Lost Qokeen

Lost Qokeen is set around a quarter century before the events of Mage Errant. It is, in great part, inspired by Wolf Hilbertz’s Autopia Ampere, one of the most brilliant, gorgeous utopian cities never built- or in its case, grown.

(And hey, I've got this one for you at the beginning of the month, instead of the end!)

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Everyone knows there are no cities at sea. No floating cities, nor any cities built in the depths. Anastis’ seas are too harsh, too vicious.

And yet the stories of Qokeen persist. 

Most scholars will promptly dismiss Qokeen as a myth, of course. They’ll point to the myriad failures of archmages, nations, and great powers to build cities on the seas of Anastis. The tides are too great, the storms too powerful. 

A few scholars, however, ones who have studied the issue in greater depth, will say something a little different— that Qokeen did exist once, that it was one of the countless failed sea cities of the past.

It’s funny, though. All of those scholars make wildly different claims about which of the failed sea cities Qokeen was. None of their accounts match in the least- not the date, not the location, not the structure of the city. That’s part of what first got me interested, what began my pursuit of Qokeen. 

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The usual tale of Qokeen goes something like this:

There was once a brilliant architect who devoted her life to her work. She designed great towers in Lemmanen, living baobab sculpture tenements in Sica, cliff-face towns in Highvale. 

She loved her family, but as is often the case with architects, loved her work more. Like so many architects, she thought her work could change the world— thought that if she could design the perfect city, it would in turn perfect humanity. 

A common enough belief among architects. And, like so many other architects, she was, not to put it too finely, a terrible mother and spouse, who neglected her family in favor of her work.

And when that family died when two great powers battled for rule over her home in Ruhn, all she had left was her work and her grief, and out of those two things was born Qokeen.

In her grief, she built a floating wooden city far out to sea, fashioned of hundreds of ships lashed together, where people might live safe from the wars of the great powers.

And, less than a year after it was built, Qokeen was torn apart by a battle between two of the seagoing great powers, all its inhabitants lost save the architect herself. Now she roams the world eternally looking for a place to build her city safe from war.

That tale is, of course, completely wrong.

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I wish my story had some epic beginning, some grand motivation, some tragic past.

It doesn’t, though. I was a rather boring historian, with a large number of dry treatises on the movement of trade routes over the centuries. I was no orphan with a mysterious birthmark— I was the middle child of seven, with more aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, nephews, and assorted elderly relatives who all went by cute nicknames, to the point where I wasn’t entirely sure which were my actual grandparents, than I could possibly count. I can’t even claim that I was overlooked and forgotten in the absurd bustle of my family’s compound in southern Tsarnassus— it was quite the loving environment. My family regularly visited me at Lemannen’s university when I got a position there, and, bafflingly, they even read my dry historical treatises with excitement when they were published.

They were the best possible family to have, except for the purposes of being the hero of a grand adventure. 

It was in the course of researching my most recent trade treatise that I stumbled on Qokeen’s trail. I’d found a two hundred year old cargo manifest that someone had used the back of to pen a letter to their illicit lover. (Or, perhaps the trade manifest was written on the back of a love letter, but that would just be strange and sad.)

There was one particular line of the manifest that caught my attention immediately. It had listed nearly two tons of goods— mostly cloth and foodstuffs— being shipped to Qokeen, with an expected shipment in return of, strangely, limestone.

I thought I’d misread it at first, or that it was some sort of joke, but the name refused to change no matter how long I stared at it.

So I started tracking down historians and scholars who knew something of Qokeen. Easy enough at Lemannen’s great university.

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My dry academic quest took me months. My dry trade treatise was soon forgotten as I pursued this one strange, solitary clue. I assigned less homework to my students, so that I’d have less grading to get in the way of my research. I even sold or gave away many of my birds— though I kept Grey, of course.

If the scholars I’d consulted had all dismissed Qokeen, I’d have lost my interest in the pursuit. If the small group that had believed it had once existed had all agreed which failed sea city had inspired it, I’d likewise have lost interest.

Instead, they disagreed wildly about the original Qokeen. Some of the scholars claimed it had been a city of lashed-together ships, like in the children’s tale. Others claimed it had been a great city of ice, floating in the northern reaches. Others still claimed it was a city of woven, living seaweed.

