Origins: The Long Way to Loria
By Griswold Cain Β· 4/19/25
I did not set out to leave the world I knew. I set out to verify a footnote.
The note itself was unassuming, the kind of oddity that hides in margins where no one bothers to look. It mentioned a basin βwhere roots sing,β and credited an author I could not place. I copied it down, forgot it, and then found it again, and again, as if it had decided to follow me.
Back then, my days were filled with ledgers, and my nights with notebooks. Ledgers taught me to distrust mysteries. Notebooks taught me not to dismiss them. And when the same words surfaced across decadesβValemire, Underroot, TolmirβI began to suspect there was a thread worth pulling.
Most rumors scatter when chased. This one condensed. A battered travel pamphlet described a river that forgot its own bed. A flea-market chart bore coastlines corrected in multiple hands, as though the land itself kept moving. A binderβs invoice tucked in a cookbook carried a strange instruction: do not tamper with errata.
Then came the name. Osric Vale.
Valeβs book, The Drowned Atlas, was printed in 1927. Reviewers called it nonsense, but it did not read like invention. Its sketches were too precise: fungi drawn as if for study, tools designed to be mended rather than discarded, constellations no chart on Earth could place.
My copy carried an inscription: For those who travel patiently: the gate keeps its hour. Beneath it, a stamp from a long-defunct binder and an equation no science text could explain. Later, I would recognize the initials as moons: Talvaris, Cynvara, Orriven. At the time, I only knew the marks felt less like a dedication and more like instructions.
The trail of plain things grew stranger. A compass that refused north. A watch with no numbers that revealed, under warmth, a map of three points and a ring. A sliver of amber with a single spore sealed inside. Each item more improbable, each harder to dismiss.
Patience was the key, the old cartographer told me. βThis isnβt broken,β he said of the watch. βItβs a reminder.β
And so I waited. On the equinox, at the ninth hour past dusk, I stepped into a forgotten fort by the sea, carried the amber to a niche meant for it, and listened as the air thickened to storm. The floor shifted without moving. The world redrew itself.
The first thing I noticed was weight. Air heavy with intent, moss that gripped like rope, fog hung in ropes between trees taller than excuses. And above them: three moons, pulling shadows in three directions at once. The galaxy itself blazed so bright it seemed the night had forgotten how to be dark.
Frogs droned in chords. Insects plucked the air like strings. Water laughed to itself. It felt less like arriving in a country and more like stumbling into an orchestra mid-song.
I did not act like a hero. I stood still, said oh, and tried not to cry.
The days that followed humbled me fast. My fires refused to last. Paths changed shape while I slept. Hunger simplified me, fever stripped me down to the barest will to keep breathing. And yet, through that fever, I felt it: the hum beneath thought and soil. Not a voice, not a god, but presence. The same pressure I had felt beneath the old fort, only now it was everywhere.
I would come to call it the Underroot. I would come to realize it was less a thing to worship and more a neighbor too vast to ignore.
The Valemire educated me. Its reeds taught me which way water wanted to go. Its fungi taught me which warmed like a hearth and which ate you back. Its storms taught me to drift instead of carve.
I slept in trees that scolded when I shifted. I traded buckles for bread and learned that coin meant little, but baskets and patience meant everything. A woman with moss-stained hands nursed me through a fever and never once asked where I was from. Only whether I had sense enough to drink broth slowly.
The days stopped marching and instead began to pool, like water collecting in a low place. I stopped trying to measure time and began to measure attention. That was when the Valemire stopped treating me like a trespasser.
And then came proof: a cliff-face etched with the same seven-threaded sigil Vale had drawn a century before. Fiction was confession. His book, a breadcrumb trail. The world, a gate.
The months that followed did not answer every question. They only taught me to ask better ones. And to record them, plainly, before the swamp swallows them soft as sleep.
Years after I made my crossing, proof of another arrived in my hands. A shopkeeper who dealt in oddments passed me a bundle wrapped in oilcloth: a beige machine of plastic and wires, a modem with the voice of a gull, fragments of Earthβs late-nineties ingenuity that had no business in Loria. They said it came from a traveler before me, though whether he ever found his way back, I cannot say.
I spent years coaxing life from the wreck. Roots hummed where wires had rotted. Crystals, when warmed, carried current the way a brook carries 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, frogs went silent as the modemβs cry shivered the stilts of my hut. The machine had found its voice. By lantern-light I laughed like a man reprieved, because at last there was a way to send words outwardβto Earth, perhaps, or to whoever still listens in its quiet corners.
What you read here is the result. A repository, a ledger, an archive of Loria kept as honestly as I can. It is not sermon nor boast, only record. If the pages serve wanderers, dreamers, or those who delight in weaving stories from maps and rumor, 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 those who build worlds of their own, may they find in Loria a neighbor worth knowing.