The Edge of the Old World

"Tahvin..." I could hear my mother calling to me from my parents' bedroom. "Come here."

Freezing immediately, I stared down at my pre-calculus homework. Letters and numbers made equations that generated answers on the page, but none of them could tell me what I was being summoned for. I hesitated for several seconds, fearful of sitting up from my desk and walking to the familial courtroom that awaited my arrival.

"Tahvin!" She then screamed at me.

With a slam of the pencil down, I leapt from my desk as though an electric shock had awoken my legs, while in reality, the terror of disobeying my parents caused them to tremble with fear. Crossing the space and opening the door, I stepped out and immediately went through the open threshold that led to their massive room. There, I saw my mother propped up in bed with her maroon robe hanging over her shoulders and my father already lying in bed, half asleep.

"Sorry, Mom," I replied respectfully as I placed myself at the foot of the bed, awaiting trial. "I was doing homework."

She held up a hand to silence me as her vision narrowed with a glance to the edge of the bed.

"What are those?"

I followed her eyes, glancing to the side at the pair of white, sporty Rene Brand shoes that I owned. Inspecting them, I tried to understand where the conversation was headed and what the lecture would be.

"They're my shoes?"

"They're ruined!" She screamed at me. "What did you do to them?"

"What do you mean, ruined?" I panicked, reaching for the shoes and examining them.

Looking over the leather, I inspected the alligator logo on the side, the fine stitching, and the gently worn tread on the quality shoes. That was when I saw it. The left toe of the shoe had a scuff, no larger than a nickel, but enough to have worn the leather down to a matte texture.

"I-I-I, mom, I'm sorry I—"

"You ruined your expensive shoes at tennis practice!"

"I didn't have my tennis shoes, and I thought that these would work fine because—"

"Unacceptable!" She screamed at me. "Your father works hard every day to pay for your schooling and the nice clothes you wear. And you disrespect us by ruining the things we buy you?"

"I—"

"Tahvin, you're a disappointment!" Her words cut into me. "How could you be so irresponsible? It's not just this, either. Your grades are slipping! I see that you got a B in your math class and that you were written up for not properly tucking in your shirt! Are you trying to spit in our faces? This rebellious attitude won't do!"

"Mom, I—"

She sat up in the bed, pointing a sharpened nail at me as her words became venomous.

"Enough. I've had enough of your excuses. You're grounded. No friends. No television. And absolutely no video games! If I hear that television on in your room, we will rip it from the wall, do you understand me?"

"Yes, Mom," I spoke softly, shrinking away so as not to upset her further. "I understand."

"Now leave and close the door on your way out. I expect your grades to improve and for your next tennis matches to be a blowout!"

"Yes, Mom," I whispered with a slow, retreating step. "I understand."

Exiting the room, I gently closed their door before entering my safe space and doing the same. As quietly as possible, I placed my back to the door and slid to the ground. Stiffling a sob, I pulled my face to my knees and quietly cried. I choked on the pain, knowing that if they heard me, I would only be in more trouble. 

She always knew the right things to say to make me feel like a disappointment and a failure to them. No matter how hard I tried, all it took was a small slip-up to attract her scorn. And now, because I had forgotten my tennis sneakers one time and scuffed my dressy athleisure shoes, I was without any form of joy or entertainment until I raised my grades and won every tennis game.

"It's not fair," I whispered, voice inaudible to even my ears. "It's not fair that I can't have at least something. I wish the world would just explode already so I could be free. Be free to—"

And then the thought hit me, as I rested my head on my knees and looked over at my computer. The answer to my pain. The way to release myself from the torment. And all of it without playing a single first-person shooter or real-time strategy game or needing another soul but myself.

That was the day that I turned a hobby into a passion. The day that I opened the blank document and typed the first words into it. It was the moment Esseria was born.

—ooo—

With a gasp, I awoke to the faint beginnings of morning light sneaking through the canopy of my tent. Touching my chest, I slowly calmed my breathing as I attempted to work through the memory. While it had been a long time since that trial, the terror of mistakes still haunted me, and I could tell that this memory had come to me only after my repeated failures thusfar on the adventure.

No more mistakes. I told myself, thinking of my mother and the harsh things she had told me. I don't want to let the triop down like—no, scuffing a shoe is not something to be screamed over.

Lately, as the dreams and memories had more often plagued my sleep, I had begun fighting back. Trying to talk myself through the trauma that had afflicted Tahvin and slowly broke him down into the shell of a man he had become. If they were going to return to me whether I liked it or not, I wouldn't let them control me as they had back then. After all, they at least were coming back in a trickle of trauma and not a flash flood.

Touching at my calming heart, I breathed again and looked at the top of the tent. At least I remembered something important from the most recent memory, and that was the day my adventure in Esseria began. Born of trauma and agony, I slowly built the world I travelled.

And I'm—I'm not him. Not anymore. I'm Ishara. New me. New world. New legacy. So let's get started with this dungeon dive.

Drawing back the flap of my tent, I emerged to the campsite to find Aesandoral and Rionriv already sitting around the flickering embers of charred logs. They both turned to me as I appeared, with Aesandoral flashing a smile my way.

"Morning." She spoke, looking over to the pot of stew. "Breakfast?"

"Morning," I replied, and slowly approached the duo. "Yeah, that would be great."

A moment of silence settled between the three of us as Aesandoral prepared my meal. Then, without warning, Rionriv turned towards me.