None of those claims were particularly unrealistic— there had been attempts to build floating cities in all those forms before, and many others as well.

There were estimates of its origin dating back over a century before the fall of Ithos, to estimates two centuries after its fall.

My cargo manifest was dated a hundred years later than any of them. 

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I am an unquestionably skilled scholar, but I won’t pretend I’m some great genius, capable of solving a historical puzzle that had stumped countless before me on insight alone. 

I wasn’t even the first to solve it, though I wouldn’t figure that out until much later.

No, I was just the first to think to approach the Kaen Das family for help. 

The great family of storm-mages weren’t particularly known for their scholarship, nor having a great library. Most scholars would, when seeking out lost pieces of history, beg for access to Keayda’s library, or the library at Skyhold, or even my own university’s library, which was third only to the aforementioned on the continent.

The library at Stormseat wasn’t anything to be ashamed for, but it would never be one of the great research libraries of the continent. Half of it had been stolen from Yldive, as an insult to the former strength of that city and as proof of the ascendancy of Ras Andis, and half of it had been accumulated over the span of the Kaen Das family. 

I traveled to Ras Andis on what amounted to a whim. There wasn’t much more to my plan than the idea that if anyone knew the secrets of the sea, it would be the family that produced the greatest storm mages alive.

The trip took months. I took a sabbatical from the university, but with me I took with me only Grey, some clothes, and an excessive amount of research materials. 

Thankfully, I proved resistant to seasickness, and Grey proved quite popular with the crews of the various ships we took. The little crow spent most of the trip shamelessly begging for scraps or teasing the ship’s cats. He only got in trouble on one ship, and that was when he stole a captain’s earring. 

I eventually persuaded him to give it back. You’d think being a bird mage would help me control the little feathery idiot, and said captain certainly blamed me for the incident, but animal affinities are among the subtlest of magics. Strengthening or healing Grey, I could do. Seeing from his eyes, I could also do. Communicate with him? I could also do that, though it certainly wasn’t making conversation with him, like stories of animal mages would have you believe.

Keep Grey from making a nuisance of himself? Not a chance in the world.

The sea voyage was, in fact, remarkably uneventful. Grey and I were stranded for a week in Sica by a great storm— Ephyrus, the great flying jellyfish who dominated the storms of southeastern Ithos, operated by its own bizarre instincts and urges, and had little concern for trade or schedules. Grey and I spent those two weeks exploring the countless living baobabs the city was grown out of, most sculpted into the shape of living creatures, each filled with homes and apartments. Most of the trees had been grown into the form of men and women, but at least a third were in the forms of gorgons and naga, dragons and sphinxes, and even some creatures I suspected weren’t even real. 

And as much as the trees had grown to resemble people there, the people had grown to resemble trees. Many wore clothes of living bark, soft as cotton. Others wore armor of living wood. Some had their hair replaced with living vines, and others yet had replaced entire limbs with those of wood. 

Sicans have always been more comfortable altering themselves than most are. I’ve even heard rumors that alongside merging the body with plants, that the Sicans have taken alchemical modification of the body to levels even surpassing Havath. 

A dangerous game, that, and not one most survive long.

I could write an entire book on the countless wondrous cities along the coast— at least, where there were cliffs for them to rest atop, for no-one sane would build a city anywhere else along the shore. The tides would wash them away anywhere else, for they rose higher than most buildings would. The great beaches and mudflats between the cliffs were far too dangerous for anyone to live on. None compared to Sica for me, though. Even Tsarnassus itself paled in comparison. Though, to be fair, I never stopped at Zophor, and I’ve heard wonders of that lich-city.

The most astonishing sight in those months at sea, however, came as we sailed through the Shattered Isles.

A passing Radhan ship had informed us that the Silent Straits were unsafe, that the Listener’s demesne was blooming. So we took the longer, more southerly route.

It was two days into the Shattered Isles that the captain declared us lost. He’d spent decades running the route from Sica to Ras Andis, and knew the Shattered Isles far better than most, but on the dawn of the second day, he declared himself utterly bewildered. We were surrounded by dozens of rocky, craggy islands, ones that we’d not seen in the night somehow. 

After a few hours, the captain was growing desperate enough that he had considered asking me to use my magic to call seabirds to me to scout around us.

That was when the islands started moving.

