The lightborn coughs in the dark empty room, knowing his vision would remain unclear even in the bright hours of Hikari’s watch. For his eyes are bleary from the aching pain in his chest and endless coughs in his throat. His head is drummed by this curse of a plague that has stricken his village and killed all but him. He waits for someone to come but knows no one will, for his home is far to the north of the Sol Navis, capital of light, and too far to the east for aid from the other villages, lying just inside the border of the accursed Devil’s Hideout. But they wouldn’t help if they knew of the sickness in any case. The only people to come here are the forsaken children when food is scarce or abominable creatures that come from a pair of lightborn and another. Few survive for long as the foxes with too many eyes are ever watching for the vulnerable.  

There once was a man who was born quite crooked. His crookedness was not a fault of an action or deed but of the snail on his back. No one knew why the snail was on his back, but it seemed connected, so they let it be. The man and the snail grew together. As the man shot up, the snail weighed down, and as the man grew wide, the snail grew thick. They were so in sync it seemed bound to be. 

Mai Koyo stares upon the walls of his people, an adaptive race of ever-changing skin and ever-thinking minds. The walls circle the city atop the holy mountain where his ancestors settled long ago. Each segment is a piece of their history painted with the richness of their civilization and growth. It tells the tale of their people from its birth and following separation from the foul enslaving barbari, a people of ten eyes on their chest, back and face, continue on to tell of their development into its own culture, earning itself the name of the roswijać. The barbari bare their foul teeth, jagged and cruel, as they surround the party of roswijać children separated in the chaos of the great slave escape. Their blades, spears and sticks are poised amongst the yellowed grasslands, with anywhere to hide far away in the background.