 | Name | Anecdota Septentrionalis (I) |
| Type (Ingame) | Quest Item | |
| Family | Book, Anecdota Septentrionalis | |
| Rarity |  | |
| Description | An ancient Remurian scroll you accidentally discovered in the ruins. There is no way to verify the truth of the words within. |
Item Story
| From time immemorial, those respected poets, playwrights, and historians have loved to write that which is utterly absurd and have the temerity to call it their real experiences. Anyone who cares to look can tell it's a pack of lies, and still, they insist on extravagantly embellishing everything while bending over backward to maintain a facade of sincerity, swearing that "I saw it all with my own eyes! Not a word of it is false!" as though they cared not an iota how they would be ridiculed in the ages to come. For example, Xanthus Talassii filius wrote of his meetings with the barbarians in the north, speaking of how they used glass and platinum to build their prosperous polis amongst the mountains, calling their king a "knight." He even claimed that they have seventy-two legions, each comprised of 66,600 soldiers, all armed with weapons forged of the purest of sourcewater, brighter even than the crystals of Machimos. In reality, he has not in his life even set foot outside of Capitolium. Forget barbarians, he's probably never even seen barbecued eel! However, it must be said his stories are interesting at least. As such, to satiate my own vanity, I felt I too must write something for posterity. However, I have no experiences worth mentioning and am unlike those respectable folks who name the cock and bull stories they concoct "true accounts." So I will freely and honestly admit that everything I write is completely, utterly fabricated. After all, since I've admitted it up front like this, nobody can call me a fraud. Anyway, the events I shall now commit to paper have never been heard of before, nor experienced by anybody, and are nothing more than pure nonsense that I have fabricated with no basis in reality. It is not more truthful than tales of "Lochknights," so you need not believe any of it. Thus, we weighed anchor and set sail, traveling ever northward, passing through the territory of the barbarians, with a tailwind spurring us on. Our goal was simple: To see just what the edge of the ocean looks like. According to Quinctilius, the High Sea ends in impassable waterfalls in every direction, but this was, evidently, utterly wrong: after all, did not the respected Iuvenalis also write of the "faraway kingdom in the north"? Anyway, the farther north we went, the less land we saw. At first, there were still clusters of islands and archipelagos covering the sea's expanse, but later there were little more than tiny bare isles dotting the waves remaining. A few days of sailing later, even those islets vanished, leaving nothing but boundless blue. Fortunately, we had brought sufficient supplies of fresh water and food, and were in no danger of dying from thirst or starvation. We sailed for 79 days without sight of land. We were originally planning on turning back at that point, but to our surprise, on the 80th day, in the middle of the ocean, we were attacked. A group of bandits riding on the backs of giant birds blocked our path and asked us for potatoes. If you wish to know just how gargantuan those birds were, I can tell you that each of their feathers was as thick as the Ocean Pillars. With absolutely no hope of resisting, all we could do was fall to our knees and pray to Sebastos to deliver us, to let us live another day, and we swore to never again travel so recklessly, or write baffling believe-it-or-not travelogues. But in a flash, faster than words could describe, warriors riding Blubberbeasts surged up from beneath the sea's surface, each Blubberbeast larger than fifty Sumpter Beasts, their entire bodies draped in armor made of crystals, the scales of dragons, and cabbages, and they tore into the massive birds, biting them until they cried for their mommies and daddies, and soon they fled without a trace. It was only then that we noticed that the appearance of those knights was completely different from that of us humans. They were more like bipedal vishaps. With those eyes of his, glowing with their strange light, the leader of the knights spent some time sizing us up, before casually speaking with winged words: "Dear guests, are you merchants from Serenum?" We had not the slightest clue what kind of place "Serenum" was, so we told him the whole story, that we were seafarers from Remuria, and wanted to see what the end of the ocean looked like. |
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