Origins: The Long Way to Loria
By Griswold Cain · 4/19/25
I did not set out to leave the world I knew. I set out to verify a footnote.
Back then, my life was divided between the ordinary and the impossible. By day I worked in ledgers and invoices—numbers, deadlines, polite half-truths. By night, I filled notebooks with maps that didn’t exist and symbols no one had reason to draw. Curiosity, I told myself, was harmless. Harmless, but patient.
The first mention came in an old naturalist’s index: a basin “where roots sing.” The author was untraceable, but the phrase lingered. It turned up again years later—in a sailor’s log, a stained pamphlet, and a letter folded into a secondhand atlas. Each time it appeared beside three names: Valemire. Underroot. Tolmir.
At first I thought it coincidence. But curiosity, like mold, thrives in damp places.
The pattern deepened. A torn travel brochure spoke of a river that forgot its own bed. A hand-corrected map showed coastlines drawn and redrawn as though the continents themselves had shifted.
An old bookseller in a dying strip mall pressed a cracked journal into my hand, saying it “smelled like somewhere else.” Inside was a name—Osric Vale—and a title: The Drowned Atlas.
Vale’s book, printed in 1927, was dismissed as nonsense, but it read like fieldwork. His sketches were too precise, his inventions too practical. I found my own copy in a bin marked “Occult Ephemera,” the pages smelling faintly of brine. Inside the cover: For those who travel patiently: the gate keeps its hour.
Tucked in the binding was a card from the same strip mall’s bindery—long since closed—with a sigil of three interlocked circles and the faint outline of moons.
That began the year of the hunt.
I traced every rumor I could find. A compass that refused north. A watch whose face revealed, when warmed, three glowing points in orbit. A sliver of amber holding a single living spore. Each artifact felt like part of a language I almost understood. The deeper I dug, the more it felt as if something—or somewhere—was digging back.
When I returned to that abandoned mall, I found every store stripped bare but one: the binder’s. Inside, only mildew and silence. A table. The amber fit perfectly into a shallow niche carved into its surface. I remember thinking the groove was too smooth to be human work.
I don’t remember placing my hand on it, but I remember what came after: air thickening, the hum beneath my bones, and the sudden sense that the world had folded—not away, but through.
The first thing I noticed was weight. Air heavy with intent. Fog hanging in ropes between trees older than history. And above them: three moons, tugging shadows in opposite directions.
Frogs sang in chords. Insects trilled counterpoint. Water laughed to itself. The land felt awake, its breath moving through every living thing.
I did not stride forward. I stood still, said oh, and tried not to cry.
The days that followed humbled me quickly. Fire refused to catch. Hunger simplified me. Fever nearly claimed me. Yet through it all pulsed a rhythm beneath the soil, an awareness vast but gentle. Not a god, not a voice—simply presence.
Later I would name it the Underroot, though naming it felt like calling a mountain by its shadow.
The Valemire taught me how to stay alive. Its reeds showed me which way the wind intended to move. Its fungi taught me which burned bright and which burned back. I bartered with marsh-folk who spoke in proverbs and brewed their water twice. A woman with moss-stained hands saved me from fever, saying only, “Drink slow. The world’s patient—you should be too.”
Time lost its edges. Days pooled instead of passing. When I stopped counting, the land stopped resisting. That was when the Valemire ceased to treat me as a trespasser.
Months later, I found proof of Vale himself—a cliff carved with the same seven-threaded sigil drawn in The Drowned Atlas. Fiction was confession. His book, a map. The world, a gate.
The mystery I’d chased for half my life had simply turned and swallowed me whole.
Years passed. My journals multiplied. Then one evening, a tinker in the trade-village of Harrow Fen sold me a bundle of Earth-made relics: plastic, wire, and dust—remnants of a world that had forgotten me. Among them, a modem.
It took years to coax the thing to life. Roots hummed where wires had rotted. Crystals carried current like brook water carrying rumor. I bartered with tinkerers wiser than I, grafted fungus to circuitry, lashed reed-cords to brass, and argued with the Myrrhn itself until the pieces agreed to speak.
One night, the frogs went silent as the modem’s cry shivered the stilts of my hut. The machine had found its voice. I laughed by lantern-light, because at last there was a way to send words outward—to Earth, perhaps, or to whoever still listens in its quiet corners.
What you read here is the result: a ledger of Loria, kept as honestly as I can. Not sermon, not boast—only record.
If these pages serve wanderers, dreamers, or those who build worlds of their own, so much the better.
I write to remember. I write to repay what has been shown to me.
And if my words stumble into the hands of another traveler,
may they find in Loria a neighbor worth knowing.