Quartes took me to the end of the Four Provinces today.  We had reached the northern edges of Koril and from there we turned west.  My calves still burn from hiking up the foothills that extend north past the edge of the Hendarks.  I’ll admit that I had never travelled this way.  Everyone knows that the towers and forts of Koril mark the boundaries of lands held against Dragons and their kin, that the only people that wander out past them are the Riders of the Finnupave.

Well, them and a Landian and his Bard.

To say I was shocked, well I suppose it can join the many things that have shocked me over the last few months.

I knew they were wild lands…I just didn’t know that it was quite so literal of a term.  From the top of the hills, I looked west and where storms of both rain and dust didn’t obscure my vision the land heaved and seethed.  I watched what looked to be a grassy hill fall from until it was a valley, drawing in the waters of a nearby river or stream.  One of the storms rolled through at that point and hid the land from me but anywhere I could see the sight was the same.  I suppose I should be shocked that they appeared to stay grass covered fields but then again we’ve always known the land west of the Hendarks as the Finnupave Plains.  

Side note: Quartes insists I note that adding plains to Finnupave is a redundant as adding mountains to Hendarks, it’s apparently in the Landian name.

Quartes saw the chaos of the land, how dragonkin would multiple and spread from such chaotic and undefined places.  That without Landians and their memories that lands fell victim to uncertainty and chaos.  The grass thought made the bigger points for me.  It shows the power of how our stories can still control the chaos.  When I asked Quartes what would happen to the rolling land if he were to walk he answered that if it was a spot he had previously passed on it would return to its old nature.  I pressed him on new spots and he offered that in time it would likely settle and grow fixed as he remembered it.  He was quick to add that in either case dragonkin in the area would seek to repel him, making the trek dangerous.  One reason amongst many that he came here through the Hendarks and the mountain halls of his dead kin.

A Landian’s memory is a fixed thing unlike any of the other sentient people of Illithiust.  However, I can see other ways to fix things, just as the word plain has fixed grasses to this land.  If we brought a mapmaker with us, Quartes says they’re called cartographers, then we can make a record of the path we take.  A map cartographer talented in their craft would make something they are confident in.  That would shore up, help to fix the land, and only grow more confident as people made use of the map and travelled safely.  Something Quartes’ presence could help to ensure.  I think it would be slow going but it’s a way to make it work.  Further, there must be a way that the nomads of the Finnupave survive.  Quartes thinks it has to do with the Taikeets, the birds following some sort of migration pattern and that the nomad’s taming of the Taikeets is just as much about transportation as it is making the land safe.  I wonder if the Taikeets take their riders from one side of the plains to the other.  Do they see what is on the other side?

Quartes says that there are other people out there, on the other side.  Another coast and remnants of cities as old as those in the Hendarks.  People fighting their own battles for survival in a land consumed by chaos and Dragons.  I wonder what it would be like, for our disparate homes to come together.