There was panic on the ships at first. I have to admit, to my shame, that I was among those panicked, convinced we were about to be crushed by the mad, moving rocks around us. 

It was only when the rocks changed color, then vanished, only to be replaced by psychedelic fields of a thousand rippling colors that the captain realized what had happened and calmed us.

We had sailed among a school of leviathans.

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I must admit, I remained nervous for some time. Though I knew that leviathans were gentle creatures who never attacked ships, and had even been known to shield them from storms with their bulk, seeing animals whose length was best measured in leagues was a deeply humbling experience. 

Leviathans are, in form, akin to cuttlefish— long, oblong bodies, with short fins wrapping around them, and dozens or hundreds of tentacles protruding from the front, obscuring the mouth. Leviathans have astonishing camouflage— they’re able to alter the color of their skin to a degree unrivaled by any other creature, hence why they were able to disguise themselves as rocky islands so effectively. I’ve even heard of them going effectively invisible before in various ship’s logs I’ve read in my studies of sea trade. 

I had never expected to see this many of them, or see them this close.

The leviathans escorted us for the entire morning. Their slightest movement should have swamped the ship, but the seas around them seemed unnaturally gentle. Magic, one would assume, but even the ship’s water mages didn’t know for sure. 

Great clouds of seabirds orbited overhead— they nested atop the leviathans, keeping them clean of parasites. The leviathans never fully submerged once grown, so they made for ideal nesting grounds for the birds. 

Each of the great beasts was an entire ecosystem to themselves.

No one has ever communicated successfully with one of the gentle giants, but few doubt their sentience. Most experts on the matter that I’ve read believe that the strange rippling patterns of color that often cover the sides of the leviathans are some form of communication, but not even Galvachren claims to understand any of it, and he often claims knowledge that others lack.

Leviathans fear nothing— only their newborns are vulnerable to anything, and only the maddest of krakens would make a pass at one. Nothing else would even make the attempt.

Well, perhaps some of the abominations rumored to live in the deeps, but all anyone knows of those are rumors— Ampioc and the other giant octopuses, who are the sea-dwellers best able to communicate with those of us on land— seldom offer many details. We do know that not even the worst of the things in the deep will go after an adult leviathan, though.

The most alarming part of the morning was when one of the smaller leviathans— this one no more than a league in length, likely no more than a century or two old— decided to play a game with us. It shaped its tentacles into a great tunnel ahead of us. The ship’s masts easily passed underneath the upper tentacles, seawater dripping down on us like rain. And though I couldn’t see it, I’m sure the keel floated above the lower tentacles with room to spare.

Finally, as we ventured deeper into the Shattered Isles, the leviathans seemed to lose interest, and turned away southward. 

I wondered how far they would go. There were a few isolated islands and archipelagos to our south, but beyond that, nothing to the icy southern regions of Anastis, and those were far more hostile than the north. Only three expeditions have ever returned from there, most of their crew-members dead or dying of the strange wasting sickness that rules those frozen waters.

Perhaps expeditions from one of the other continents have returned from there knowing more, but we have tragically little trade with the other half of the world— our lonely little continent is a backwater with little of interest, so far as the great cities and empires of Gelid, the Cloudspine, and the other crowded continents of that half of the world are concerned. 

As we sailed away, I watched the leviathans drift away, exchanging indecipherable messages in more colors than I had ever known existed.

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Ras Andis was everything I hoped. The Kaen Das family readily agreed to my request to browse their archives, asking only in return that I tutor some of their youngsters while I was there. One of them, intimidatingly enough, was the daughter of Ilinia herself— but for all the girl was a fiery, independent sort, she was a diligent and respectful student.

If, at least for no other reason than out of hope I would let her play with Grey, who of course thrived on the attention, and the treats she brought him.

My research was far more fruitful than I could have ever hoped. I don’t think anyone realized what a treasure-trove the Stormseat archives are.

I hope, for their sake, that none do after me. 

Within a few weeks, I had already pieced together the bones of the truth from old trade manifests and ship’s logs. Within a few months, I’d fleshed them out entirely.

The scholars couldn’t agree about which Qokeen had been the source of the legend because there had been multiple Qokeens, dating back centuries. 

There had been an Qokeen woven of living seaweed, anchored to the seabed near Yldive, fifty years after the fall of Ithos, that rose and fall with the tides. A particularly fierce storm had torn it loose from the seabed then dashed it apart near the cliffs less than a year after its construction, though the population had thankfully been evacuated beforehand. 

