2046 or 1 Post Dissections. Two faces are nowhere to be seen. Faces that had always been bright now shine through their absence, faces lost to time, perhaps never to appear again.
“Where are the elders?” Reese asks.
“It seems that in the face of the cosmogonic change that occurred, amidst compressed blades of light cutting like diamonds and an unbearable roar, Daman and Grizzly sincerely set aside their own differences that kept them separated for so many years, and headed together but in the opposite direction from the rest of us as we were all certain that the Cave would protect us from these distortions. On their last imprint, over the fragmented rocky top, they were embracing, in tears, watching the reflection of the pure universe in the shattered waters of Anima Key’s trapped sea. They should have been further out, on the cliffs, but perhaps they were broken by the waves imprisoned within the Giant Dome. We search for them and find them nowhere but we discovered these new hierographics on the walls of the Great Cave! They had already been there!”
“They paint and then ran together,” Cerran, Berran and Roussan say softly.
They are not bε found anywhere but in those new Hierographics in the cave! The tribe falls silent.
“We are from now on, a mixed and decimated tribe. The pain for the loss of our companions is unbearable. In only two revolutions, our entire life changed. It is our priority to steal a little time and fall silent for them. They could not have gone that far, there appears to be no nearby fragment capable of pulling them. And yet, as souls, they might have escaped the Giant Dome, or perhaps they remain somewhere close.
We remember the words of the Elders as we behold painted the tales they gave us, their origin bound fast to the pirates.”
The Elders lead us to the last age of human-scale power in the Anima Key universe, where history still believed it could be controlled, before memory, myth, and post-humanity took over.
They were born into a world where lineage, land, and ritual still matter. They were innovators and keepers of power and wisdom.
Daman Purpura and Lavou practiced sovereignty through blood, continuity, and sacred right while Grizzly Indigo and Blanca taught survival through strength, territory, and endurance.
They inherit fragments of knowledge about the Anima Key, but only enough to fear it and not understand it.
1970. The beginning of authority decay.
The Elders remembered that war was not a conquest, but hospitality betrayed.
According to Daman’s wall scripts, the cave-dwellers arrived in the hinterland where he ruled, in two waves.
On the first wave came the three advisors, Keras, Veras, Rousas, and on the second wave arrived their leader, whose shadow is already heavy with silence.
Paraperas entered as an anomaly not bound by Elder codes and not loyal to lineage. She embodied post-moral survival. She will outright invalidate them first, but she will ineptly defeat the Elders.
Their inside conflicts become irrelevant in her presence.
Τhe Elders, ignorant of the deeper causes of this migration, offered land, supplies and time.
This act became the foundational mistake of the Elders’ history. “The distortion of prehistory,” as Daman called it, began there. The refugees’ own narrative spoke of injustice and betrayal by their former neighbors, the Anemaki, already planting the seed of future antagonism.
1980. The civil wars of the hinterlands set the Elders against the refugee pirates, the cave-dwellers. The Elder paradoxical fear betrayal yet cannot break the ritual of hospitality.
“For me, the hist’ry was writ… The old ones say that after their defeat, the cave-folk came in two waves. First came the band of the three counselors of Keras, Veras, and Rousas, and after them their chieftain herself, Paraperas.
Our forefathers knew not well the nature of the happenings that drove those pirates into exile, yet they showed trust and granted them land and stores, that they might find their feet again.
I named it the Forgery of Prehistory, for the refugees themselves spoke of the injustice and betrayal forced upon them by neighbors and sworn friends alike.
Through the next months or years, in the days of my own reign, let us say things went passably fair. The refugee pirates showed good intent and agreed to the codes of neighborly conduct we set forth, yet behind our backs they had already wrought, in utter secrecy, their designs of conquest.
I kept my doubts about their meek compliance, yet my officer then, Grizzlys, pressed that we must show tolerance for the peculiarities they bore. As our ancestors had done for so many generations, so too must we accept that we all shared neighboring roofs with Keras, Veras, Rousas, and their bloodline.”
1990. Elder memory becomes unreliable, and therefore powerful.
Behind compliance, the refugee pirates organize in absolute secrecy. The Elders interpret this retrospectively as proof of conspiracy and validation of their suspicions. But crucially no Elder ever admits they might not have understood what the refugees were actually fleeing from.
The world begins to crack, not physically yet, but psychologically.. The old balance breaks. The opposing camps clash over control of the Interior, the last stable ground of Greece. Power is no longer symbolic, it becomes militarized memory. The Elders fight not for the future, but to freeze time.
2000. The moment the Elders stop being rulers and become exiles with memory..
The civil war reignites, now no longer manageable. Add to the defeat in the civil war of the homeland, the diaspora of young men and the underground reign of the sadistic tyrant Paraperan, the Elders flee. Daman and Grizzly, with Lavou and Blank, abandon the Interior and take refuge on the deserted beach of Anima Key.
2005. The continuators of Anemaki.
“When we got together after our loss in the civil war, because of that scumbag Peran, we took our wives, Lavou and Blanca, and we run to the beach of Anima Key. Exiled after so many battles , we established our yaranka tambourine strongholds on the Big Tree and in the Small Cave. This was our symbolic inversion, the cave-dwellers once arrived as refugees and now the Anemaki inherit refuge themselves.
Here, I, Daman performed a great meaningful act, I came to show the Anima Key to my nephew Ari.”.