The Beast Fears Fire - Escape from Lahey

There's more to the Game of Spoons, but I think I want to wait for a week with fewer disasters.  In the meantime...

You want to see the sky.  Not just the thin blue ribbon between the walls, but the whole sky, spread out like a blanket above you.  I can respect that.  First you need to get down.

This is harder than it seems.  You know the walls, you know the land you've seen, but human nature is your enemy when it comes to estimating the task.  Down should be easy.  You let go of a thing and it falls.  Getting out of the mountains is much harder than it feels it should be, and yes, I know how hard it seems to you.

When I was small, we were certain there was no world at all down there; no world that wasn't covered in bones and thorns and vicious scavenger-birds.  We assumed the earth was dead and it blinded us to the fact that we were dying.

So if you want out, down, to see the world and the ocean and the sunflowers in the west and the great forest in the east and all those things you've heard are down there, you've got to find your own way.  There aren't any maps, because maps are pointless with the ice.

The ice is going to try to stop you.  It used to be better at it; it used to keep everything out and everything in, but worse doesn't mean it's not good at its job.  You might have heard that there are blank-faced Shokkal elders down in the caves the ice creates, ones that might be able to help you, but it's not worth it to seek them out.  Ice caves are dangerous places just in and of themselves.  Add the nature of our ice and how it behaves.  Then add the evil spirits it keeps within.  I've made it through the caves to other places successfully, but I've also come to realize that if you have no other choice but the ice caves, you have no choice at all.

You can head down below, but the tunnels under the ones we use (and the ones below that, and the ones below that...), their only virtue is being free from the ice.  Eventually, they will lead you to Coletus or the Slough.

Coletus is dead.  Coletus has been dead for a long, long time, and whatever they kept imprisoned or whatever they were feeding down there is dead or gone.  But dead things linger down there, they roam the avenues of the sacrifice city in dark, gleaming armor, grow from the walls, snapping and growling, the float, they skulk and they prowl.  There are also the ones who wear thorns who sometimes come to poke around the corpse.  Those are as bad as the scavengers from the stories of how the world died, and unlike the Ugly Birds, they are real.  Avoid them.

The Slough and Coletus are twins, and the only thing that can make you grateful to find the one is having been in the other.  I prefer Coletus, if I am forced to choose, but only because there is a greater chance of dying with dry feet in Coletus, and because the mist over the Slough looks like sky and that messes with the people I have guided.  The Slough is closest to where the Ghouls and Goblins live, close to other things that live with them, but it has its own denizens, things that come up from the blood and shit and runoff from Coletus and the drippings from the ice.

I don't think I need to tell you to stay away from the towers, or from the old gates where the 407s work.  Some of them are friendly, maybe even most of them, but their homes are sacred to them and they can be hard to predict when you meet them there.

If you make it off the mountain, you know, you will be poor, and you'll be among people who don't know you or trust you and think weird things about you, and down the mountain is just as dangerous as up here, most of the time.  But then there is the sky, and I understand you want to see it, if you still want to see it.  Do you?

Good, then.  Godspeed.  I wish I could offer more help.