The first of three story seeds, these short stories are designed to compliment the mythos and atmosphere of Triptych without actually alluding to, or being a part of, them directly or their canon. The makers of Amnesia did this as well in PDF form post-release, so we took inspiration from them and thought we'd write similar short fiction. Two more pieces are to arrive before October ends.
The Moon
Only when it is waning upon the horizon on starless nights, pouring its pale beams over the ripples of the Nile, do the Sheiks whisper hideously of the Legend of the Moon. Sheiks whose curious ages are but a crease in time compared to the echoing void of life. Frigid winds poured over the mossy fields of the cooling earth whilst creatures of unnameable aesthetic crawled reluctantly into the Stygian tunnels and vaulted crypts of the Great Mountain, progenitors to the forms which grazed nervously from the vegetation soaked into the fibers of the fields. And from the oceans of time immemorial came the hum of pleased creators, with the echoing toll of bells from their temples signifying the dawn of a new age. The final gusts of the star winds swept over the vales of abandoned primordial cities whose inhuman secrets rested in peaceful ignorance. With their knees shaking as they felt ground beneath their feet for the first time mankind rose as the successors to the beings outcast into isolation since times long forgotten. Over the course of aeons man became a collective; forming tribes and settlements and congregations, seeking to worship the only thing they could see upon the sky worthy of their praise– the infantile blood red sun which soared the heavens in solitude.
The Great Mountain was silhouetted insidiously upon the horizon, rumored to be the prison of predecessors of man. Amorphous and without sight the remnants of the royal, the profound, the entitled, the noble and the proud of their kind crawled through the lichens of the earth and sapped the moisture from Precambrian stones and huddled together in absolute darkness, starved of warmth and of the sun which had now shed its bloodied form as it adopted the comfort of orange and yellow hues in accordance to the thankful host that worshiped it upon the Earth. And from the pores of the earth they who were doomed to rot eternally beneath humanity grew in contempt and in jealousy.
It is written in particularly sinister books as truth that from atop the very peak of the Great Mountain the forgotten ones made their announcement, their oath, that they would return some day and take all that they had been robbed of from the world of men and the creators who cast them aside. Upon this pledge there rose once again the cacophony of bells from the placid blue void, the hellish echos of judgment called out from the waves as the waters began to boil with the rage of displeased creators. Men watched in agonized horror as the whole of the Great Mountain was torn from the face of the horizon, lifted as a feather into the sky, only to be expunged effortlessly up into the indifferent void. Nothing remained of the civilization lost to time except their fate, and of the Great Mountain there remained nothing to prove it had ever been at all. As the sun retreated and the last of dusk bled into the starkness of evening there floated listlessly an unrecognized and foreign spherical dome upon the night sky compressed together as of from an immeasurable mass of dirt and rock.
And as their story concluded, and as the children pondered as their eyelids grew heavy, the Sheiks looked up with nervous apprehension upon the moon which hung somnolent against the weeping stars. Their oath to return was remembered, cursing the wise with another sleepless night.