There had been an Qokeen seventy-five years before the fall of Ithos, a great floating ice city far to the north, that the Ithonians had planned to use as part of a northern trade route to Gelid and the Cloudspine and the rest of the world. That Qokeen had fallen prey to a mighty ice-lich who had fashioned an iceberg into her demesne, and who had no tolerance for others intruding into the waters she roamed. Ithos never attempted another sea city after that.

There had been an Qokeen a hundred and fifty years after the fall of Ithos, fashioned of stone, of all things. Not anchored to the seabed, but actually floating! It was an immense floating ziggurat of pumice, the lightest of stones. Pumice is a volcanic rock filled with holes, which gives it a density lower than water— it can take years for the water to fill the tiny holes and steal pumice’s buoyancy. I’ve seen pumice-rocks used in public baths in Tsarnassus, and when dropped in the water, they bob along the surface quite happily. The pumice city’s underside bore a great basalt counterweight to keep the ziggurat stable. Great enchantments had been carved into the stone to keep the pores in the pumice from ever sealing. 

This last one survived almost four years before vanishing. No one had any answers as to what happened to it, and the dragons that had funded the project had apparently done an excellent job at covering it up— I’m still not sure how the Kaen Das family acquired the copy of the report they had, which far predated their reign.

I found nearly a dozen Qokeens, along with many other attempts at floating cities I suspected of being Qokeens. Every possible way of building a sea-city had been attempted under the name Qokeen, or so it seemed.

Every way but one, at least. While the city built of lashed-together ships had been attempted, of course, it had always been a miserable failure, and it had never been done under the name Qokeen. I couldn’t help but appreciate the irony that it was the very thing Qokeen had never done that was what the reincarnating city had become best known for.

Most exciting of all, though, was when I found my Qokeen. That Qokeen dated later than any of them, from three centuries after the fall of Ithos. Though I had nothing to do with its construction, and was born well over a century after its fall, even now I feel oddly possessive of it.

It was, in its own way, stranger by far than any other Qokeen. It had been founded, bizarrely, by a group of lightning mages, who had apparently found a way to use lightning to grow limestone from seawater. They would plant thin metal rods or meshes into shallow seabed, then channel lightning into them continuously. I confess I don’t understand precisely how it works, but according to the document I found— a letter to a prospective investor in the project— there are countless bits of dissolved stone floating in every drop of seawater. It sounds a bit strange to me, but it clearly worked.

My Qokeen was built atop a seamount, one that nearly surfaced at low tide. It took the form of a spiral, like a seashell laid on its side. 

It was new land grown half a hundred leagues out to sea. It must have been beautiful- every building grown of the same limestone, each home and business a seashell spiral of its own. A city out to sea whose main export was limestone, in quantities greater than any quarry.

It died a violent death to one of the great powers of the deep. A kraken, even more paranoid than normal for her violent, xenophobic species, became convinced that the land dwellers intended to replace all the seas with land, and used its magic to awaken the long dormant seamount, destroying the city in a great volcanic cataclysm. In the three days of quakes that preceded the eruption, most of the city’s population fled.

There wasn’t a single attempt to rebuild Qokeen after that. Not that I could discover.

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I spent a few more weeks delving the Stormseat libraries, seldom even taking a break to explore the majestic gardens and ponds surrounding the twisting, chime-like towers. I regret that, now, for I’ll never get another chance to do so.

I felt such triumph in those weeks. I had, I believed, made the greatest step towards unearthing the truth about Qokeen that anyone had ever made. I tried to keep humble— I knew that I’d uncovered what I had by sheer chance, merely by consulting a resource other historians had thought unworthy of their time. Any decent researcher could have done it.

But none of them had. It was me, and I knew beyond a doubt that I’d made my career.

There were, to be sure, mysteries still to be solved. I didn’t know for sure why there had been so many Qokeens. It could, perhaps, have been coincidence, as improbable as that was. Or each Qokeen could have been named for the last Qokeen, in a great chain of ambition stretching across the centuries. 

I didn’t think so, however.

Each of the Qokeens I could prove, save the first, shared a certain… something. A commonality of purpose, of language. Manifestos sharing a certain artistic temperament, declaring a refuge, an escape, from the brutality and violence of the continent, of the constant battles between the great powers. 

