Prologue
The void existed before time itself. It was a blank canvas. Always stagnant. After an eternity of darkness and silence, it suddenly had a thought. That thought was the existence of mana. It spread like ripples throughout the void. Being nothingness, it could not comprehend existence. Cracks spread through it and our world, Annaris, hatched into reality. So the stories say.
If you were to tell these myths of creation to the residents of Gladeside, they would instead wonder what kind of chicken would be large enough to lay an egg that big. If they could butcher it, it would be a large enough haul to keep them fed for many winters. Their population has always been small, constrained by the lack of food. It was a small, forgotten village. After all, no one in their right mind would settle in the cursed Bleakpeak mountains. There weren’t any roads passing through nor were there any flat lands nestled between them. There wasn’t any ore buried beneath them either. Yet, their ancestors settled there anyway, for who knows why.
But being small also had its advantages. They didn’t need a chief or a leader. The entire village was able to gather in the village square to make decisions. They didn’t need money either. No trader wanted to pass through the monster-filled forest to reach them. That’s why they just bartered with each other. In Gladeside, almost everyone was either a farmer or a carpenter, save for the priestess and the scout. Farmers tended to their crops and their animals whereas carpenters took care of the repairs or constructions around the village with what little tools they had in their possessions. Elias himself was a farmer, but he also filled the role of butcher. He hated his job. He was squeamish around sharp things after losing his father to an infected cut. But it was the profession of his family for generations, so he had to brave it out. There was only one girl in the village who was both unmarried and around his age. She was, in her own words, the ‘bravest scout of Gladeside’. That’s why he tried to ignore his fear. Alas, he wasn't that successful at it no matter how much he tried to hide it.
Elias might have thought of Lila as brave, but most of the villagers thought she was a bit crazy instead. Her mind was always in faraway lands and imaginary adventures. Her mother blamed his father for filling her head with stories of treasures and glory. She spent most of her time exploring the mountains, instead of looking for game to hunt or predators to chase away. But her explorations finally produced a result. She found a cave that even her father, Arsko, didn’t know about.
When she returned and informed the rest about finding a cave deep in the mountain range, it was met with concern instead of excitement. They feared that some aggressive monster might have dug out a lair for itself. It was enough to make Maya, the village priestess, personally go there to check the cave. After seeing the cave, she concluded that it would be wise to steer clear because she felt a strange presence as she stood in front of the entrance, most likely a wild beast or even worse, a monster, watching her. But this was not enough to dishearten the one who discovered it.
Young Lila has been going around the village and talking about the cave nonstop, even trying to convince Elias to come with her when she goes up there again, which was unsurprisingly rejected every time she proposed it. Unlike her, he had a healthy caution of things that could kill them. Ever since one of the carpenters went missing in a lumberjack run, everyone has been hesitant about going up to the mountains, much less a cave that was discovered less than a week ago. This was the difference between Lila and the other villagers. They were content to ignore it as long as it didn’t harm them.
You could call it courage or recklessness, but at its root, Lila just wanted to break out of her own egg. She was feeling trapped inside this small, stagnant village. That’s why she ignored all warnings from others and went back to go spelunking in that cave.
What she didn’t know was that everything was about to change. For better or worse, only time will tell.