"You were whining in your sleep." She spoke plainly. "Do you do that regularly?"

"I...I don't know?"

"Well, it sounded bad. You sure you're up to this? Not going to crash out on us, are you?"

Silent for a moment, I took the meal from Aesandoral and stared down at the bowl of congealed stew. Taking a bite, I let the hodgepodge of flavours assault my taste buds before swallowing the food down.

"Yeah," I replied to Rionriv, flashing as confident a smile as I could manage. "I've got this. Where's Sharzin?"

"Right beside you." She suddenly spoke up.

"GYAH!" I cried out, nearly dropping my bowl. "Sharzin! Not first thing in the morning."

The three laughed at my terror before joining together for breakfast. We finished the meal from the night before and then quickly deconstructed our camp. Packing everything away under the cover of twilight, we began our march towards the dungeon entrance as the sun began to peek over the horizon.

We reached the edge of the cave mouth where our dungeon dive was set to begin just as the sun broke over the distant horizon. And once there, as the others examined the space, I took a moment to look east and marvel over one of my favourite creations in this world.

The Broken Shard Sea was a nearly two-hundred-mile-diameter crater mostly filled with sand and a few desolate desert outposts. At the center of the treacherous, hostile landscape was a mesa that towered proudly. This obelisk was once the grand mountain city of Westerriton, a beacon of mortal innovation and magical creation second only to the First City created by those who would call themselves Divine. Three thousand years ago, during the Great Cataclysm, in a fit of rage, the Gods razed the city so thoroughly that all that remained was a crater and a remnant.

This forsaken land was a beautiful sight, probably more to me than anyone else in this world. But I felt this way because I understood the complexity of its history and, what's more, knew what secrets remained hidden within that remnant. Ancient arcanotech, alien and more advanced than anything Esseria wielded at present, still lay dormant at the heart of that desert—technologies that would change this world. Contraptions that made my heart race at the mere prospect of one day accessing. But before I could do that, I would first need to complete this quest and befriend the remnant's future leader.

“Oh wow, is that it?” Rionriv gasped.

I turned to face the direction the girls were looking, expecting them to be marvelling at the desert. But I was wrong. Instead, they glanced south, towards the ridgeline of this crater and where the Fallen City of Talir’sahn stood. No longer a city, this graveyard was now nothing more than ruins and rubble used by merchants passing through to the desert villages or soldiers transporting dangerous prisoners to The Kiln, a maximum-security prison hidden deep in the scorching sands.

Talir’sahn had once been a peaceful nation aiming to recreate Westerriton's technological superiority. They only engaged in the Two-Generation War to stop the conflict between Anak’hati and Sutin’eli. Unfortunately, with their advanced weapons and strategy, they soon found themselves labelled the aggressor. It was only after years of conflict and tens of thousands dead that the city fell, and the war ceased. This was not because of actual peace or resolution, but due to fear of mutual annihilation. The war stopped because of the weapon used on the forsaken city we now stood above. A device so powerful and so destructive that Talir’sahn and its residents had all but been eradicated in a flash of light. In a single evening, the equivalent of an arcane nuclear bomb wiped them out. 

Mostly.

Rumours were that the Fallen City was eternally cursed by the angered souls of residents lost that night. But I knew that these were mostly false. While ghosts wandered the area, lost without a purpose, most of the dangers came from the contaminants and mutated beasts still left over from the devastation. Creatures like the chimera and potentially whatever had taken its place at the bottom of the dungeon.

“That’s it,” Sharzin acknowledged. “Looks like what they taught us in class.”

Though the triop also wasn’t looking at the skeletal remains of ancient buildings, but instead the massive, faintly luminous dome that shielded a fifth of the city under a pearlescent curtain. An impenetrable bubble put up at the end of the war by one of Talir’sahn’s greatest Generals that, for a hundred and fifty years, has stood unbroken.

“What is it, Iz?” Aesandoral asked with genuine curiosity.

“What?”

“The shield? You know, like, everything from the past, right? So, what is it?”

“The time dilation effect of a reality-breaking chronomantic spell. In fact, it’s the only one of its kind. The shield is a bubble of space-time that separates our reality from theirs.”

“And what does that mean?” Rionriv questioned with a huff. “Please, in the common tongue for us non-oracles.”

“For us, a hundred and fifty years have passed since the bubble appeared. For everyone inside of it, it has been less than a second. No one can enter because the different states between our reality and theirs would tear us apart.”

The three, understandably, looked at me with bewildered gazes. The chronomancers Esseria had seen in its thirty-thousand-year history were limited to a small handful numbering even fewer than S-Rank heroes. This was a direct result of chronomancy being more scientific than arcanum. And, historically, when Esseria drifted too close to technological advancement, the Divinity-that-was liked to appear to knock the mortals down a collective peg.

“They’re alive in there?”

“Eh, more like frozen in a moment, waiting for someone to press play on the tape.”

“Again, with the weird nonsense.” Rionriv shook her head before directing her attention to the cave mouth behind us. “Well, it's officially morning...”

“Agreed,” I replied and gripped my quarterstaff tight. “Enjoy this view. It’ll be the last glimpse of daylight for a few days.”

Taking a final moment to appreciate the world, we looked each other over before moving towards the secret entrance to the facility. As I turned to leave, I stole a final glance at the desert and fallen city, taking the last deep breath of fresh air I'd have for a while.