Author's Preface
There is a great wealth of undiscovered things of our world's antiquity. Not all is as we presume it to be, and our recollection of an entire history of the world has its gaps. Though I am in no way qualified to fill those gaps for everyone, my prime attempt to at least warn the world of where the seams of our current principal antecedents lie is contained in this volume. Call it speculation if you must, but bear in mind it was I, not you, to find these things and tell them as I best interpret. An honor I shall delicately reserve for myself and my wife alone. Let the undiscovered rest where we disturbed them, and let my observations ring through the world to shape the best possible accounts to endure.
~ V.R.
Delight you now in the fruits of my travels and research:
The First Edition of a Work I am Exceptionally Pleased to be Our World's Foremost Presenter On
Eternal Indigo Sunrises
An Oceanic Take on Lathander
The Morninglord greets us with every sunrise, a scene depicted on every inhabited island in temples, artworks, and books, the lot. The golden colors are there for us to embrace the hope of a new day. It's poetic, and it would appear to be somewhat muddied in its history, not so pure a symbol as it may for its own sake hope. For, deep in ancient cave ruins I dare not pinpoint in a publishable manuscript, my wife and I have encountered armies of remnant skeletons, curious languages, bizarrely arbitrary puzzles, doors that seem to scoff at our very will to proceed, and this curious symbol painted on the floor of a chamber filled with bones and flowers. Proud at the foot of a beautiful, if inexplicable, mural, we see the sunrise of Lathander, made in pigment indigo as the waters that carried us to the first such cave of many we have touched and braved.
A Possible Defunct Epoch
Each time, the layout that takes us to this recognizable piece of antique reverent familiarity is similar, and through a door always in the same place to the right we find a room like this one. These sunrise symbols are there in every such room. I surmise the culture that made them must have been weak, panilian, and somewhat singular in purpose. Weak, for they chose to hide in small ruins rather than build larger temples or halls above ground. Panilian, for the wealth of territories myself and my wife have catalogued these sites beneath. Singular in purpose, for how tracelessly they vanished, seemingly once their sole purpose was met and gave them no more reason not to dissolve in so cryptic a manner.
To Touch That Past
Our history books likely forgot these people, whoever they were, and what I imagine to be a possible inter-faith role in spawning the movement that would stir the unifying efforts of the Lyndrake family. Their blend of religious traditions is foreign to us now because, under Avaloch, they had no means to renew their sense of purpose. The ruins we find their remnant in are small and scattered. Gold trinkets lie about in rooms that dazzle and disorient, and the air you breathe is as lifeless as our hope to learn anything substantive of the origins of these caves and their symbols. Absent any miracles in that department, I settle on my own theory of the history they represent. My honest curiosity, however, does not quiet itself so easily at that. I pen their record so these Blue Lathanderians at least may be known. Them and their flowers, to on the back of this record hide away from our annals as they presumably once did in a mysterious underground life.