Dauntless: Moirai's Course

Chapter 1.1: Kismet

Understanding life as we know it is pretty straightforward, happiness, sadness, love, hate, good, and evil. All things in the world have a balance. For Aiko Tokugawa, her world would begin to change from a single moment that would propel her on a journey beyond her wildest dreams. But to understand the story, we need to return to the moment when everything went wrong or was it right.

The year is two thousand and twenty-eight. The world had emerged as a chaotic mess, and very few not only have the will but the courage to continue to do what they love. Doctor Richard Tokugawa was one of these people, an American archaeologist from Gleewood City College with a strong heritage of the orient. He left the comforts of his hometown as he had done multiple times in the past to seek an answer to a question plaguing his mind for months.

Throughout his academic career, Richard would often find himself gravitating toward historical anomalies. This unyielding need to make sense of events of the past sometimes engulfed him, but once a question was asked he needed to find the answer. So when an anonymous benefactor presented him with a fractured stone tablet dating ten thousand years old, it caught his interest. The age of the tablet was interesting, but what hooked Richard was what was written on it. An archaic civilization before written history.

This discovery excited him for he had proof that there was more to human history than they know, but his excitement would be short-lived when his fellow peers in the scientific community asked to prove his findings beyond that of the tablet. Even though Richard was a well-respected archeologist amongst his peers, even with only a year under his belt from obtaining his master's degree, he was still subjected to the same rules as everyone else in his profession.

Richard's research had brought him to a rural area of the world hidden by a multitude of natural wonders. A place marked as untamed jungle land on the maps of South America's continent, but local inhabitants know it by another name; the devil's door. However, Richard was not one to back down from a challenge. He gently questioned the nearby villagers and uncovered a culture within the region that was very similar to the writing on the tablet about a temple buried deep within the jungle.

At first, his interests were purely academic, to find proof of a tribe lost in the pages of time that could further their understanding of human existence. It excited him just from the mere thought of such a discovery. However, when Richard delved deeper into the myth of the lost tribe, he quickly discover that the temple he searched for, may hold a secret far more interesting.

The legend of the secrecy of the temple also told of an artifact that could only be described as a massive green gem of unfathomable power hidden within, which could only mean that the artifact was a giant emerald. Richard was, first and foremost, a man of science, so when the villagers warned him of the curse placed upon the temple, it sounded like a bedtime story to frighten the locals. In his experience of world travel, when a local legend invents a way to keep people from looking, it usually meant that there was something fantastic to find. He gave no notion to the locals' pleas and set out with his family to find the temple. Richard would finally prove his theories right, and, as a bonus, find a massive rare gem in the process.

Over time, the surrounding area of the temple became sacred. Every town they passed through spoke of the legend although each one differed just slightly. Most of the villagers were reluctant to reveal what they knew, but everyone has their price and soon, Richard began hearing the same song from everyone. Still, even with the financial incentive, few people agreed to help him. Fear of the ramifications of the curse kept most of the older villagers at bay, but it was the young that agreed to help. Maybe they felt that the stories they grew up with were nothing but fairy tales or maybe it was the lack of work within their region that forced them to go against their parents' wishes. The handful of men that did agree to help the doctor, soon found themselves setting up camp a few hundred feet from a newly discovered entrance leading into the earth.