THE REDISCOVERY OF CUSINA

Write about a lost city in your world that was rediscovered. What was found inside? What is its impact on modern life?

Field Entry and Observational Narrative of Nepsun Kriel, the Traveler

The cliffs of Mesa Cusina had always been empty.

Nepsun had walked their windswept ledges a hundred times in his life, carrying goods across the coast and shadow-walking between the quieter folds of the world. The mesa was barren, its imprint unmistakable — the ghostly shape of a once-great city stamped into the land like a memory pressed into clay.

But today, as storm clouds folded low over the sea and the light bent strangely at the edges of his vision, Nepsun felt something shift. The air rippled. The wind stilled. The world paused.

And the mesa was no longer empty.

He drew a sharp breath and wrote the first line in his travel journal:

I should not be seeing this.

Cusina stands before me.

A city that should not exist shimmered in full, impossible clarity. Towers of glass and stone rose from the mesa’s crown. Waterfalls carved frozen ribbons down their sides — not flowing, but suspended, caught in the moment before motion returns. Pools beneath them glimmered in still, translucent perfection.

Nepsun approached slowly, boots silent on dust that had no right to exist. His shadow stretched long beside him, unsettled. The boundary between realms here was thin — thinner than he had ever felt.

The Traveler has found the Lost City,

but I do not believe it meant to be found.

He stepped through the silent gates.

No guards.

No voices.

No movement.

Only the impression of life, paused.

Stalls still stood arranged in tidy rows, their awnings collapsed under centuries of dust. A child’s wooden toy lay abandoned against a fountain rim. Chairs on a café patio remained pulled back from tables, as though their occupants had just risen.

Nepsun swallowed hard.

“Where did you all go?” he murmured, and the city offered only the soft echo of his own voice.

He continued, writing as he walked — a habit born equally of warning and reverence:

The waterfalls do not fall.

The pools remain fresh.

No bodies. No signs of struggle.

The city simply… departed.

A whisper of unease crawled along his spine — not fear, but trespass. Cusina was not ruined. Cusina was waiting.

And at its heart, exactly as legend promised, stood the Library.

The Great Library of Cusina rose like a cathedral of thought — three sweeping stories, crowned by slender spires and veined with crystal supports. Dust softened its sharp lines, but it remained breathtaking.

Nepsun placed a clawed hand on the massive doors.

“Let me enter,” he whispered.

The doors answered by opening on their own.

Inside: stillness.

Shelves soared upward into shadow, every scroll and tome perfectly arranged. Lectern lamps stood cold but unbroken. Quills sat in ink pots that had dried in strange, perfect curls. A ring of reading chairs bore faint depressions in the dust — reminders of those who once sat there, engaged in debate.

No half-written manuscripts.

No discarded notes.

No personal effects.

It was a library abandoned mid inhale.

Nepsun walked forward slowly. The scales along his arms prickled. The small spines at the back of his neck lifted like hackles. Something was present — not a being, not a ghost, but… memory. The room hummed with distant echoes, faint vibrations like the after-resonance of countless voices.

A whisper brushed his ear.

Not spoken.

Remembered.

He turned sharply, throat tight.

Nothing moved.

Still, he wrote:

The Library lives without its scholars.

An echo-realm or stasis pocket… I cannot tell.

But something remembers they were here.

He found a scroll laid out on a desk — unrolled, pristine. Its title was written in a script older than any living scholar, yet Nepsun felt the meaning settle over him:

The Veins Beneath the Cosmos: A Treatise on Dimensional Latticework

His pulse quickened.

This was knowledge no archive in the waking world possessed. Knowledge that vanished with Cusina itself.

He read.

He studied.

Time grew thin and untrustworthy.

Finally — reluctantly — he rolled the scroll to take with him.

The air fractured.

A ripple of cold fire shimmered across the far wall, and a figure stepped through as though emerging from the boundary between thought and starlight.

His eyes struck first.

Not gold.

Not amber.

But the deep bloom of a space nebula — swirling blue and violet in balanced harmony, ancient and knowing. In them lived the hush of interstellar distance and the weight of forgotten galaxies.

Ash.

Eternus of Mind, Lorekeeper of Lost Cities.

The Fox-God himself.

Nepsun froze.

Ash regarded him with an expression that hovered somewhere between amusement and sorrow. The nebular hues in his eyes did not lean toward mischievous blue nor wrathful violet. They remained steady — balanced — as though the moment required perfect clarity.

“You read well, Traveler,” the god said softly.

“Few mortals ever have.”

Nepsun bowed his head. “I meant no trespass.”

“You trespassed,” Ash replied gently, “the moment you tried to leave with what belongs to Cusina.”

His gaze drifted to the scroll in Nepsun’s hands. The nebula in his eyes pulsed faintly — not in anger, but recognition.

“But,” Ash continued, “you found the city because the city allowed you to find it. And you read because it wished to be read again.”

Nepsun’s throat tightened. “Then… may I keep it?”

Ash stepped closer and placed a hand over the scroll.

“No.”

A single word — quiet, absolute.

The scroll dissolved into dust and reformed instantly on the desk where Nepsun had first found it.

Ash lifted his chin toward the doors.

“You may return whenever you wish. Walk these halls. Read these works. But nothing leaves Cusina.

Not a scroll.

Not a page.

Not a whisper.”

Nepsun nodded slowly. “I will honor your terms.”

Ash smiled — a thin, knowing curve.

“I am certain you will, Nepsun Kriel.

Because you, too, understand the weight of knowledge.”

And just as silently as he appeared, the god vanished — leaving only the faintest shimmer of purple-blue luminescence where his eyes had last been.

Nepsun closed his journal with a slow exhale.

End of Entry.

Cusina sleeps.

But I will return.