After they charged through the Gate, they found no people yet, but a land that seemed quite promising. It seemed they had landed in a hilly, forested region, and they had to clear a number of trees in the valley the Gate had appeared in, setting up a camp as they sent out riders- whether on wyverns or horses- to scout the land. Some of the men were bitter about the absence of any loot straight out of the gate, but morale was still high.
The first to realize was a wyvern rider, whose mount sprung into the air so he could get the lay of the land. There were miles and miles of forest, stretching to the horizons like a carpet… and it took him a few moments of scanning the horizon to see it. Two great rises, one to the front of Gate below him and one to its rear. There was the vaguest hint of the horizon curving upwards...
And then night hit. The sun had not moved an inch in the sky, and yet its light began to darken… an eclipse seemed an inauspicious sign. Then he looked up. No moon was rectangular. Slowly, the rectangle- one of several- slid across the sun, as you might slide a shade over an open window.
With time, the sun's light had faded to a faint glow, peaking out from behind the rectangle… but in the absence of its light, he could see more. The stars spangling in the sky in almost every direction, of course- strange, strange stars, in constellations he had never seen- but he could see that the horizon did not just curve up.
What he had assumed to be two great mountains on either side of the gate stretched up and up, checkered by long strips of black… but the shape could still be traced until they vanished behind the sun- where they presumably met, an arch so terrible in size it went behind the sun.
The rider nearly fell off of his mount, and he was fairly certain he could hear panicked shouting below. He grasped his wyvern tight- the creature, for all of its cunning, couldn't recognize the madness he was witnessing.
In some ways, the world they had found themselves in was incredibly rich. There was all the land you could ever dream of, enough to grant fiefs for millions, enough to supply all the lumber a growing city could every need, enough to ride or sail for days on end… but as prospectors carved their ways into hills and mountains, they found something concerning.
If you dug deep enough, you found no metal or valuable materials save a silvery substance, almost completely frictionless and completely immune to almost every tool they could bring to bear. Slaves could hammer away at the material for days on an end and do absolutely nothing- they had some luck with magic, but even then they only carved off slivers. Slivers of a mass of practically invincible metal of unknown depth.
A few of the splinters- thin as whiskers and yet strong enough to hold a man's weight- were packaged, to be sent to the Emperor as tribute, but otherwise, the good news was the land. Scouting had revealed vast oceans of potable water, plains that stretched to the horizon, great mountains and vistas which made the heart thrill…
They had encountered only one city within a few day's flight of the Gate, and scouting had revealed the place to be a ruin. It seemed as if this land had held princes and lords with architecture to rival the great arch which sat above them in the sky- as it seemed this city had castles that once floated in the sky. The keyword being once. Whatever magics had made them float had failed long ago.
Some people lived in the city, eking out a living in the ruins. While the ruins they had inherited allowed them to field a fair defense, they were overwhelmed by sheer numbers, the might of armies with nothing else to do but crush them totally. They were quickly sent back as slaves or sent to work the same fields they had before- under new management, of course.
Still, their religious beliefs were popular. How could argue against the wonders worked by these Architects, when they had bricked off the sky itself?
Slaves from the Arch-world side of the Gate did not fare well on the other side- they stared up into the night sky with terror, fighting to comprehend a world where no arch bound the heavens, where their engineer deities had not worked.
Lelei La Lalena was disciple to Cato El Altestan. He was known by his nickname, now: the Mad Mage. The rumors all said similar things. He had gone through the Gate, to see the wonders beyond the other side, and had quickly gone mad. Which was, she supposed, true. Although after the revelation he had, it would be quite hard not to go mad, she thought.
There was, of course, the first revelation, the one that you never truly made until you experienced a night on the far side of the Gate. The Arch, the one that stretched far above them, far enough to even go behind the sun itself- some said that this sun hung suspended, like a chandelier, from the top of Arch. Like a lamp and its shades, they said.
