🔥⚔️TIMELINE KINGDOM:
Season VI: The Seven Springs
The Archivist has begun to cast light on the mystery of The Seven.
📜 THE VERSE BENEATH THE STONE
Translated by the Archivist from a fractured tablet of unknown age. Three words remain without satisfactory translation.
Before crown was cast,
before banner knew the wind,
before the first road scarred the earth,
there ran beneath the world a brightness without flame.
Men had no name for it.
The earth did.
And so the earth kept it.
Seven mouths were made for its keeping,
hidden beneath root and ruin,
beneath field and fortress,
beneath lands men would one day murder to call their own.
Six drank near the waking world.
The seventh drank far below.
Deep below.
To the six was given one measure each.
To the last was given four.
For what lies nearest may be found by fortune.
What lies deepest was never meant to be found gently.
Ages passed.
Kings raised halls above them and knew nothing.
Priests knelt above them and heard nothing.
Armies crossed them with iron feet,
spilling blood upon stones richer than the crowns for which they fought.
Still the Seven slept.
Yet the old verse gives warning of an age
when the land itself would begin to answer.
When the Sixth Gate opens,
let every lord look twice upon the ground he takes.
For the first hand upon the hidden stone
shall wake what sleeps beneath it.
Then shall the silent water rise.
Not water as men know water.
Something harder.
Something older.
A fortune that does not glitter in the hand, yet has sent wiser men than kings to war.
And once awakened, it shall not choose its master.
It shall know only the banner above it.
Hold the land, and the current is yours.
Lose the land, and the current turns.
Yet what has already passed into your cup no conqueror may drink again.
Thus shall yesterday belong to the fallen,
and tomorrow to the victorious.
The old scribes call this justice.
I suspect they had a peculiar sense of humor.
Of the six, the tablet says little more.
They shall wake.
They shall flow.
They shall empty.
And men shall fight over them until the stones remember every name.
But of the seventh, the hand changes.
The letters grow larger.
One line has been cut so deeply into the tablet that the stone is broken behind it.
It reads:
WHEN THE DEEP WAKES,
LET NO LORD SPEAK OF PEACE.
For the Deep carries the greater measure.
Fourfold beneath one hidden place.
And when its old current rises,
ravens shall leave their towers,
oaths shall become negotiable,
friends shall study one another’s borders, and swords long sheathed shall remember their purpose.
Many shall drink.
Few shall drink long.
None shall drink forever.
For every Spring has an ending.
And when the last bright measure has passed from stone to man, the waters shall still.
The earth shall close its hand.
The banners shall remain.
The dead shall remain.
And the Chronicle shall know
who first woke the water,
who held it longest,
who stole it,
who lost it,
and who stood above it when the final drop was given.
Then shall the Seven sleep again. Until the following season.
But the final line is the strangest.
It does not speak of wealth.
Nor war.
Nor kings.
It says only:
Six shall be coveted.
For the seventh, blood shall remember its price.
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