User:8bit BlackMage/Ex Nexo/Chapter 1

In the long lost whispers of the people of Sailendra, a legend was told of a lonely bird with beautiful multicolored wings that glided for eons between Sea and Sky. It had no place to land, and no one to hear its song. For the Sea and Sky were jealous, squabbling siblings, and their noise drowned out all other sound. Elegies of indigo, rhapsodies of blue and white - the bird found joy in shaping its aria of wind and wave, lost and suffocated in the raging storm between Sea and Sky.

The bird decided to seek an audience with them, hoping that its refrain would reveal to each the wonder of the other. It soared far into the heavens, until it reached the zenith of the Sky. But in this place the bird found no breath, and it implored only empty air. The Sky, sneering, dismissed the bird back to the borderline. For the Sky knew everything of its majesty, its feathered and angelic canyons of clouds, and why would it care to hear of the Sea?

Though the journey to the Sky was tiring, the bird knew it would find no rest where the wind met water. It decided to dive deep below the waves, until it reached the nadir of the Sea. But here, too, the bird found no breath, and it implored only empty air. The Sea, scornful, dismissed the bird back to the borderline. For the Sea knew everything of its majesty, its complex and graceful crests and currents, and why would it care to hear of the Sky?

The bird returned to its threshold exhausted, and found it no longer had the strength to sing. A tide of sorrow enveloped it, for it could not understand why each sibling could not bring itself to love the other. It could not keep its vigil forever, with nowhere to roost, and its voice fading into grey. Finally, its tired wings ceased to beat, hovering in that infinite and infinitesimal space that was neither Sky nor Sea, but merely itself.

The bird wished only that the songs it had collected from its travels might be preserved. Perhaps one day, the Sea and Sky would recognize their wonder as seen through the bird's own eyes, translated into a genuflection of music. In one final serenade, the bird burst into a shower of feathers, spreading like seeds and carried by wind and wave across the borderline. Immediately the Sea and Sky felt a loud silence, like a gaping hole existing where once there had been something precious. In the bird's absence, the siblings found in each feather a pure note singing their praises, revealing facets of themselves they had never before considered.

Wracked with grief, they reflected that the bird had never sung of itself, of those magnificent wings that sparkled like a rainbow across the horizon. And they wept a rain of ascent and descent, each knowing the other, and their tears settled like dew on each feather in a confluence of sound. From each feather bloomed a tribe of Mesi, each singing its own hymn of Sky and Sea.

This legend is as old as the stone temples long since sunk beneath the waves, in one universe of many. There is a confluence here too, of worlds, and a curious anomaly has just occurred. A destructive rift across spacetime throws the already strange mosaic further askew, shattering minds and magic, breaking the master's once ironclad grip on the game. Amid such strife, in the clouds of amnesia, nobody remembers the tale of the lonely bird. Nobody, that is, except for one.

They are awake.