Of Glass and Gold

Sky Water

Truth turns to legend, legend to story, and story to daydream the more a telling is told. Warping and mixing, losing pieces, and gaining others, until there is just a grain of sand worth of truth left.
Sometimes that tiny grain is all you need.

Through the whispers of one hundred and twenty years the tale of the sky water has been told. Warped and twisted by uncountable retellings, how much truth remains?

Those who study such questions answer thus; no matter whos tongue tells the tale, three things are constant.
First, the land was not always hot and dry, once it was a very different place. A place where water poured from the sky and the living thrived.
Second, of a lock and a key, what they are and where long since forgotten.
And third, that reuniting the key to its lock will free the sky water, releasing the world from the ever worsening drought.

An answer to raise more questions.
Which is the true lock and key?

Uncountable versions of the tale are sprinkled across the land, voiced by people from all walks of life. The lock and key not always easy to define, but always there, and always different.
Salt miners and well diggers fantasizing about uncovering a literal key, finding a tunnel leading to a door deep in the earth.
Devotees of The Living Temple singing hymns of an acorn growing into a great tree that will one day pierce the sky.
Ink-black haired nobels whispering with both hope and fear of a pure soul to sit on the long empty throne.

Endless combinations flowing and changing as you move through the land. Region, class, occupation, religion, a different legend coming from each.

But if you ask a tinker, a traveler, a trader, the ones who have traveled wide and herd them all; fantastical, somber, illogical, impossible, which is real? Each and every one will answer the same.
They will spin you a tale of love. A tale of magic and longing and despair. A tale of tragedy. And a task. A perfectly simple task that even over five generations it has not been achieved. A task that until completed, will leave the world broken, slowly dying and turning to dust.

Which brings forth a final question.
What is the task?