My parent's voices cut across my dream of leveling up, waking me up.

I blinked and made a noise as hunger began to gnaw at me.

Mom hugged me and attached me to herself, singing a song to me and cradling me in her arms.

The words seemed like gibberish to me for a split second, but then something inside me clicked. The lullaby mom was singing wasn't translated by the Soul-Song at all... because it was an Alanian song, one immediately recognized by Kopusha!

The song was a story, revealed to me stanza by stanza.

The Sons and Daughters of Alania rose up against the gods and built a mighty, prosperous Empire of great Citadels connected by skyship lanes and gateways between worlds. Through the abyss-gate Alanian Archmages brought back our fallen heroes, to march upon the vile enemies from the world of Andross. We thought the war won, but the enemy Archwizards had pulled the stars down from the sky and bathed our great cities in death. As centuries pass by, we, the Skyisle Sentinels, remember our legacy, a time when we stood as Gods and reached for the cosmos beyond. We are last. We are the keepers of the hearth, the last outpost, the last light that must never dim - Skyisle. Descend into the white city and reclaim your legacy when the curse-effulgence ends, children of Alania. Let your Soul-Song guide you home to... Tricameron.”

“Holy crap!” I blinked tears out of my eyes.

The song had struck a chord in the part of my soul that belonged to the Alanian Acolyte. Mom's pronunciation was a tiniest bit off, but otherwise the song was perfect. It was a chorus carried through centuries of darkness. There was something innately familiar about each stanza because the Alanian songs were designed to resonate across the soul connecting the singer and the listener with the power of the nearest Astral Engine.

I mulled the words.

The curse-effulgence which lasts centuries. Was the song talking about radiation from the fallout?

I felt a sense of inner peace settle over me, thanks to power drawn from the arcane obelisk via the Soul-Song. The Alanian Magocracy has fallen long ago, but its Astral Engines were still semi-functioning somewhere nearby, likely buried beneath the earth and a mountain of rubble, rearranged by the cataclysmic destruction of the Tricameron Citadel.

I wondered if mom even knew what she was singing about. She clearly wasn't a properly raised Alanian Sentinel nor even an Acolyte like Kopusha, because if she knew anything then she would not be making Vows to the local gods.

How many millennia has it been since the Magocracy? Was Tricameron less radioactive now? Could I reach it and reclaim the arcane soul-powered artifacts of the Magocracy? The centuries of darkness had clearly wiped away nearly all knowledge of the truth and wisdom from the local populace.

Such unfortunate things happened in history quite often. The ancient Greeks of Earth, for example, invented the aeolipile aka the Hero's engine, a bladeless radial steam turbine. Vitruvius, a Roman architect and engineer who lived in 1st century BC, described how aeolipile demonstrated physical properties of weather and laws of nature. The aeolipile steam engine was one of many genius, technological breakthroughs which were lost with the decay and fall of the Roman Empire. In fact, it took humanity over 1,800 years to remake the steam engine, thanks to a British inventor Thomas Newcomen.

Could I make a magitek steam engine for Skyisle, uplift the locals enough so that they would not be cowering in a cave from a dragon?

It was a lofty plan to look forward to. I didn't know anywhere enough about magic to start making artifacts.

“What are we going to do about our son's level, Cass?” My father asked when mom finished singing the lullaby.

“I don’t know. The Equality Overseer might find out eventually… he might try to take Dante away from us.” There was bitterness in my mom’s voice as she whispered the words back to dad.

“I’ll have to speak to the Elders. The Crafters Guild might be able to help us. We have rights! The Equality Order is relatively new in terms of...”

My parents continued to express their concerns about my questionable stats and what options they had in terms of dealing with the official church of Skyisle which was apparently "Equality" and not Ishira. It seemed that after the fall of the Magocracy the local gods started to squabble with each other for power. From their conversation I surmised that Skyisle now had two or more gods competing for the rights to consume the skills of the populace.