The Post-Prologue Side Story

There was a tribe of people that lived on the edge of a deep canyon. Either side of this canyon was bordered by a wide flat mountain range infected with an evergreen virus. The canyon itself stretched deep into the planet into a black nothing, which the tribe had lovingly named "The Death". At night "The Death" would often creep invasively close to the canyon's edge, threatening to engulf any passers-by. Venturous members of the tribe could sometimes be seen sitting on the edge of the canyon and dangling their feet into it's enveloping darkness. The tribe and "The Death" co-existed peacefully.

The other half of the tribes interaction with the world around them dealt with the bears of the enveloping mountains. Each day a tribe representative would sit in a designated holy place outside the village and wait. After time had seemed to lapse into irrelevance, they would be surrounded by a multitude of ebony cloaked bears. 3 times the size of any bear you may be imaginging now, these giant Centurions would circle around the villager in a complex dance of alien design. An outside viewer might look upon this gathering and think it strange to see so many creatures in one place, but they wouldn't think any further on it, and they would miss the most important element. The bears were singing. They were singing the song of "The Death" and calling it to themselves. They wanted to feel it's emptiness and freedom once again.

The villagers had lived so near death for so long that they were in many ways dead themselves, and they had no real implication as to why this was important, but to many of the contemporary minds of their world, this was a most important fact indeed, but we will talk again of that later. Now, we must discuss a particular member of the village named Igo.

Igo was tall and whimsically skinny even for a member of the canyon-villagers who were themselves elegantly slender creatures. He was not particularly the brightest of the villagers, but he was particularly more dead than the rest of them. He had spent a majority of the darkest nights of his life venturing far and deep into "The Death" against the objections of his family and the village council, and while he had found nothing, nothing had also found him. Nothing held a deep clutch on Igo's soul and would eventually be the catalyst for a great change throughout time and space.