courage

The Spire sits at the heart of what, I am told, was the greatest achievement that mankind has ever achieved, a geomantic network which harnessed the power of the very earth to make everyone's lives better, so long as they lived close enough to one of our nodes. When it still worked properly, they said, it made the crops more bountiful, it calmed the earth and the sky--and those were, I'm told, just incidental benefits.

It doesn't do that anymore.

You can make it work. It takes time and work and dedication and it doesn't usher in the promised utopia, but it does mean you'll probably have enough food to survive the winter, and the monsters seem to stay away.

Oh right. Did I mention there are monsters? There are monsters. And the nodes that, I am told, once made us so great, seem to corrupt the land rather than blessing it, blighting crops and calling storms on a good year. Sometimes it kills: a slow plague sometimes, a sudden poisoning others. And sometimes it seems to work its way into the mind of someone who lives too close and it just . . . makes them their worse self. And everywhere, throughout the world, this is happening, because once, forever ago, we thought we could get away with it.

I've been studying it for a while now, since every time we talk about it, every time it comes up that this is our fault, that people are dying, that the earth is dying because of us, they deflect. "There's nothing we can do but try to improve things now," they say, every time. And, sure, we help a village here or there. But the blight is spreading faster than that.

And there is something else we can do.

I've been talking to this stranger who seems to know more about the system than the sages who still tend to it--or, perhaps, the sages hope nobody figures out the truth. Because all we have to do is rip the stone from the heartroom of the Spire, and the system will collapse, well and truly. The corruption will stop because it's the Spire that is corrupting everything. The city will be destroyed, of course, but the world will be free at last.

The princess tried to convince her father that we needed to do this, and he refused. She's been locked up in the palace, and they won't even let me visit. They're worried she might somehow convince me to do what we had already decided I'd do if her plan failed.

I'm in the heartroom now, along with the stranger. (I begged the stranger to leave but they wouldn't. They said this was what they had lived their entire lives for. Which seemed odd, but I'm not here to argue.) The sages were nowhere to be found, almost as if they knew what was coming, so together, the stranger's hand on top of mine, we wrest the stone from its socket.

And the world is swallowed in light.