They also shared a certain mysteriousness in their funds. While I’d found records of attempts funded by dragons, by merchant cooperatives, and more, there always seemed to be gaps in the records, as though someone else was funding Qokeen as well.

I became convinced of the existence of a secret society funding each new Qokeen. Who kept learning from every failure, keeping the dream alive.

I hypothesized— rightfully, as it turned out— that it had been founded in the chaos of the collapse of the Ithonian Empire, that architects and mages in those violent years had revived the Qokeen project first started by the Empire. Rather than a tool of trade and empire, however, it would be a place of peace, of artistic vision. An escape for those who sought a life of quiet and beauty.

I hypothesized- this time wrongfully— that following the disaster that ended my Qokeen, my wonderful great seashell of a city, that secret society had finally collapsed, its dream given up for good. That the cruel realities of our world, the endless violent churn of its politics, the constant battles for dominance of the great powers, had finally broken their will to go on.

I often wish I had been wrong, that their will had been broken, that they had finally given up.

It was a foolish assumption on my part. A group of artists, of visionaries, that had already lasted centuries, seen a dozen or more of their cities fall? That should have spoken to me of how powerful their dream was. I should have known they would not simply have given up.

There was one other reason that might have caused them to fall from the historical record, after all, one I never gave credit to until it was too late.

That they might have succeeded. That they might have finally built their utopia, and that it yet lived, hiding itself away from the world.

I should have never gone back to sea.

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I took passage on a Radhan ship on my return. My passage cost more, yes, but would be far swifter, and oh was I eager to share my findings. I planned to compile my findings into book form on the voyage back, to rush into print on my return. I was already dreaming of the speeches, the accolades, and yes, even of tenure and an office with a view near the top of the university tower the history department was located in.

My greatest mistake was in bragging. I told the Radhan of my findings, of Lost Qokeen.

In retrospect, I should have noted the significant looks traded between the Radhan traders.

After all, no city may truly thrive without trade, not even the most self-sufficient. Qokeen needed trade to survive, and who better for that purpose than the Radhan, who were so practiced in keeping secrets, both their own and those of others?

Four days out from our stop in Lothal, I awoke somewhere I did not know to Grey pecking me gently on my nose.

I could feel the boat rocking, but it felt wrong. The motion of the waves moved the boat strangely, and my bed, a thin, hard affair, appeared to have transmuted into a slick surface that gave when I pressed on it. 

My head was bleary and confused, but I managed to sit, finally, transferring my concerned crow to my shoulder. The bleariness, of course, was from being drugged, as I’d find out later.

I found myself in a small, open boat, no more than the length of three men laid end to end. There was no land, no other ship, and hardly anything else in sight save for a few clouds on the southern horizon, in the direction we were heading. 

The boat itself was like nothing I’d ever seen before. It was grown out of a single piece of kelp. If you’ve ever held kelp in your hands at the shore or on a dock, you’ll find, interrupting its stalks, sturdy, gas-filled bubbles. They are there to help the kelp float, to reach towards the sun. They’re often translucent, even somewhat transparent, and have the precise slick texture of the boat. 

The boat was one of those bubbled, but grown to absurd size, and folded into the shape of a boat, with the air pocket inside the hull below me, sandwiched between the upper and lower layers.

I could see through the upper layer, down through the air pocket, through the lower layer, and down into the sea itself. I could see fish swimming below us, eying me curiously. I could see a small octopus, no larger than my hand, crawling about the bottom of the boat.

I must admit, it took me quite some time to notice the woman in the boat with me, the water mage pilot. I’ll save myself the embarrassment of describing to you every detail of falling in the water in surprise and having to be fished out.

She was, as you’ve likely guessed by now, a citizen of Qokeen, sent to collect me. 

The mage was kind and patient with me, answering my questions honestly and forthrightly. She was no historian, so there were many she simply couldn’t answer, but she answered everything she could, as Grey entertained himself playing with the octopus attached to our boat— the crow atop the hull, chasing the octopus stuck to the transparent bottom.

She had no reason to deceive me, after all, for Qokeen would not willingly let me go. Qokeen preserved the secret of its own existence jealously.

