Heading down through the tunnels, corridors and catacombs that wind their way beneath Ascacia the fortunate traveler may chance upon the cavernous entryway to Ekrekes, last extant city-ruin of the Holy Xoulic Imperium. Amid the cracked streets and crumbling temples one might discover a few navigable passages burrowing down further to the remains of the Iron Parliament, once the civic and cultural capital of the glittering Republic of Scales, whose massive shadowtowers and lavaducts still loom over the grave of that once-great civilization. Below these, the cautious explorer may encounter still more antique lands: the horned fortress of Akkeska, the nameless tomb-city of the lizard kings, and the ruined encampments of the skullfields, overrun with the eartheaters, tunnelworms and armored theophage larvae which have long prevented archaeologists from digging further into the past.

By all accounts the Xoulics who carved these passages haven’t set foot in them for over six thousand years. With the failure of each tunnel-city or cavern empire, the fork-tongued people burrowed upward to begin again and again, shedding civilizations as casually as they shed their skin, until they finally broke through to the surface to begin their long exile in the sky. Such a refusal to even briefly revisit the lands of one’s past has often been interpreted as a cultural taboo, but the fork-tongues’ relationship with their history appears too final to warrant such a description: as the Xoulic philosopher Keskres bluntly put it, “The past is under us, and full of worm-dung.”

Which is not to say that the Pathways have been left abandoned altogether. For centuries they served as a haven for smugglers, spies, saboteurs and magnetopirates, from real and fictional Ven’rom’es cells to the UPRCFR’s fearsomely eccentric Underground Underground. Remnants of the Ctjn military also made their some of their last stands here in the final days of that empire; many of their fossilized remains have been admirably preserved by the Ascacian Pathways Trust.

—Recorder 3000-21