Guide to Lower Heaven 2: The Founders
From the History Book, Chapter Four, Section 16
Today, the goods and ideas produced in Heaven spread to every corner of the Valley, but just a few centuries ago, this reality was something no one could imagine. Key to understanding Heaven’s primacy in Valley politics are the struggles its Founders endured, even after living through their flight cross the Poison Sea in the great airships called they Arks, a journey unduplicated in any century before or since. Their arrival in the Valley alone stands as a testament to their unassured wisdom and clear-eyed bravery as individuals. However, whether the Dream of Heaven would survive on the ground was far from a certainty.
The early settlement was little more than the wreckage of the airships, hovels holed out of the crash debris. They had the good fortune of landing on the island, which today shares its name with the city, but at the time the island was a blank, barren rock, inhospitable and isolated. No food grew there, and many of the original settlers were lost to starvation, and new diseases like snakepox their bodies had never encountered.
These natural factors nearly overcame those men and women who would live on to become Heaven’s Founders. Opportunity and ingenuity saved them. Though the island was empty and the settlers had no boats to reach the lake’s shore, the fires of the crash burned for weeks and made their arrival known to the yet-unmet tribes of the Valley.
The first tribe to approach were the web-handed, river-trading Xbullix. Despite sharing no language, the Founders were able to communicate using the symbol language of Magic, of which the Valley people even then held a rudimentary understanding. Using Magic, the Founders bargained with the Xbullix, trading their superior knowledge for food, and established the first trade treaty of Heaven’s History. The date of this agreement is marked by the Origination Treaty, signed on day 1, year 1 of the calendar we still observe today.
Supplies from the Xbulllix stabilized the settler population, and the work to make the rocky island a home began in earnest. In time, the Xbullix shared their methods for growing foods on floating rafts of wood and soil, (a primitive version of the farm barges that feed most of Heaven’s families today) and the first Heavenites began providing their own self-sufficient food supply.
This first diplomatic accomplishment is one of the Valley’s most important Historical moments. The Xbullix Capitan, Bufford Buffordspawn, who signed the treaty, unknowingly ushered in two hundred centuries of bountiful trade and growth for the Xbullix people, as Heaven’s closest allies, and set the young city on the path that has led to every great thing Heaven has accomplished in the 245 years since.
And who were these Founders? It is obvious to wonder at what the thoughts, personalities, and individual identities of our society’s ancestors must have been like— to try and find ourselves in them. While this impulse is natural, the intention behind their collective identity is core to a full understanding of the Founders’ motives and selfless brilliance. As Heaven blossomed, and it became apparent the refuge they had found had taken root, the Founders made another indelible mark on History.
On the 4th of Luminor, Year 27, the Edifice was completed; the first of Heaven’s Colleges, as the seat of the still-forming Academocratic government, and a monument to the bravery, ideals, and vision that had brought them over an uncrossable ocean to create a new paradise, triangulated around the human spirit’s richest expression.
They fled the Old Continent as heretics and refugees and died heroes of a new, better land. But instead of glorifying their own names, repeating the blood-borne cycle they had left behind in their homeland, they chose instead the ultimate sacrifice. Once the Edifice’s structure was complete, they entered, to never step foot without, binding themselves in all ways to governing and stewarding the new way of life they had created, subsuming their living selves into the entity they brought forth. Their first mandate was to strike their given names from the Origination Treaty and all others formed since in a ritual process we know now as Sublimation. This original Sublimation redacted all formerly-held identities of these men and women with the name we know them by: The Founders. Those who subsumed not only their lives, but their legacies, to create the reality that we all live in today.
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