It was her master who endeavored to understand the Arch, to measure its bounds and take its width. The question, of course, was how.
Their efforts involved any number of things. Counting the number of great rectangles which periodically blocked out the sun, giving some pale imitation of days and nights (Lelei missed sunsets, but not enough to leave this mystery behind). Wondering what the shadows meant, exactly, the way they sped across the land, the way they seemed to climb up the Arch…
It almost seemed to imply that the Arch was not as much an arch as it was a small part of a massive ring. Measuring the span of that ring was difficult- it involved several failed attempts at measuring the speed of the shadow cast by the great rectangles before they resorted to using geometry, measuring angles and degrees...
Perhaps they were missing some obvious way to measure the scale of the ring with the tools they had, but they could understand, vaguely, the size of the ring in ratios. By their measures, the ring's circumference, the whole length of it, was some six hundred times its width. And every time scouts came back with reports that the land just kept on stretching, they only increased their estimates. The scale was hard to grasp, the area held within the ring clearly more than a thousand Empires, a thousand of the continent the Empire sat on, even.
But her mentor's next thought was horrifying. A ring did not spring from nature fully formed, no? You did not see planets or stars shaped like rings, after all, barring the exception on which they stood. Knowing this, was it possible that the ring, so vast, was the work of an architect, as the natives believed? Of course, that architect could have been the Gods, crafting a domain for their people… but what of the failings?
The mountaintops where the wind had worn the stone away, leaving naught but the glimmering silver bedrock which the whole world sat upon. What deity wouldn't maintain their world? That seemed to imply that the ring had been abandoned- by architects who were, presumably, if not bored immortals, mortal.
What architect could craft such a wonder? What hammer and chisel, what forge? What mason or carpenter could lay the foundation for a ring with a circumference greater than a thousand day's riding?
Those were the questions that drove the renowned sage Cato El Altestan mad. The scale of it all beggared belief, barely seeming to fit in the mind, and the thought that anyone could build it… who wouldn't quake at the thought of such a maker? If they still existed, they would be to the Empire what the Empire was to the lowliest barbarian tribe.
And what would such an architect feel upon seeing that their creation was being trespassed upon?
Perhaps they were as thieves who had crept into a house, blissfully oblivious to the threat of the owner's return. Or perhaps not- the ring was already peopled, filled with successors to the architects, ones who could not dream of matching their skill. And that was a greater terror still. Because Lelei had seen what happened when taxes left a province but never came back in, when they were never directed to the maintenance of roads and bridges. The bridges wore away.
You could ford a river, or attempt to haul your cart through the wild. But what if the entire world were to break, to crumble like a house with poor foundations? There were already signs of wear...
Lelei took steps to move her (and her practically catatonic master) much closer to the Gate. Dealing with city-life was vexing, but she imagined it would be considerably more vexing to die.
Omake: Sunflowers
It was night when they charged into the field. On every side, great flowers stretched to the horizon, silvered blossoms reflecting both starlight and the reflections of light off of the Arch. Of course, they were so caught up in the wonder of that tremendous sight that they did not think much of the flowers, trampling over them as they sat up camp in slack-jawed amazement.
Unfortunately for them, as the great rectangle above them shifting off of the sun, the flowers began to move- for these were no normal flowers. Their silver blossoms were quite like mirrors, serving to focus light on a single point to be photosynthesized… but there were other things you could do with thousands, if not millions of mirrors.
When the sun began to shine in its full glory, the fields were suddenly filled with screaming as the plants moved, directing terrible beams of light at anyone unfortunate enough to be above the ground or not already through the gate. Tents were little more than tinder under that intense light- the generals cooked shortly after their soldiers fried. All of them died, of course, but heavy armor made it significantly more unpleasant.
In the Imperial Palace, a single silver blossom sat in the garden, a trophy of that doomed expedition to another world. Unfortunately for the people on that side of the Gate, that would not be the last flower of its type in their world.
