Terra Nova Research Base, Antarctica.
RAIN-897: “Queen Galathea’s Crown”
Annex: “On the Lost Kingdom and lost cities”
International relations are a pain in the neck. Interglobal relations, as we know them in the modern sense, are much worse. Having to deal with whatever strange concoction the current magical nations are working on, is a godless and thankless task. We have no record of peace talking between all the nations that ended with everyone happy and agreeing to whatever the meeting was for. Though we’ve managed to live in relative harmony, emphasis on “relative”, for the last three centuries, domestic threats and the looming potential war are on a common basis there in Thera. The belligerent race by excellence has to be the Fae, now stylized as “Holy Winged Kingdom” with the seat of power in Rosea and the Palace of the Thorn.
It is a known fact Queen Galathea is the eternal monarch of the kingdom, and has been since some point in the fourth millennium BCE. Reasons for it are vague and left vague on purpose, so I can’t dwell too much in them. Let’s just say she was the eldest daughter of a king living in the high Nile before the Old Egyptian Kingdom, and, after a civil war against her sister, she and her followers prayed to Demeter and were transformed from Ancient Ones to Fae, and took off to an undisclosed location where the lost kingdom is.
Side note. We, the magical race, have a preposterous ability of creating secret cities and, when they are not needed anymore, simply abandoned them and only keeping tabs on a handful of them. For example, the city of Lancaster in the southern France close to Nice lasted for almost two centuries, but the only record we have is of the day of its destruction and nothing more. People who’ve lived in Nihteard, Massachusetts, since the Schism, still have trouble keeping their own records straight on features regarding the city, as no one knows when Nihteard North Mental Asylum was created and abandoned, nor when Limestone House was carved into the side of Wolfsbane Point. We seem to have a multiplicity of examples like these. End of the side note.
Efforts in locating the lost kingdom ended always in disappointment or in an unnecessary loss of lives. The few records we have are from before the Schism of 1692 and are written in a mixture of hieroglyphics, demotic, Coptic, Sanskrit, and a series of still indecipherable dead languages. Even with the help of the Old Guard, comprised mostly of gods of former pantheons, whose exceptionalism in ancient cultures cannot be compared to the magical and human races, it’s been impossible to read some of the records properly. Asking for help to Queen Galathea herself, as she’s the only surviving member of the Fae Court of those times, has resulted in the kingdom closing frontiers every time the subject is brought up, so it’s been impossible.
The only phrase that we’ve managed to confirm in numerous translations is that the kingdom moved to the “land up-north, where the forest goes forever but the water doesn’t reach”. It sounds like a performative spell back from the times of “double bubble toil and trouble”, but that phrase is the only confirmation we’ve had from the court and the academic circles.
Unfortunately, “land up-north” in what is modern-day Sudan, could be anywhere in the countries of the northern coast of Africa, and pretty much everywhere in Central and Western Europe. The old kingdom, of which we have no name either, had interchange routes that went beyond the Mediterranean Sea and up to the English Channel. Even if the lost kingdom had been untouched for the last millenniums, which is a stretch in itself, we have more than eleven million square kilometres to search just in Europe and Egypt alone.
Most of the search was realized during the golden age of Egyptology from the late 18th century and the early 20th century, until the attention focused again in Egypt after the Carter Expedition and the opening of Tutankhamun’s tomb. Egypt as examined inch by inch, and so were other neighbouring countries, but with no chance on finding it. Reinterpretations of the phrase and a finer comb turned into isolated searches in other places. From the Hadrian Wall to Mecca, searches ended in disappointment, injury, and death.
Now, until this point, this is what you will find in common magical history books, including the ones provided by Thorn Editorial, which is the official editorial house of the Holy Winged Kingdom. However, most of those who read these reports are aware of the testimonial report based on the notes of Blaire Faraday in the formation days of the Terra Nova Base; therefore, know this is not the end of the story. If not, I recommend you read it in addition to these reports.
On October of 1915, Blaire A. Faraday, with the help or Sir Murad Joshi, published “New translations and the search for the lost kingdom of the Fae”. On it, the following line can be found: “The wording of the quote mentions a place where the water doesn’t reach, and we assume it has to be dessert; what if it isn’t?”. On the article, the thesis recalls old myths from the roman period, referring to an endless forest of clear skies somewhere in the Galia Narborensis, but it was buried under similar depictions in Britannia and the Goth regions in East Germania.
The article reached some select academics, due to the connections of Sir Murad, and a team on MI7 was deployed in the region. It was planned by Daedalus Athenida, but not given priority resources as the rationing during the war were making it harder than ever to hide secrets. Under the command of Staff Sergeant Victor Colin Holger, a British-American soldier living in London since 1909, the team was to be deployed in the continent and secure artefacts and important pieces of architecture to be retrieved on a later date. In the point of discovering the lost kingdom itself, nonetheless, the team of five people turned less successful. The squad, labelled as “golden fleece” in formerly classified reports, arrived to the region on 1918, were promptly fell out of reach and were declared missing a couple months later.
With the rediscovery of the main temple on October of 1923 by Blaire Faraday, Iggy Eklund and Dr. Tang Zhu, MD., this building seems to be the last remain of the lost kingdom, but we’re been unable to reach the place in the following years. We haven’t lost hope, but it’s getting increasingly harder to reach the area, since the magical decay seems to have closed the forest in almost all entry points by the late 1990s.
Ariel Bonheur, Chief Archivist.
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