The Obelisk

Around 2510 a village called Great Question is standing next to the Ravana Ruins, and has been for some time, and nothing has happened.

Then something does.

It is not a share. Nobody in Great Question becomes immortal. What reaches them comes through as illness, spreading in a way illness does not, and it very nearly finishes the village. The survivors do not know what they have been next to. There is nobody left in the world who could have told them.

The last person who knew what was in that ground has been in it for centuries.

The village does not recover so much as persist.

A few stay. Newcomers do not, for reasons they tend not to put into words. It is the first time since Severin Falkenrath went into the earth that the thing under the world has touched anyone, and it is recorded, when it is recorded at all, as an outbreak.

Eight years later the Frangfurder Sea opens and something comes out of it.

The Obelisk is not built and it does not arrive. It erupts, from the ground, at the centre of the sea, and then it is simply there: a cylinder, enormous, doing nothing, with a coastline rearranged around the fact of it.

It makes the earth move. It pulls water into tsunamis. It puts out radiation at a level that has never once been survived.

Everyone who has gone to look at it has died, on the site or within a day of leaving it.

That is the complete documented history of contact with The Obelisk. Not a range of outcomes with a bad end. One outcome.

It stands near where New Cliffhanger used to be, which was the settlement that tried hardest to keep a balance with the land it was on, and which had all five shares of the Curse of Ravana underneath it the entire time.

The record notes the position. The record does not draw the line.