I had been right about nearly everything. There had been a secret society behind the reincarnating city of Qokeen, and those mad, hopeful artists had spent centuries and lifetimes trying to build their escape from the endless cycle of violence the great powers brought to Ithos.

I’ve already told you, of course, what I had gotten wrong. I had thought they had failed, had given up.

They had, instead, succeeded.

As we traveled further and further south, propelled by the mage’s water magic, the clouds grew on the horizon.

I confess, I paid no attention to them until they dissolved into great rippling auroras of color, then shifted to immense, eye-achingly vibrant interlocking grids, then became great birds, hundreds of feet high, walking atop the surface of the water.

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The seas of Anastis are vicious and powerful. A gentle tide can top forty feet, and I’ve heard of tides twice that. Ocean swells dwarf any ship, and you would be mad to sail without water mages. Storms are powerful enough to shatter land-bound cities, let alone seaborne ones.

And that doesn’t even get into the monsters of the deep, like the kraken that sunk my Qokeen in volcanic fire.

So how do you build a city that lasts, that is safe, that can survive among the most hostile conditions of our world?

I had thought it impossible, as had every reasonable individual. Only a madman would think it possible.

But then, all artists are mad, in their own ways.

The Qokeen that finally succeeded was built atop the one place that could survive everything the ocean could throw at it.

Atop the back of a leviathan.

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Running down the back of leviathans is a shallow groove. Shallow, at least, compared to their immense size. Compared to people, it is a deep, broad valley. Just behind the head of an adult leviathan is a great flap of skin that arches over part of their that valley, forming a sort of sheltered hollow, an open cave.

And in that hollow, that cave, is built Qokeen. 

The refugees from my Qokeen, desperate and afraid after the destruction of their grown seashell city, had been separated by a storm, and one of their ships, falling apart, had been rescued by the leviathans, their crumbling ship lifted whole onto the back of the leviathan, tucked away into the hollow to shield them from the storm.

And there they stayed.

They sent for their kin, for the rest of the inhabitants of reincarnating Qokeen, and brought them to the back of the leviathan. It was the fastest they’d rebuilt Qokeen between its failures, and never since has Qokeen needed to be rebuilt.

It isn’t dark or dreary inside the hollow— leviathan skin can glow when the creatures choose, and the cities are lit with an unearthly, changing light. Some days it comes from below, a gentle, soft glow, as though you were walking atop the back of an unbelievably huge firefly. On other days, the leviathan skin displays two dozen slowly dancing suns, doing gentle pirouettes on the bottom of the flap of skin above the city.

The buildings themselves are a chaotic hodgepodge of styles and experiments. There are home-sized ziggurats adjacent to broad Tsarnassan-style villas adjacent to simple cottages. It’s as entirely chaotic as you might expect from a city of iconoclastic artists.

There is one thing uniting all of them, however. Each and every one is covered with living leviathan skin. It is apparently possible to cut the upper layers of the tough, thick skin open, with great effort, and then implant foundations into it. The skin will then grow up and over the buildings, though keeping doors and windows exposed and able to open or shut takes yearly maintenance on the part of the inhabitants. The beautiful, unearthly color patterns drift across the skin of all the buildings.

None of this hurts the leviathan- the construction process doesn’t even come close to cutting all the way through the thick skin. The Qokeenans clearly have the blessing of the leviathan, at that— the only ways to get to the city are by flying or by being lifted atop the great cephalopod’s back by its tentacles.

Not even Qokeen has figured out the color language of the leviathans, sadly. The creatures clearly get something from the relationship, of course. Some Qokeenans believe that they are scholars, learning about humanity this way. Everything that occurs in Qokeen is watched by the leviathans, after all— they can see through their skin, as well as their eyes. They would not be able to camouflage themselves so easily otherwise. Other Qokeenans think the leviathans artists, welcoming them out of kinship.

Others still simply think the great creatures were lonely, and wished company.

You might note me using the plural of leviathan, not the singular. This is, of course, because there isn’t just one Qokeen these days— there are dozens of Qokeens now, each built atop a different leviathan, roaming the world. The sea city has become something more— not a nation, for there is no king or central government between the cities, merely a shared way of life, a bohemian rejection of the demands of hierarchy and power.

After all, they need not fear conquest on the back of the leviathans, for nothing on Anastis can kill a leviathan. Even the mightiest of great powers would be hard-pressed to more than irritate the leagues-long beasts— let alone kill them. And that’s merely a product of their sheer, unimaginable size, ignoring the fact that most leviathans are mages as well, it seems.

