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Save Point: The Old New World

Somewhere In North America, 1500's

One of her earliest memories is of playing, literally, with the bronze keys of the clavichord and the skull to keep her company.

The skull is a great friend and likes to listen to her music, and she in return holds conversations with it and pats it on its polished surface. They found it in the sand dunes out back near the sea, which means presumably that is a much desiccated and well-shined ancestor, the family having been exotic imports to this land for a number of generations. The children of the native population are unaccountably scared of it, and when she holds it up so it can look through the window, they scream and run away. She can't see why, it's very friendly.

The native children are always like that. Sometimes her mother sends her with them to go through the forest and get stonepowder from the town, where it is delivered in big black ceramic jars from the nearby quarries that mine the ancient reefs. This is so her mother can make her fathers favourite drink, by dissolving it in the purple-coloured waters. Sometimes the quarrymen leave a nice fossil in the bottom of the jar for her to discover.

In the forest there is an ancient building that began long ago, built intimately around several trees, which has since its abandonment become even more closely a part of the forest. Plants and other vegetation have taken root through the boards of the floor, and curl around the timbers of the walls and roof. Nonetheless, it somehow retains its shape, and when travelling through the clearing, the native children run as fast as they can and keep as far away as possible, yelling that there is a terrible kuri living there, a moon-eyed beast.

She's always assumed that the word means some sort of large feral wolf or similar has made its lair there. Possibly she has misheard the word, however, because while it sounds like the word they use to describe the tame wolves in town, they also use it to mean the skull, when she holds it up to talk to them. Her father, who works at the hospice in town, has said that the natives are terrified for some reason of rooms without open windows, because then they will be unable to escape from the kuri if it comes in the night.

This fear of the kuri is not, however, without its uses. As long as she carries her friend the skull with her, she is quite safe. Her favourite place that she can go, but no-one else can, is the dead forest, which is actually a vast stand of petrified ancient plant life intruding amongst the natural forest, like trees without leaves. It has its own unique fauna different from anywhere else in the surrounding woods, because of the lack of cover, and some of the stone trees are decorated with carvings which she knows are called dendroglyphs, pictures-on-a-tree.

The native children say that they were carved by the elder ones thousands of years before, but there is no way of knowing whether they are actually quite recent, or were carved into the wood long ago when it was still soft and the trunks were still growing. The native children say many things but are mostly too scared to actually go look, so it's mostly just opinion.