A lot can happen in a thousand years.
Once upon a time, when the veil between the worlds was thin, it was an everyday occurrence for otherworldly creatures to wander onto our plane of existence. Magic and wonder touched our lives, giving rise to our myths of sparkling Fae paths, nymphs, divine oracles, and celestial dragons. Darker things came through, too, glimpsed in tales of Fae bathing in human blood and monstrous serpents gnawing at the roots of the world. We knew how to deal with spirit-creatures and nightmares back then. The solutions were encoded in symbolism and mythic narratives, embedded into our oldest stories: how to bind demons, how to exorcise phantoms, how to appease the guardians who defend the gates between this reality and the next and guard our world against horrors unimaginable.
So the veil between the worlds thickened, and otherworldly visitations slowed to a trickle. A Guardian was appointed to defend the gates, to be replaced every thousand years.
A thousand years is a long time, though. Plenty of time for the old truths to fade into legends, and even those, barely remembered. Enough time to forget.
Maybe that’s why there were no omens to warn us. No portents, no prophecies.
That night, you came home from work, or classes, or another long day on the merciless streets. You turned off the computer, or you plugged your cellphone into its charger. Tomorrow would be another day. You’d fall into bed, the lights would go out, and you’d wake up tomorrow with your life set on repeat. The usual routine.
Your dreams, however, had other plans. Or, it was something bigger than your dreams: processes first set into motion at the dawn of time, cosmic machinery that has ground on through the ages and remembered what we’ve forgotten.
You know this much: our world had a guardian, once, to patrol the boundaries that locked the nightmare creatures of the other planes outside. That guardian has been slain. They can tell, the primal horrors of our ancestral memory, entities of unending malevolence and consuming appetite. They’ve gathered where the veil is thinnest, poking, prodding, clawing, looking for a way through. If the veil falls– well, that’s encoded in the old stories. There are myths about wolves devouring the sun and corpse-goddesses reigning over frozen planes of eternal agony. However, there are other myths, too: stories of human heroes harnessing the power of gods and nature, performing heroic deeds and crafting miracles.
The veil between the worlds is tearing. You may be the last, desperate hope for its repair– or the herald of its destruction and a new age.
NOTE: Each character also stars in a one-on-one game that tells the story of his/her waking life. Links below!
Alcippe: https://storium.com/game/the-veil-is-tearing-alcippe
Araceli: https://storium.com/game/the-veil-is-tearing-araceli
Daniel: https://storium.com/game/the-veil-is-tearing-daniel
Hosted and narrated by:
Chip (JackOfTheLighter)
Started 07/22/14.
Scenes played: 2
License: Community License
