The Gem Lords

The Realms - Part 5

     A moment before, he wouldn't have been able to say what the Realm of Sapphire looked like, but the moment he saw it it was as though the memories had been there all along, as indeed they had been. The six arches were standing on a round, flat topped island circled by grey rocks against which the waves beat in thunderous sprays of foam. It was surrounded by a great ocean, but it wasn't alone. There were other islands visible in the distance, the nearest of which were quite small. Mere outcrops of rock covered by flocks of screeching gulls. Further away were larger islands, though, and the entire horizon ahead of them bore the dark smudge of a land mass hundreds of miles across. Nahul, Thomas remembered. A sparsely populated country, peaceful and prosperous, where the climate was always pleasant and the soil always fertile. Home to a race of physically perfect human beings descended from people they’d brought from Tharia, who sang the eternal praises of the mighty beings who'd created their world for them.

     Barl led the gem steeds to a nearby island that was mostly flat, about half a mile across, and covered with a luxuriant carpet of waving, green grass. He brought his steed in for a landing, and the other two steeds landed alongside, flapping their wings madly for the last few feet so that their landing was soft and gentle. The three climbed out of their saddles and dropped to the ground, and then Barl ambled towards them, a broad smile on his too young face.

     "Any memories coming back?" he asked Thomas. "I brought you here, to Tak's Realm, because I hoped it would be familiar to you. You should be feeling almost as if you're coming home."

     "Home," said Thomas, and Lirenna looked up in surprise at the note of anger in his voice. He looked out to sea, and saw that there was no horizon in that direction. Just the sea receding into greater and greater distance. This world's not round, like a planet, he remembered. It's flat, like a tabletop. How wide? Thousands of miles? And how far down does the ground go?

     The answers popped into his head the moment he thought the questions. This realm was a hundred thousand miles wide! This one realm had a dozen times more surface area than the entire planet Tharia! And the ground only went down a couple of miles. Beneath that was another landscape, upside down, the gravity pulling in the opposite direction. There were places where holes led through from one side to the other, some of them miles across. There were entire empires and kingdoms here, as well as vast tracts of untamed wilderness that Tak had stocked with the most fearsome monsters his imagination had been able to conjure up.

     There were no continuous land masses, though. Only islands. Some of them thousands of miles across, but islands nonetheless. Tak had wanted to encourage diversity by making it hard for people to travel very far from their homes. Travel between the major island masses was only possible by means of ocean voyages lasting well over a year. They couldn't fly. The gem steeds were restricted to the elite; the Gem Lords themselves and their chosen favourites.

     Thomas stood, pale with shock as these facts cannoned into his head, leaving him trembling with wonder at the beings who had accomplished all this. Maybe they were right to call themselves gods, he thought. Even the True Gods Themselves would surely by astonished by what they'd created here.

     "You made your people worship you," he told Barl, and it suddenly came home to him that this person standing before him in the deceptively young body of an apprentice wizard was one of the awesome entities that had created the Realms. He could probably snuff out his life with a single thought!

     "Not at all," replied Lord Ruby, however, smiling gently. "When we told them that we were responsible for creating their world, they worshipped us of their own free will. Some of them still do, although we no longer set ourselves up as objects of devotion. It gets a little boring after a while."