PrinceCon XXV - Save the Worlds
The Tale of Hardak
Hardak cast his mind back over the ruins of his world. The blowing sands of Amarna fired to a smooth obsidian plane. The eight towers of Kaspelheim, Jewel of Cities, collapsed into a demon pit. The wooded hills of Shalomar sunk beneath the cold encroaching sea. His world swept clean by elemental blasts from some unknown, dispassionate force oblivious to the cries and prayers of the dead and dying.
He alone escaped the end of his world. The rising waters forced Hardak to the mountains, to contend with flows of lava and melting glaciers. A rift in the ice had exposed a section of the colonnaded white temple. The presence of the building had troubled Hardak's mind, for the temple was clearly the work of skilled architects, but no men inhabited these frozen alpine wastes. Still, he had seen light emerging from the space between two pillars, and had stumbled through the opening, hoping to find other men.
And Hardak did find other men, but not in the temple. The portal did not lead inside, but to a island - a grassy island, surrounded by an empty void. Hardak stumbled from his world out between the columns of another white temple. He noted another temple beside the first. Then Hardak, exhausted, lay in the warm grass and slept.
When Hardak woke, he found others on the island. Many, like he, were refugees from the deaths of their own worlds. They gathered in a old Alchemical Laboratory, the other building on the island, a short walk from the twin temples. There were not only men, but the beings of legend - elves, dwarves, fey, even short beings with furred feet and strange otterlike creatures, and some sort of talking deer. They wore all manner of clothing - togas, cloaks, armor, even gaudy tight bodysuits, or next to nothing. And they spoke of all manner of disasters - fire, flood, famine, wars, pestilence, earthquakes, armies of monsters, clouds of pollution, and something called nuclear annihilation.
But the dispossessed did not speak only in laments their lost homes -for some here hailed from worlds that were in peril, but not yet destroyed. They spoke boldly of finding ways to stave off catastrophe, or of finding new homes for their people.
Hardak knew that is was too late to save his world or his people.
It might not be to late to save others.