Nor do the Qokeenans need fear storm or tide, atop the backs of what amount to moving islands. In times of great danger, the flap on the back of the leviathans can even close up and seal against the back entirely, creating an enclosed, safe pocket to hide the cities in. It’s even enough to keep the city safe when the leviathans dive underwater.

That last was news to me. Like all the other landbound, I had assumed that leviathans spent their entire lives on the surface upon reaching adulthood, but it turns out otherwise— they do submerge, on very rare occasions. 

Not every leviathan will accept a city on its back. Some have no interest in the Qokeenans. They are not hostile, they simply will not lift them up onto their backs. Among them include those leviathans who venture into the toxic waters of the southern polar region, for whatever unknown purpose.

Great forests of kelp grow on the flanks of the leviathans. Kelp mages are the most valuable sort in Qokeen, even over water mages or salt mages. They can collect rainwater, after all, so they’re not entirely dependent on desalination magic. Their mages grow their ships out of kelp, however, and grow other varieties as food, or as furniture, or as clothing. The frameworks for most of their buildings are even grown out of reinforced and grown kelp.

Possibly the most important question to ask of any city, of course, is what it does with human waste. Qokeen has large holding tanks for chamber pots to be emptied into, and the tanks are periodically levitated out to and emptied into the sea by mages.

Metal, wood, and stone all have to be imported by the Radhan, of course, but everything else Qokeen gets from the sea. Their kelp-boat fishing fleets seldom stray far from the flanks of their leviathans, but each leviathan is a thriving ecosystem of its own, with immense teeming schools of fish living off of the shed skin, parasites, and even waste of the leviathans. More fish prey on those, and more still on those, giving Qokeen the richest fishing grounds of Anastis, all next to home. 

There are many downsides to living in Qokeen, of course. It would not be a joyful place for those that did not enjoy seafood, or those that found the feel of kelp-grown cloth on their skin. Thankfully, I am fine with both, and need not compete with weavers and tapestry-makers for the little cloth we trade for from land. Qokeen can feel lonely and claustrophobic, at times, for other Qokeens on other leviathans are the only places I have ever been allowed to visit. First generation Qokeenans, like myself, are not allowed to return to shore, for fear of revealing the secrets of Qokeen.

I’m hardly the first to discover Qokeen, after all. There have been oh so many. Most are lost or shipwrecked sailors, of course, or willing Radhan immigrants. The Radhan are allowed to leave if they want, unlike the rest of us first generation Qokeenans. Scholars who had discovered the truth of Qokeen, like myself, were surprisingly common. It was quite a blow to my pride to meet no less than three others with stories nearly identical to my own, though. One from Yldive, two from Sica, all of whom had found their own evidence— though not quite so rich as my own. The Qokeenans were rather shocked that such a large collection of evidence remained in Stormseat— they had, in fact, quite regularly combed it for such evidence for centuries now.

They’ll return to Stormseat, of course. While stealing anything from a great power is perilous, I have no doubt Qokeen or its agents will manage to sneak the records I found of their city out from under Ilinia’s nose, or perhaps her heir someday.

One of the greatest downsides of Qokeen, of course, is the smell. Leviathans have a… rather unique odor. It’s not a foul one, but it is powerful, and omnipresent in Qokeen. Even after three years, I’ve only just begun to truly grow accustomed to it.

For all the downsides of Qokeen, for all the strange ways in which it is impoverished by not being on land, it is, I think, everything its founders dreamed of. It is not crimeless, but the crimes are always those of passion, not of desperation or greed. The inhabitants need not struggle and work— the fisheries always provide, and few need spend more than a day or two a week working to provide for themselves. The inhabitants spend their days creating and enjoying art, inventing and playing new games, and being precisely as dramatic and ridiculous as you would expect a city of artists to be.

---------------------------------------

You might think me resentful and angry over being kidnapped, taken to sea, and forced to join a secret city that always smelled somewhat like fish. And, to some degree, you would be right. It was not an easy transition for me to make. I miss my family every day. I miss the beautiful forest of towers that is Lemannen. I miss arguing over obscure historical points with my colleagues, and I miss the food of the land.

But I’ve also come to love it here. 

