The Odeon Cave
The Odeon Cave on the island of Kelemi has become a place of secular pilgrimage for artists everywhere.
Masters and amateurs reach the islet in the Confederacy after sailing for weeks, spending a small fortune in supplies, and risking Daemon extortionists and cutthroat pirates. Still, they all tell you it’s worth it: every painter, engraver, and muralist who sets foot there can come back exalted or disappointed but always inspired. The paintings in the cave are said to be incredible, impossible, and inimitable, both in subject and technique, but no one knows who the authors were, why and how they did them, or even if they were from this world.
The Confederacy is littered with ruins of places that never existed. Many islands have statues of unknown heroes, rusting structures raised for unfathomable purposes, and sometimes just small “things”: objects with indecipherable writings explaining unthinkable functions. Tirtons care for them, to a point: if they are nice they will use them as decorations, if they are sturdy they will use them as construction blocks, if they are just weird they have a gathering to have fun wondering what it could be, but at the end, they throw them away.
Kelemi has many of those ruins: concrete walls forming many squares, probably what remains of the ground floors of a dozen buildings. The crumbled walls are of the perfect height for corrals and are now hosting pigs, sheep, and chickens. The triton families living there have made a little fortune with livestock. Breeding animals is a lucrative job around there: everybody likes some meat on the grill but few tritons bother to tend to ground animals, too dirty and needy when compared to fishes and mollusks.
Once the tritons got enough money they hired some workers (technically they bought their indenture contracts) to dig around and find if there was some other ruin lying around. Exacation after excavation, other maimed walls emerged. It was clear the island hosted a piece of a settlement, a strange city with nonsensically large roads and metal poles here and there for no apparent reason. The tritons were not enthusiastic: sure, it was nice to have a starting point for stables and sites, but they were hoping for a treasure, maybe a nice big statue to put on the staircase that leads to the sea (their neighbors on Sanima have a beautiful naked lady made of marble… if only they had something gorgeous like that!).
Just before the tritons called the digging off, some workers found something interesting: the side of a rocky hill was the wall of a buried building: the edifice was full of dirt but still accessible.
Now most agree it is some kind of opera theatre: after an entrance room, there is a big hall full of chairs, and there are writings in infernal everywhere and they do love opera: what else can it be? Still, it’s strange: the chairs (lavishly cushioned) face a shallow stage with little room for a scenario and a laughable small orchestra pit. What shows were held there? Maybe a puppet theatre of some sort? Or, maybe, it was a temple?
Most people are enthralled by the big pictures hanging on the wall: some are incredibly detailed and painted with stunning realism, and others depict never-seen-before clothes, weird vehicles, and unusual romantic scenes, with people from different cultures locked in tender embraces.
The tritons were fine raiding the place, taking everything nice or useful, and forgetting the rest, but the workers disagreed. Those who found the place felt it was theirs, not like they owned it, but more like they had to protect it as if they found a wounded dog, and now they had to care for it. It was their pride and responsibility.
To settle the matter, an astral monk was invited as mediator. Opening the minds of the tritons elders and the workers made it easy to find an accord: the worker would own the hill and could live there, with their indenture contract severed, but they had to impede anyone from taking any items as they could not sell any founding to anyone but the tritons of Kelemi.
The workers, eight men and four women, all humans from the Empire or the Confederacy, made that place their home. Between the odd jobs the locals would give them, they kept digging, eventually finding the facade of the building and its name “odeon” written in big metal letters (what that word means is still unknown). They also unearthed the side walls, revealing other paintings, at first glance frescos but, in reality, drawings on paper glued to the concrete.
As years went by, the people coming to the island to buy some piglets or lambs would hear about the strange place and take a look. The ex-workers, now guardians, made all visitors swear they wouldn’t speak of the Odeon Cave, but such oddity demanded to be told.
As the word spread, more and more artists became curious. Firstly the neighbours then further and further away: what technique was used? Was it printing? But how did they achieve so many colors? Why did they seem to be made out of little dots? What was their use? Was it to advertise some spectacle, opera, or play? What shows could deserve such exuberant promotions surely costing piles of gold coins?
Not to speak of the improbable attires of the people represented. Why were they wearing those clothes with little color and flourish? Were they all poor? And some of those strange objects they held: one had an arquebus of sorts, and there was a boat without sails, spewing smoke (sail-less ships powered by magic are an idea circling, but why the smoke?). Those things in the sky? Kites? Who knows!
Some painters found the fame of the cave overtly exaggerated: they were strange artworks, sure, but “strange” doesn’t equal good. Why racking one’s brain to understand a technique so inferior to oils or watercolors? So even the disappointed travelers returned home with something from the visit to the cave: reassurance of their talent, maybe, or of the fact that art has many roads still to explore, or even with the fiery determination to prove to the world they could do better.
Eventually, the fame of the Odeon Cave reached Uxali. What pushed the renown of the ruin so far was a later finding that sparked the imagination of the gnomes. In a room, the guardian found ribbons of a translucent material, a flexible and transparent lacquer, completely painted with hundreds and hundreds of small scenes. Sections of the ribbons had different subject matters, but all correlated, and a section was made of many hundreds of paintings each slightly different from the other. Gnomes love everything transparent and minutely detailed: just think! Those are like cycles of stained glass artworks but compressed in a shiny ribbon! They were surely created by kindred spirits! And what they could find with closer inspection in an alchemist’s lab?
The gnome Sheiks tried to bribe the cave’s guards in any way, but they were incorruptible. They then tried to steal them but to no avail. These attempted thefts only granted a ban from the cave for all gnomes, now unwelcome on the island.
There is a bounty of thousands and thousands of gold coins to anyone who will bring a piece of the “story ribbons” to a sheik, but somehow nobody had the will or the guts, to try to claim it.
