(These are stories and fictions, not facts. I wrote these to soothe my nerve while also to build up lore for a book I have been planning for years.)
The Age before…
Seven is a whole number. Every historical turning point happened in a seventh year, a Rola year. It was said the last age, the Britannian Age, ended in the seven thousandth Rola year.
The Britannian Age was an age of machine. Massive robots and sophisticated machinery occupied people’s life. Massive transparent towers extended to the sky. People lived in mid-air. Some ancient records even claimed that the Britannians were living on the moon, though it is believed to be impossible, else the Britannians would have contacted the earth long time ago.
Yet all these glamours came with a price. To support the giant machinery, the Britannians needed fuels. And they collected their fuel in a disturbing way — from the blood of the veilers — magical creatures that were said to be the ancestors of the whales. According to the legends, the vielers, as mammals, had similar physiology as the whales, but they were much larger. Their flippers were as transparent as the wings of dragonfly, while much thicker with webs of veins visible to the outside. Since their blood was fluorescent under water, their flippers were like glowing spider webs in the deep ocean. On the top of their heads — between the dorsal fin and the blow hole — there was also an area of the skin being transparent, revealing the silvery glowing blood vessels within. When the veilers floated back to the surface, their network of blood vessels shone from the deep, like a glowing veil gradually emerging from the sea. That part of the skin was called the “veil” and thus they inherited the name veiler.
From Wikipedia: The skeleton of a sperm whale
The Britanians hunted the veilers for their blood. It was said that the veiler blood was highly flammable but it also released energy at a low rate — it was rumoured that just a small drop of veiler blood could burn for at least a week. Therefore the veiler blood was harnessed to support the energy demands of the Britannians.
There are very few records about the veilers left from the previous age. The present understandings about the veilers are mostly based on myths. The most famous veiler tale is about the veiler Samantha.
Samantha was a female veiler whose mother was hunted down by the Britannians during her “childhood”. The Britannia songr depicted the event as such:
“Two hooks went through the tail and the part of the body behind the dorsal fin. The huntsmen always avoid the head, especially the veil, in order to reduce blood loss. Once the blood contacts the brine, the glow will perish and the price will drop. To the huntsmen, it was business. Yet to little Samantha, it was survival. She bite into her mother’s skin, trying to pull her back. One huntsman saw that and aimed his hook on her. ‘No!’ the other huntsman shouted, “leave the cub! Wait till she grows. We are harvesting, not eliminating! Else where will the veilers be for us to hunt in the future?’ Little Samantha remembered that. The words fueled her anger towards human.” — The Britania songr. Chapter VIII, the seed of the end.
According to legends, when Samantha grew up, she led the resistance against human. The veilers were magical creatures and they were capable of primitive magics. There was one precious record detailing the veiler magic:
“I hear their voice again! Like cries, sipping into my skull! All the machines stop within their weeps. The veiler blood explodes as they cry. People falling from the sky. I saw my dead mother. I see my child cover in blood. What is madness? I remember I saw the veilers once, along the coast. It was like an array of army, shouting their voices into our cities. My vision was blinded in their nightmares — the memories of slaughters, their slaughters. Can we ever tame the nature? Or should we?”
The small passage is believed to be from the journal of a Britannian. From the passage we can know that the veilers were capable of using sound as the medium of magic charms. Their “cry” or “weep” could stop the operation of the Britannian machines while causing the veiler blood fuel to explode. It is also possible the veiler cries could conjure illusions and induce madness into human brain, leaving the victim mentally broken.
The Britannians tried to fight back, as indicted in most records, but they were not particularly successful. It was mainly due to their hope to conquer the veilers. The Britannians were still trying to preserve the veilers, in order to keep using their blood as fuels. Yet the Britannians was never aware of the high intelligence of the veilers. The veilers were organized in a sophisticated way to counteract the attack of the human, while retreating to the depth of the ocean when in danger. The result of the war was most coastal towns were destroyed and the Britannians retreated inland.
Yet the war did not end here. The Brtiannians were clever enough to invent a powerful weapon while foolish enough to use it. They thought since the veilers were aquatic animals, they can defeat the veilers by reducing the size of the ocean. They intended to do so by stimulating geological movements — stimulating submarine volcanic eruptions. The result was disastrous:
“I woke up to find the water boiling up. The whole sea bed erupted. I saw light coming from beneath, not from above. My veiler kin and I tried to swim away, but the whole ocean was burning down. My kin used their life to power a magic to envelop me in a bubble. The bubble rose into the sky and I saw the foolish human drowning in their own treacheries. The fire breached their lands and finally all melted into lava. I wept, not conjuring magic with my voice, but truly crying for my kin, the human and myself. ‘Where should I go? Is it the end of the world?'” — the legacy of the Pearls
Then some legends tell of Samantha praying to the Divine, while in some versions she prayed to the Old God of Ocean. Either version, her prayer was heard by the deity and her body began to dissemble. Her blood began to evaporate into glowing clouds that rained for seven years. Her bones hardened to form the crust while her flesh turned into soil with lives thriving on it. Her tears crystallized into seven Pearls. Gradually the lava died down. It took the earth seven hundred years to heal and in the 7100th Rola year, civilizations started to reclaim the earth again. Thus ended the Age of Britannia and began the Age of Hellenia.
The events depicting Samantha and the veilers are mostly dismissed as myths by academic authorities. Yet some scholars are still willing to admit the truth in these myths, since there are far too many records on the Pearls of Samantha. The Pearls are usually depicted as powerful relics or sources of knowledge in various historical documents. The Pearls were usually involved in important historical turning points, though they were always lost after these events. Therefore it is believed the Pearls have their own wills, or possibly the will of Samantha, to evade human. And many biologists believe the veilers are the prehistoric species of the whales. The whale oil possesses similar properties as the claimed properties of veiler blood in various myths, although the whales might be less intelligent than the veilers. And geological evidence has also suggested there was once a vigorous global earth plate movement. The Riskan magicka academy has also acknowledged the magical capability of the whales, and possibly veilers, that their voice could conjure certain magics. Yet all these speculations lack solid evidence to verify what actually happened during the end of the Britannian Age.
Paint, write and photos 