The Arrival to Puerto da Gaula
The leaves whose dew had suckled the crackle of an autumn sun upon the flagstones of an old homestead now lay behind me, upon the border betwixt wrath and dread, in a land with no name.
I crossed the Valley, a long divide that runs through the nameless land from north to south, following a path without track or bearing. I paid due reverence to His Majesty the Río Grande, and recited the litany:
Thou shalt die. Many times. All kin die at the selfsame hour, yet they are not buried at the selfsame time. All kin die somewhere along the road, yet their graves are dug at the end of it. The first death is in the heart, and at times it lingers long before coming. The last death finds thee when it whispers that thy journey is done. Upon the road, through this nameless place, it shall grant thee brief glimmers of fair melancholy. Upon the road, through this place so familiar yet faceless, thou shalt dig thine own grave. Keep thy strength, wanderer, for thy dawn is not yet come. Keep thy strength, wanderer, for the day shall come when thou shalt kneel before her. Before Her Majesty, the Río Grande.
After some weeks I contrived to scale the howling walls of Cordura, until at last I fell spent upon its summit, upon an immense meadow beset by dense woods along the brink of the ravine. The passage carried on toward the Cayena Sea, a salt flat amidst ruddy sands upon a high plateau of snow and buried tears. These heralded the coming of the marshlands of La Chene: stifling, inhospitable, and labyrinthine.
I kept in my memory the perfidious thorn of not having profaned with my worm-eaten boots the lands of Guijarro, of not having wrought ergodic pages of writing from that clay and gravel country bathed in the pitiless waters of our Astro Rey—the land of no hearth.
When at last I departed the Land Without Name, that galleon upon the narrow waters set sail toward an isle I knew only by its ties to the Fifth Regiment of Master Elisabat. Thus it was that I came upon the shores of a land—the Realm of Calafia—yet to be built, where artifacts still lay waiting, where legends and histories remained untold, and where, above all else, there were still games.