The Allegory Of Triberias: The Call Of Destiny .

The True First Virtue

THE ELYDRIAN FOREST,
West of Bethesda,
2420 A.A,

Morning came quickly and to Havillah's delight it brought in with it a blazing sunlight. The sky was cloudless and blue, and the warm rays of the sun were now kissing her skin even as she stretched out her joints and the very taut muscles of her backside.

It had been a long night tied to that tree branch. A tree branch that was quite thick and strategically placed in the upper most parts of the forest's canopy. The height being safe from any wandering wildlife and the ocassional predator that may have stalked that night.

However and despite this relative 'safety', her wooden mattress had not been at all comfortable. When the mosquitos were not trying to bite, the night wind had been quite malevolent , howling even as it shook the very branches that Havillah had taken to resting upon. Had it not been for her cloak that warmed her, wrapped tightly around her shoulders, Havillah was sure that she would have been frozen to death.

Thus was the asperity of Havillah's night. A night spent on a mattress of cork and suberin and a pillow that was so lumpy from all the stuff it contained including the not so soft water bottles she had stuffed in.

All in all she could not wait for the morning to dawn and when first birds began singing, Havillah was quite impatient to leave. To quickly move on, not just because she needed to put enough space between herself and the people behind her, but also, to explore the vast forest that was spread out both below and before her.

It had been so long since Havillah had been in a forest and forests fascinated her. How a cove of trees growing so closely together could harbor so much life? A single tree on it own carried enough life as it was, but the biodiversity within an untouched forest? Havillah could only smile lightly as she thought back to the Misty Mountains of Triberias.

The Misty Mountains had not been mountains per see, but that was the name that the people had given to the towering canopies of green and brown that had stood proudly for eons among the clouds until one day when they disappeared around Havillah's twelvth birthday.

Her own mother, the Elder Tamaar had been there to witness it. She had seen with her own eyes as yet another piece of the great city crumbled down into oblivion leaving behind it kilometres upon kilometres of blue skies and the ocassional cloud that dotted the empty sky. In one moment the Misty Mountains were gone and little Havillah had always thought that they had fallen into the sea.

Growing up, she had hated to think of what had happened to the people or the animals who had had the misfortune of having great giant trees raining down upon them, upon their heads and upon their homes seemingly out of nowhere. Or maybe, it was just like they had said. That the trees had fallen into nullity, into a void of nothingness. Havillah really hoped that these sentiments were true and that those forests mighty as they were had not ended up on some poor human's head.

For along time, Havillah could only wonder. Her disturbed tranquility being the same thing that had led her to explore. Her perturbation from the occurrence leading to the very edges of the city and that was how she discovered the viewpoints and her discovery of the viewpoints had led to a new fascination. A great curiousity concerning the things of world below and the reasons why they had been forbiden to mingle.

She also wondered why the city was crumbling. Why piece by piece the land area of the Eastern Scaffolds of Triberias was diminishing. When she finally gathered enough courage to question her mother, the woman had explained it with a tale of a lost Virtue. A Third Virtue that had been wielded by the ancients. That now, not even the Council of Elders knew how to wield. No one had the knowledge and the people were perishing for it. All that the Council knew was that it had once existed and now, with no one to wield, there was the disparity that caused the Inner Sanctum to forever remain closed.