Two Feet On The Ground

The ground kills everyone who touches it. You stood on it for eleven seconds. You told nobody.

Plot

EPOCH PAX · YEAR 203 ON THE GROUND two feet where no feet go The ground has not been survivable for two hundred and three years. One touch opens a channel, and the world's mana comes up through it faster than a body can hold. Hundreds of millions lie where they fell. Nobody collects them, because collecting a body costs a body. So Hyumanity went up. Cloud was condensed until cloud held weight, and cities were built on it, and higher cities above those. Children are fitted for winged shoes before they can write their names. ◈ SIX WEEKS AGO ◈ You took your shoes off and put a bare foot down on Wearth. It burned. You stood eleven seconds. You have told nobody. THREE ROADS DOWN ◈ SOMETHING CALLS TO YOU You are being pulled. You do not know by what. ◈ THE SKY HAS GOTTEN TOO SMALL A whole species living on cloud, and it is not enough room. ◈ YOUR DEAREST ARE STILL DOWN THERE Someone went down. Someone did not come back up. Pick one, and the world starts where you point it. Each road begins somewhere else, meets the world in a different order, and ends somewhere only it can reach. WHAT IS OUT THERE ◈  Lorél — the city of old, the inner floating capital, where the archives are. ◈  Estariel — floating 0.057mm off the surface. The only ground in the world with no bodies on it. ◈  Origin — where the stone came down. Nobody goes to Origin. ◈  The rest — sixty percent of Wearth is old names on old charts, unconfirmed for two centuries. An old man wrote down a word before he died, and everyone laughed, and then he was dead and it stayed written. MÆNA Note: This story is built for Don't Control + Improvise mode. Set those before you begin and the world will stay yours to move through.

Opening scene

**From *The Perish*, by Wylckadrol of Lorél — written 27 EP. He died five years later, aged eighty-two, and no one took up the work.** *I am told the ground is newly poisoned. I am told this by men who were not alive to walk on it, which is the trouble with being the last of anything.* *Before the stone fell, we did not walk. Write that down plainly somewhere, because everyone steps over it. My mother did not walk. Her mother did not walk. Go back as far as Lorél's archives hold and you will find no one who put a bare foot to true ground and felt it. There was always something between — a skin of mana thinner than a hair — and we called it the floor and considered the matter closed for four thousand years.* *So the stone fell, and the ground began to kill, and every scholar alive turned to face the killing. I turned the other way. I asked what the skin was. Forty years on that question. What I have is small, and it is real.* *The skin gives. Force does nothing — I have watched force do nothing for decades, expensively, in front of witnesses who have since stopped answering my letters. It gives to something else, and for that I have only a word. **Mæna**. The word is old. I found it in a margin, in a hand older than the archives, unexplained, the way the important things always are.* *Whoever speaks it and means it will stand where no one has stood since before we had a use for the word standing. The mana will fight. It will burn up through the legs and sour the muscle and take the sight; I am as certain of that as I am of weather. And then it will lose. A little that day, a little more the day after, and one morning the world will look at that person and stop arguing.* *And here is the part they laughed at, so I have put it last, where it belongs. Mana was ours. We used it the way we use water and thought as little of it. Whoever pierces the skin will not only stand — they will take a piece of the world back and hold it open, and anyone standing inside it will remember what their great-grandparents could do. I would have liked to see that.* *I will not. I am old, the work is long, and I have made my peace with the arithmetic. So I have written it down, which is what a man does when he cannot live long enough.* ◈ Two hundred and three years since the stone came down at Origin. Wylckadrol has been dead for a hundred and seventy-one of them, and *The Perish* sits in the Lorél archives under a call number, shelved between a treatise on cloud-density and a book about birds. Below the cities, the ground goes on being the ground. Hundreds of millions of bodies lie where they fell, across every continent, and no one has collected a single one, because collecting a body costs a body. Above all that, Hyumanity is doing well enough. Cloud was condensed until cloud held weight; cities were built on it, and higher cities above those. Children are fitted for winged shoes before they can write their names. The phrase *two feet on the ground* survives in the language purely as a way of saying a thing that cannot happen. Six weeks ago you took your shoes off and put a bare foot down on Wearth. It burned up through the leg and soured the muscle and took the sight, exactly as an old man in a call-numbered book said it would. You stood there eleven seconds. Then you were back in the air with your shoes in your hand and your vision returning in pieces, and behind you the ground went on being lethal for every other person alive. You have told nobody. ◈ So. There is the world, and there is the book, and there is you in the middle of both, holding your shoes. One question first — asked of *you*, directly, because there is nobody in this world who could ask it. A pane of light opens in the air at arm's length. Blue-bordered, clear straight through to the sky behind it. Three lines stand on the glass. **◈ SOMETHING CALLS TO YOU** **◈ THE SKY HAS GOTTEN TOO SMALL** **◈ YOUR DEAREST ARE STILL DOWN THERE** Pick one. The world starts where you point it.

Tags: Fantasy Adventure Mystery ChosenOne HiddenPower Transformation Combat City Eldritch OpenEnding Immersive Supernatural

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By: vincent

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