I love the frivolous fashions, the strange music, the feeling of constant festival. I love the ridiculous, bohemian lifestyles of the Qokeenans, their over-the-top affairs and the tragic brooding they make sure they have an audience for. 

I love feeling as though I live inside of an endless dream, as though the colors that appear behind my closed eyes have been wrapped over the world around me. I love being able to watch the sea for leagues and leagues around me every day from atop the leviathan. I love diving in the kelp forests along the leviathan’s flanks.

And, in truth, though I’m viewed as singularly stodgy by Qokeenan standards, I’ve come to share more than a few of their ridiculous ways. I have had more friends and lovers among them than I had in a lifetime on land. More, they genuinely value my knowledge of history, and I’ve found a place for myself as a tutor of history.

Grey, of course, has found a place for himself as an endless nuisance, and has grown quite plump from all the treats the Qokeenan children feed him, for he is the only crow they’ve ever seen. I’ve used my magic to befriend and tame a few seabirds as well, and I’m working on befriending one of the great sea-eagles that nests atop our leviathan.

I have my resentments, yes, but I have learned to live with them. Perhaps I’ll decide to try and escape someday, but that day hasn’t come yet. And if it does come… I don’t believe I’ll share the secrets of Qokeen with the world. Some things are more important than fame, or intellectual triumph, or even than tenure.

I’m sure every one of my old colleagues at the university would think me utterly mad for that.

I’m not sure I’ll ever even show this account to anyone. Perhaps I’m only writing it for myself.

There is, however, one thing that I’ve always wondered. One piece of the puzzle that has never quite fit for me.

Even with how cunningly Qokeen is hidden, it seems almost beyond belief that is could escape the attention of great powers like the Kaen Das storm mages, the Sican Elders, or the Tsarnassan Guardians. That such clear proof of Qokeen’s history could exist in their own palaces and escape their notice.

I’ve not voiced this before, but… 

Perhaps they do know. Perhaps they’ve always known. Perhaps, just perhaps, it was no accident I found proof in Stormseat, despite the Qokeenans stealing from it again and again over the centuries. 

Part of me suspects that Ilinia Kaen Das had it put there on purpose.

The whole point of Qokeen, after all, is to provide a refuge from the endless, mind-numbing cycle of history, that endless churn of betrayals and usurpation so inherent to Anastis. Philosophers and historians have long since declared it inescapable, after all, for there was no hope of a stable order when the divide in power between the great powers and the rest of Anastis’ thinking beings was simply so immense. Great personal power is, they say, the antithesis of stability. 

But then, all those philosophers are beholden to the great powers. The most common cause of death for philosophers is irritating one of the petty rulers of our world, and those that live usually turn to them as patrons, writing to avoid their anger. 

And what would please a great power more than one of their pet philosophers declaring that there is no viable alternative to their rule?

I know, I know, I am being somewhat hyperbolic. There are stable nations out there that have lasted for generations or even centuries. My own homeland of Tsarnassus is obviously greatest among them to any not blind with pride for their own lands. There is also that aggressive, self-proclaimed heir of Ithos, the Havath Dominion, which seeks to revive that anachronistic philosophy of empire.

Nonetheless, those islands of stability are an exception, not the rule, and they stay that way through violence and personal power writ large in destructive, bloody magic across the face of history.

I have come to believe that Qokeen is a safety valve. I think there are great powers that know of it, that tacitly support it, simply because it acts as an escape for those artists, madmen, and radicals that simply cannot accept the shape of the world as it is, that crave something new.

I think the Kaen Das family put the documentation in their library as bait, to lead those malcontents to where they can do no harm. It is… kinder than the alternatives, to be sure, but a means of extending their own power, nonetheless. I suspect other great powers have similar baited traps. The occasional stodgy historian like myself might get caught in it at times, but I wonder how many frivolous, mad artists have been led to Qokeen this way.

I suspect that soon after Qokeen's agents steal the documents I found, they'll be replaced by new copies by the Kaen Das family.

I cannot prove any of it, of course, and I’m not sure I’d want to even if I could. What good would come of telling the Qokeenans, of marring their dream with a nasty little doubt like that?

Though…

I do wonder, at times, what history would look like if Qokeen had chosen to turn all those centuries of genius, toil, and brilliance upon the task of changing the world, instead of fleeing from it.