A Challenge to the Deep.

Harmonic 0, Node 032, Overtone 102Hz.

The following was found written in the private journal of the first person to travel into the Mar from Oiler’s Pass in 32ATR. The journal was recovered with her return in 138ATR and is now stored in the Pass’s primary history museum. Despite her safe return, her name remains lost to time, and she is most often referred to as Challenge to the Deep.

TRANSCRIPT BEGINS

They told me that I am standing at the edge of the world. I can see that, can see the place where it fades off, where the rest of the sky crashes into the ground and splits into a million pieces like shards of glass - but for some reason, it doesn’t seem to matter. My mother broke a glass window when she was young and her grandmother told her to pick up the pieces and put them back together. I don’t know why I’m thinking of that story now, but that seems to be the nature of this place, this time. Sometimes it’s stained glass, sometimes it’s mirrors, you know?

I have with me all the food and supplies I may need for the next three to six months - longer if there’s anything out there I can hunt. I said goodbye to my mom and my little sister, left my brother a note. I know I’ll see them again, it’s just a question of if it’s back here or out there. It’s reassuring anyways.

The maps we found in the library tell us the world has no edge - that it goes until it wraps back around to the start.

I am going to find the point where the voyage becomes a return journey.

Transcriber's note: A rather short entry here, and not particularly descriptive, but the Pass is...protective of their history, and their museum staff is not inclined to indulge passing historians. This is partly becuase of how bold the Pass' claim is: to state that it was one of their citizens that first began to see the Mar as obstacle and not death sentance is to grant them a massive amount of power in the general landscape of myth in our collective history. All evidence points to their claim being true, it is, at the very least, the first recorded journey into the Mar for the sake of exploration alone.

The myth of the Challenge to the Deep is an alluring one for those of us who have dedicated our lives to Mar exploration. She was the very first of us to look at that place and feel a call, a compulsion, instead of a fear, to attempt to winnow out its truth for the fact of the matter alone. And though this fragment is relatively small, it bears distinct fingerprints of those that are compelled by the Mar in the same way: an unwillingness to provide description outside metaphor, a note of the survivlalist about them, a family left behind, a belief that the Mar holds some secret that must be discovered. I know many Mar-divers, all of them fit this description nearly to the letter.

It is tempting, then, to try to allow this to become part of the mythos of the Mar-diver in the same way that the Pass incorporates it into their own history, to imagine a common thread. I must warn against this to any fellow Mar-divers reading along, but I cannot claim that I have never fallen victim to the urge. It's a nice idea, isn't it? The Mar as Mobius strip, returning you always home.