7th of July, 2022
[This is Not a Place of Honor]
This is […] a place of honour

This is Not a Place of Honor by Sea Change Games: A culture leaves warnings for the future, but over time the warnings break and their meaning mutates (note: written for 2–6 players, but I did this solo without the ritual elements).

This place is not a place of honour.
No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here.
Nothing valued is here.

This place is a message, part of a system of messages.
Pay attention to it!

Sending this message was important to us.
We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.

What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us.
This message is a a warning about danger danger.

The danger is in a particular location.
It increases towards a centre.
The centre of danger is here, of a particular size and shape.

The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.

The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place.
This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.

1: There was a scientific accident…
5: …characterised by a slumbering behemoth.

Phase 1: Preparing Defenses #

HEADS HEADS HEADS

A massive structure ahead. Pyramidal, but shattered, violent. It looks almost natural until you see the faces.

TAILS TAILS TAILS

You find a wall of faces—impressions in brass, looking like photo negatives in the light of your swinging lantern. A plaque proclaims this to be The Wall of the Leviathan. These faces are the death masks of a civilisation. There are no gaps, only faces superimposed on one another like a never-ending crowd. They recede the further up the wall they are, and as they shrink smaller and smaller so the crowd grows larger and larger. There must be millions of them, tens of millions, even, all of them nameless but unique.

HEADS HEADS TAILS

ꙮ A symbol—perhaps meant to unnerve and transfix. The eyes are everywhere. Painted everywhere in tar.

TAILS TAILS HEADS

The only way in is a narrow borehole at the top leading down to a cruel human warren. Dead end after dead end wastes so much time and fuel and eventually you're left with nothing to guide you but the gravity and the rope. There are so many of them, each engraved in dozens of languages—mercifully including Braille—with the story of an ugly moment from these people's past. They tell of the atrocities they let slip past, the murders and rapes, the derision of their small joys. Above all, the constant vigilance of all against all.

HEADS TAILS TAILS

Vibrations from below, then a multitude of sounds, a swarm where all push one another aside in their rush to be heard first. Then, the unthinkable—speech. It booms and breaks against the rock walls of the tunnel. No words survive, but it has all the quality and timbre of human speech.

When you finally break into open subterranean space, you see the dinful source: a swarm of sounds come from a swarm of mouths. The whole cavern, lit coldly from above by ancient lanterns, is packed with babbling humans. Or, no, not quite. They have no eyes. They have no hair. They have no navels.

Ferngängers, that's what people call them on the radio. They stand on hilltops and in the trees, any high place where they can be heard far and wide, and mechanically call out warnings to drive people away from this place. They'll even use violence, but they can be overcome. Mostly, they terrorise and flee.

These ones seem defective, somehow. Their words are not nonsense per se, but certainly not warnings. Choked confessions, poems and ditties, imitations of the echoes of water drops splashing on the cave floor. They stumble away blindly from your presence: a wall of human-like faces and hands and starved, bloated bellies, receding, shrinking, in their dozens, in their hundreds. Who knows why they congregated in this place.

HEADS TAILS HEADS

As you move through the crowd, parting it with your presence, you hear snatches of song. It's an old song, a nameless song, a song everyone knows; a song that plays on the radio every night at midnight from parts unknown. One by one a scattered chorus of defective ferngängers sing from the crowd. Their voices have a desperate certainty, as if each line is made of the only words they know:

“…I wandered lonely as an echo…”
“…High o’er dusty vale and hill,…”
“…When at once I saw a crowd,…”
“…A host of molten faces still;…”
“…Upon the wall, upon the hide…”
“…Of old Leviathan inside…”

It goes on and on. They don't know what a hill or vale is. They've never seen a face, not even their creator's. And, though they make a crowd, they know nothing of what that word means.

At last you find yourself at the deep centre. The old lanterns are high above you now, their cold sharp light not sharp enough to pierce the darkness. Still, the ferngängers stagger over themselves to be out of your way, and the floor is muddy, silty, not slick with moisture. It's not the best footing, but it'll do. All is silent as you finish your descent to the lowest part of the cavern floor.

A ripple spreads through the ferngängers, faster than sound. All of a sudden, they're not so defective any more: yells and cries and screams of warning fill the air between the stalactites. They beg you flee and never return, even as they close ranks behind you. Rings of them surround the pit you find yourself in. Your eyeless audience.

Their merciless crescendo masks the unfurling—awakening—of something tremendous in the darkness of the pit. You turn to see a wall of faces. Their expressions are far from placid death masks, and they are approaching, closer, closer, clearer and clearer with every step the Leviathan takes. Whatever you came here to do—it will fail.

And still the ferngängers cry:
“Run! Run! This is not a place of honour!”

Phase 2: Shifting Understanding #

TAILS TAILS

One thousand years pass, and the shattered pyramid—meant to convey terrible violence, that this place was broken, destroyed—is whittled down by the freeze and the thaw. Then the climate changes, and all that's left of the pyramid is an inhospitable rock spire, and in the centre of that spire runs the borehole that goes down to the subterranean labyrinth. It remains as difficult to climb as ever, with the added threat of the heavy sun rays pressing down on would-be explorers.

Phase 3: Missed Warnings #

The Wall of the Leviathan: Torn down for valuable brass by some scavenger.
The multiocularity: ꙮ Eventually wind scours these eyes from whatever surfaces they're painted on and disperses the tar to the four corners of the Earth.
The maze of regret: Common sense tells us that two things may be kept at the centre of a maze: a monster, and a treasure. Hopeful rumours spread on the radio: “One day, if we can overcome the evils of our forebears, we can cure this affliction and meet and gather and touch one another again.” These rumours suppose a treasure at the centre of the maze of regret will let us be together again.
The ferngängers: They lose their purpose and wander across the lands spreading fear and terror to the isolated survivors of the calamity.
The song of solitude: To join with the Leviathan is seen by many as a form of life after life.

7th of July, 2022 [This is Not a Place of Honor]This is […] a place of honour