by Cinnabar » Sun Aug 04, 2013 10:00 am
It is hard to convey the scope of the Pit to one who has not seen it with their own eyes. Two miles across, six hundred feet at its deepest, Golben is a vast bowl which torments perspective. On his first visit it had been a desolation of broken stone, the bedrock in some places subjected to unimaginable violence - shattered, jagged fragments ranging from the size of a fist to the size of a house; in others it had softened under unthinkable heat, wrenched and warped into unsettling spires as it cooled. Nothing would grow there, no animal would abide it, the stones themselves infused with whatever horrors were unleashed in the pit's creation. A landscape of nightmares.
Now, it is... something else. Something shaped, planned, imposed. From at the brink he has a view across the entire crater, from the bare stone of the rim to the oddity that fills it far below. Some of the stone spires still leer from the bottom of the crater, but they do so from amid a sea of greenery. Trees. Hedges, league upon league of hedges coiled and tangled back and forth upon themselves. All groomed, cultivated, with little open spaces here and there that give it the impression of nothing so much as a park. With time it will likely become rampant and overgrown, the neatly-trimmed hedgerows ragged and blurred, the neat little lawns more like wild meadows. For now it is a singularly tidy thing for all that its design is a rambling madness, bereft of reason or order.
He has made an exploration of the circumference over the past few days; has picked through the remnants of a vast work camp, home to the veritable army of labourers who had toiled so far below. He has spoken with those who inhabit the farmsteads and villages nearby, who can tell him little beyond the fact that yes, a great many wagons came and went to the pit, and a great many people worked on it for a great many months. Foreigners, most of them; there were a few locals who went to work there, but they came back odd - forgetful, couldn't give a clear account of what had been going on down in the pit. They'd come back to their families glassy-eyed and addled, clothes filthy and hands bearing the marks of hard toil - those that came back at all, mind you. The wages were good, but not good enough for that, so not many of them stuck it out for long. Few weeks, month or two at a time, maybe.
He speaks with a few of those who'd worked in the pit, but they can't tell him much. Building. Digging. Nothing more specific than that. Something in the camp's water, maybe, or perhaps the beer or the food, dulls your mind and makes you forget where you've been. They've had a little time to discuss it amongst themselves, these hollow-eyed men, and they struggle with the sense of having brushed their fingers against something vast and terrible. Some stayed on for the coin, but they're not in much state to enjoy it now - that one, him over there, he's not been sober since he got back. And him, the fellow on his own there, his son stuck it out for longer than most; big strapping lad, stubborn as a mule, figured those as left the pit were just soft. Called them fools for turning down good coin. The boy's not been the same since he got back - whatever happened in the pit's made him simple, can't keep a damn thought in his head from one moment to the next. His ma's heartbroken, poor woman, and her husband's had a dark look about him since.
Nothing of use to someone who might venture into the pit itself, of course. Which leaves him with only the observations he might make himself.
A voice speaks like bells and thunder, a distant murmur across so great a distance; it rolls around the lip of the crater, echoes returning long heartbeats later from the sheer rock of the far side. A great presence departs in a blaze of un-light, and in the absence that follows the pit seems wider, emptier than ever it was before.
From across the pit drifts the sound of a horn, thin and frail in the dawn air after the majesty of that voice; should eyes seek it, they might be caught by a distant flash of light a third of the way around the rim, the low rays of the rising sun sparking from some polished surface.