At some point in the early 17th Century, in the halls of a London asylum for the mad, it was discovered that a young man had disappeared from his room. Accounts of precisely who this man was are fragmentary and largely conflicting, but it is generally agreed that he was of foreign birth, had noble blood, and was locked away when his house fell on hard times, which cost him his sanity. The man began to babble incoherently, speaking every moment of his life thereafter, his lips never still, requiring the doctors of the asylum to feed him, and necessitating his isolation from the other patients. The man's name is lost.
Because of his solitary place of living, it was relatively obvious to the doctors of the establishment that he had, in fact, vanished, without accessing any of the doors or windows of the room. At first, they suspected that he had been aided in escape by some other party on the outside of the building-which was highly unlikely, as the man had no friends of which they knew-but before they could attempt to test this theory, the man reappeared in his room, before their very eyes.
In his incoherent ramblings, he had stumbled upon a very powerful strand of arcane magic, the odds of which are too infinitesimal to calculate. The process of speaking these words had caused him to wink out of existence on the greater material plane, and become transported to a very much different place, though for only a brief moment before, in an equally bizarre stroke of luck, he spoke the same phrase's inverse, and returned by the same means. It is often said that the mad understand things that the sane cannot-without a doubt, this is history's most dramatic example thereof.
What came after that chronologically will be discussed in a later article. What is of interest to us now is the place in which the man found himself, as learned in later accounts: an infinite black void, populated irregularly by flat-topped rocks with irregular bottom sides, floating in space, as if torn from the ground and then left suspended in the air on some invisible strings. Yet it is a place where there is no definite ground to be found; only a downward source of gravity permeating the entirety of the space, causing any who fall past the islands to never reach an end.
The islands slowly move about in great, elliptical orbits, forming a roughly spherical cloud, centred around what appears to be a vortex of energy, or perhaps a very cold and very small star. The orientation of gravity, however, remains consistently downward, and all of the islands always face upward. Not all are completely flat: every now and then, one will drift by with part of a hill on it, or a cliff, and occasionally scraps of vegetation, or even animal life. Most of it is long-dead, however: the incident which tore the land into these disparate islands was many thousands of years ago. Great civilisations have risen and fallen since then and before: ruins of all shapes and types are to be found built on these islands; floating fortifications meant to protect other islands which they were in alignment with five millennia ago, but have long since drifted out of synchronisation with. The majority of the ruins have been ripped apart, mostly built before the Sundering; decorated with faded, yet once-brilliant gems and mosaics of unnameable composition. The place seems deserted of the people who made these inscriptions, however.
Who were they? Where is this place?
Read further, and you will find out.