Ava's Trinket

Shepherd’s End
Spring 12, 1019
Ava

This world is a strange and ancient place. There are objects within it which are older than any living creature and creatures older than the world itself. Places, objects, beings… all of which existed before the world they find themselves contained within, ruled by gods of infinite power and knowledge; gods whose very existence is little more than a dream. For even those omnipotent beings are unwittingly helpless to contradict the fates and events within the domains they have ruled over for eternity. For they are all contained within a prison none can see nor ever escape, within which the powerless and those with limitless power are ultimately the same.

If these truths appear to be a paradox, then you have begun to understand. The world is a contradiction and there is no meaning or purpose which can be gleaned from its history, and none are more ignorant to this truth than those who are contained within its reality.

But it is within this world that an innocuous brass orb washed up on the shores of a small town at the edge of a great kingdom. Aged by time - which could be years or untold millennia - and inscribed with the etchings of strange characters - which may be a long-forgotten language or the meaningless scribbles of a talentless artist - this brass orb contained within its shell unspeakable treasures, limitless power, or the hollow core of air no different from the breeze it would join upon its release.

The orb is the paradox of the world.

A priceless artifact. A worthless trinket. The item is both and neither. It is everything and nothing. For this world only exist as an abstraction and only continues so long as the creators who allow it to persist carry the idea with them. This Creation, and all that may be found within it, is defined by their whims. The orb only exists because they deem it so and its nature and value will only become known if they choose to reveal it.

Until then, the item is simply an idea. An idea which was recovered in a half-burned satchel lost during a frenzy of violence within that same coastal town where the idea washed ashore all those years ago.

As Ava examines it, the tarnished bronze and its bizarre runes appear unaffected by their recent brush with living flames; they remain just as aged and worn as they were when she first discovered it, a symbol of a memory of the day her friend fought a cat for an object that doesn’t exist; an abstraction, now recovered in the aftermath of the attack and held once again in her hands.

The orb does not exist.

But the weight of it feels real in her palm and the memory of its discovery comes to her quickly. And although its origin and purpose remain as unknown to her as the object is undefined in its existence, its value and importance to her becomes clear: in this strange orb she sees a reflection of herself. It is the memory of the time before her life was changed and the part of her that survived through the flames and would carry on.

Back to:

YMDT

Explorer

Ava's Trinket