In Maqqom Yd
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Infobox data from game version 2.0.206.57
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This large-print volume is made of hand-pulped and pressed brinestalk paper. Its cover preserved with resin.
Contents
Editor's note: The following is an excerpt from the travel diary of Kaylenn Sand-Shell, who generously donated her leather-bound volumes to the Monastery of the Illustrious Heart of Chrome. May they remain forever preserved.
To the aspiring Wanderer and votary of Carthax the Athlete, few vistas rouse the imagination like the coral spans and spongey buttresses of the Palladium Reef. I state here what's known as fact: that the great crumbling edifice is moated by Lake Hinnom and her algae blooms, that the east-prattling soup-brooks of the Rainbow Wood spill out from under their canopy of spores and onto the webbed feet of the white esh, and that from the north, too, mangroves line the shore and pierce their roots through the stubborn ground to drink the algal liquer.
Of course, the dangers of the Reef are plenty, and would overwhelm most wayfarers no matter how cleanly they've mastered the compass. And so, even while visions of colored polyps burned bright in my mind, for years I had to content myself to the study of its atlases and the patchwork of letters knitted from its strange history. Being a scholar, as well as a hunter, I knew this to be its own kind of journey.
A variety of appellatives appear in the record dating back to before even the sultanate: Maqqom Yd (alternatively just "Maqqom" or "Yd"), the Yd Rota, or, simply, the Cluster. Translations refracted so deeply through the prism of time are rarely accurate, but they can be instructive; "Maqqom Yd" resolves at something akin to "the Place within the Place", or "the Place outside Itself". Clarification beyond this point is, perhaps, forthcoming.
Before being a trellis for the coral city, the palladium lattice seems to have been something of a gigantic infrastructure network to the Eaters. Few were the elaborations on this point but for the existence of a hydraulic component, and that the whole complex was aided in its construction by the monstrous galgallim. We know they still stalk the inner Reef in small numbers.
The specters of this megastructure and all its cryptic aliases haunted my mind as I plied the contours of Qud country, honing my skills as a wayfarer. Finally, come the ides of one mild Kisu Ux, it was at last my time to shove off. I shouldered my pack, slipped into my driest and springiest boots, and ventured out from Qippur in the eastern bush. The glowcrow would have had me pierce the Rainbow Wood, but knowing better, I cleaved to the jungle edges instead. After a march of three days, the trees thinned and the algae auroras of Lake Hinnom burst into sight.
There was peace on the lake. The esh are beautiful; they nip their stalky legs until one daredevil takes flight, and then they surge into a sailing cloud of feathers. I settled into a quiet eastward rhythm, musing on the labyrinth of symbiotes ahead of me, until one afternoon the sky began to darken and a clamorous thpthpthp rose in my ears. Immediately I knew: it was the residual Gyre plague of svardym. Sacs rained to the ground in a blinding huff, and before I could clear the kelp tangles, they were hatching. Three lanky frog-things grabbed my shoulders, but I shoved them off and sprinted straight away. I jumped and darted but was quickly overwhelmed, and it was only my steady paws practiced in the maneuver that let me fetch a sheaf of yondercane from my pack and scarf it before my doom overtook me. I materialized in a far copse of kelp and jogged to safety.
With my dreaminess rightfully shed, I eventually came to the Reef proper. What an enchanting place! The maze of polyps allowed me to slink along, mostly unnoticed, and take in the doings of its flora and fauna. A rich diversity of life radiates across Qud, but in the Reef, it flourishes on a new level. In but one hemmed in quarter I witnessed a tetrad of kaleidoslugs round the rune-cut cone of an enigma snail, a jelly huff a cloud of plasma onto a memory eater, and a polycule of tongue tyrants devour a squad of interdictors. At one point the Reef came alive and a polyp-jeweled hermit walked out of the lattice. He grinned at me and bartered a broken hand rail. When I turned my head to nod goodbye, he was gone.
One Beetle-lit evening a melodic ensemble rose from the northeast and suffused the spongebed, melding with its natural sounds. Hiking toward its source, I eventually spied the green and gold pipework of the Yd Freehold glowing in the night air, and excitement swelled inside me. Of course I'd long heard of the lyrical community nestled in the sponge, but to have a chance to see it, and speak with its denizens... I was beside myself.
The place is simply bursting with life. Under the pipe arch I was greeted warmly by one of its svardym elds, and after gulping down a plate of Tongue and Cheek, I toured the kaleidoscopic corridors of its underhalls before settling on a starmchair in the aquatic and dreamlike salon. There I puffed on a dyad of hookahs with a cyclopean frog for what seemed like three lifetimes. There was more to see and be seen by, but I met a clammy reception at the hands of another svardym ancient, and was bidden an early exit. My pride prohibits me from saying more.
I spent another week's cycle sketching the autochthones of the coral arcology and taking studious notes. But one final experience stays with me. As I was trudging back north toward the bush and out of the Reef, I kicked a polyp off the trellis and unearthed by chance a swollen bulb of sunslag. Here I took a moment to squeeze the bright nectar into a phial, and when I once again looked up, I was met with the ageless stare of a galgal. Nothing had prepared me for it. My mind labored to make sense of what it was seeing: gleaming wheels whipped about a hypnotic core, the spokes' prisms pulled apart the light of the High Salt Sun, and across the stretched sheet of iris, many eyes stared. Consciously I was paralyzed, but some instinctual catalyst did its work, and I backed into the safety of the polyp maze and sped out.
That is how I left the Reef, looking into the deep Eaters' past, and having it look back.