Displaced

Chapter 61

As Tehlmar Esmae studied the view outside the window, he found himself pondering religion, something he rarely thought about. There were only a few large religions in Scyria. Outside of the Ubrans, who worshiped their Emperor as a living god, most of the rest of the humans followed a spiritualistic form of religion known as Iacism. Iacism had no organized structure and was instead mainly based on respecting and revering the spirits of dead family and friends with the belief that they would watch over and protect the living. Tehlmar had always found these beliefs strange. If the spirits of the dead were truly protecting the living, they were doing a remarkably bad job at it.

Stragma and Otharia, on the other hand, followed a much more centralized structure with their religions, each society worshiping a single named entity. The Stragmans, of course, worshiped a giant tree they called "Ruresni", and by extension the entire forest. Now that he'd seen the impossibly-large thing with his own eyes, he had to admit it was quite an impressive tree, one that made you reconsider your own significance in relation to the rest of the world.

Tehlmar was unclear on if the Otharians still worshiped their god Othar or not after the whole coup thing. He'd been too busy with other matters to really bother to find out and the prince training he'd undergone had, like so many things in Drayhadan society, focused entirely on matters within the nation while ignoring everything happening on the outside. For now he assumed that, officially or unofficially, they still believed in their savior god Othar.

Drayhadans liked to use Stragma and Otharia as a prime example of the folly of non-elves, pointing to their icons of worship with ridicule. After all, they said, what sort of fools would worship a tree or a simple human who just happened to be more powerful than usual?

Perhaps it was because he'd lived for so long outside of the Drayhadan bubble, but Tehlmar couldn't help but find this attitude to be hypocritical. Drayhadan couldn't say much better about Drayhadal's deity Muiqir, God of the Elves. Nobody alive had ever seen Muiqir. In fact, nobody save Drakannon, the founder of Drayhadal himself, had ever even claimed to have seen or spoken with him. Drayhadans simply accepted the word of their founder as gospel.

According to Drakannon, Muiqir had commanded him to save the elven race by gathering every elf together and forming a haven for them away from all the evils of the barbarians. That, perhaps, was all the elves needed to justify their worship. Even though Drakannon had died thousands of years ago and Muiqir had never been seen again, the God's teachings were still fundamental to Drayhadan society.

Perhaps no teaching of Muiqir's had a more profound impact on Drayhadan society than "Yours is the world to make as you see fit. Claim it, tame it, mold it." The elves of Drayhadal had taken those instructions to the extreme. Whereas Stragman society stressed working in harmony with nature, Drayhadans believed in making nature their bitch.

One of the best examples of this philosophy was Casmyae, the current capital of Drayhadal and his current location. Most of the city was built on Lake Remna, the largest lake in the country. Where other people would have built their city on the lake shore, the Casm had instead built the city literally on top of the water.

Casmyae stood as a monumental feat of both engineering and overindulgence, a tribute to what could be accomplished when given centuries. In various areas, over thousands of years, the lake bed had been raised up until the water was no deeper than halfway up a man's shin. There entire "fields" of aquatic plants grew, some providing nutritious crops while others were cultivated simply for their beauty. The Casm family's aquatic flower gardens were said to be the most beautiful places in the country during the spring and summer seasons.

Elsewhere, the lake had been deepened to hold all the extra displaced water. Here, thousands of fish swam about in great schools, serving as an important source of protein in the local cuisine. There were even elaborate dam systems created to maintain the water level at the exact desired level regardless of season and rainfall. Large, thick stone pillars rose from the shallow water, joining together in large arches to support the multi-layered stone houses and walkways that made up the city.