topmost layers of dirt and sod, told to them from their raw brothers down below. A tragic recount, to be sure. A horrible accident.
The explorers went far from the city, to such a point not even the side-line haze could reveal vague outlines and shapes. The mines were a fair distance outside to keep common folk from falling into accidental holes. Of course, these caves and mines had long since been abandoned, stripped of anything useful and closed as the miners who worked the land here moved on to provide for their city. After a day of preparation to meet whatever lived in those tunnels, they entered them at the main entrance.
Old maps helped them navigate the winding corridors, held aloft by groaning aged wood supports. Surprisingly, nothing but bats frequented the shadows below-ground, but they did notice with increasing nervousness the sound of rushing water and the weighty moisture in the stifling air. Eventually, they made it to a point that not even the bats would follow and spawn, for good reason. They turned the last corner to come face to face with an awesome and terrible sight.
For those in Minecraftia who have never seen a curtain of water, it can be a monstrous sight to behold. This was what the explorers came upon and beyond it, a vast and awful void. Checking the map, they determined it to be beneath their fair coastal city and if their guesses were correct, also beneath a good portion of their island nation. Guess were all they had for even though they knew they were near their hometown, the walls and floor and ceiling of the immense chasm before them could not be seen.
While they debated what to do in dim torchlight, a cracking crumble that reverberated through the water was heard. Splashing noises echoing, and when they looked, a blinding beam of light illuminated a pinprick of space in the cavity, enough to see blocks sinking through the water at a distance with something a little more worrisome. A cart of goods was in the chasm, though no outline of people with it was a small relief. Another crack, more blocks fell and the ground opened up a little more above, light spearing through the gloom.
The addition of natural lighting did little to soothe the explorers' fears in seeing the void lit for the first time, and in their horrified awe, they realized the stone that was supposed to support the ground above had eroded away to gravel over time, likely from the constant battery of the water below. Now, a combination of natural corroding and the constant of noise echoing almost tangibly in the airspace above, the crumbled gravel was falling away in chunks. The quakes were making sense now, but the revelation was short-lived as the edge of the tunnel they stood on crumbled away with their combined excess weight and swept one of them into the watery maw of the earth.
They watched helplessly as their companion was tossed by an unseen current around and up toward the nearer skylight, a bigger hole that was now surrounded by the wavering outlines of people peering cautiously into the abyss. They saw him kick and swim, regain himself and make his way up to the surface. Then they heard him yell, a garbled warning to evacuate the city.
Breaths held as the echoes faded, muffled to his companions still in the caverns below. The world was still. Silent, waiting. The crack that came next was loud, overpowering even the ambient rush of water. The cascade of the gravel layer was heart-stopping, the cacophony of crumbling snaps and splashing as the blocks hit the surface of the water in that vast and terrible void displacing roiling waters so that the dry caverns that surrounded it were injected with seawater and filled almost instantly.
Five sinkholes opened within a day's time, three days after their explorers left to find the source of their recent disasters. Several small quakes had been felt in those three days, but the last brought many more. The stones whispered silent warnings, sagging with the loss of support beneath them and then falling unceremoniously down into the yawning abyss below.
A food cart on the edge of the market square was the first victim of the last day, falling into a hole a few blocks wide that had no visible bottom and emitted the deafening echo of rushing water. People crowded around to see the hole, and when someone else mentioned another one opening that was decidedly bigger, they moved to that one instead for a view of what lay under their feet.
As they stared into what looked an endless gulf of water, a familiar face popped up unexpectedly. One of the crew they had sent out to investigate, though the look of panic on his face and the yelling cry to evacuate changed relief to fear. People scattered, heeding the call and spreading it as best they could, unaware that they were already out of time.
There was a resounding crack!, one that could be heard above the activity of the alarmed population. The ground rocked violently, sagged downward at the loss of the gravel layer that had helped keep them precariously supported for decades. The seams between blocks began to give way, a fissure slicing through the center of the city, pulling the rest of the now-unsupported ground with it. The city, magnificent and gleaming in the sun and moon, collapsed with a collective shriek of its people into the boiling torrent below. Any who managed to survive the fall and float were met with falling masonry as the last edges of the city were dropped, entire chunks of city blocks falling whole and sinking.
The first abundance of light to touch the cavern below in decades played spotlight to a horrific scene, people and structures and luxuries floating as one, being pulled down in an overpowering current one and all with no hope of escape. In less than an hour, a grand scale of life and achievement was silenced forever and set events into motion that would guarantee the people of the first city were not alone in their requiem.
The fissure traveled, an insatiable monster. Chasms and abysses both man-made and natural honeycombed across the island nation collapsed, put under strain by the first sinkhole falling. Vibrations destabilized carefully-balanced rock and dirt, cracking and plunging into cavities of their own.
The finely-planned network of highways played appetizer to the beast that chased weight like a dog chases a bone, and before nightfall, another city had fallen into yet another sinkhole that left a handful of survivors staring traumatized into ground that was no longer there. Entire chunks of island crumbled and disappeared into a gush of water pouring in from the broken harbors of two cities, covering shattered livelihoods and extinguished lives crushed beneath fallen structures.
By morning of the next day, the third city had fallen completely, swirling into a maelstrom eddy from a drain that emptied into the Voidspace beneath bedrock. By evening, barely a sixteenth of the fourth survived, built on the very edge of the cavity that stole friends and family from them. In little more than two days, a nation that took centuries to build was gone, reclaimed by earth and water.
Only then was the eldritch abyss' hunger slaked.
That is what the stones would tell, leaving tales of mysticism behind. A story of arrogance and also of ignorance. Their recollections are fleeting, not knowing what happened to those who survived, a few straggling ruins pocked here and there on beaches where the island once sat to show anything was there at all, the rest covered by water.
Bodies disappear, wood dissolves. But stones do not.
Stones hold secrets. That is their treasure when their history lies forgotten.
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and thanks for the fave and diamond; it's really appreciated.