No Return

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The people were small, quiet, and simple. They had no name for themselves.

They lived at the top of the world of Jeroun, in a windless and barren valley with no accessible entrance, on the shore of a nameless salt lake—perhaps the most beautiful lake in the world. A deep and flawlessly clear cerulean blue under the cloudless sky, its shallow waters never froze and rarely rippled. Almost perfectly circular, it measured twelve miles across, yet the people neither fished nor set craft upon its surface. Now and then, they drank and collapsed on the shore, subject to visions induced by the ensorcelled liquid.

Their valley had once been home to a great civilization, the site of a city inhabited by the continent’s extinct native people, who were called elders by common men. Mummified corpses measuring over three yards in length lay everywhere, naked to the ever-present sun. A great many lay buried in the rubble of their buildings, which had been worn nearly unrecognizable by time and sun. With few eroding forces, this process had surely taken thousands upon thousands of years. A stone could not chip the building materials.

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