Episode 4.a
>Tellus's Chamber, mythic time, before everything<
The forge holds behind you. Vulcan's hammer rings against the anvil, the brothers have found their rhythm, and Jupiter has the bolt. Whatever was broken at the forge is closing over, healing. Still your flame pulls at you, restless, wanting to go on.
It pulls you down past the roots of the mountain in which Vulcan works, past where stone stops feeling like stone and starts feeling like something older. The descent is long. The heat of the forge fades, and the cold that replaces it has weight to it, pressing in from all sides. The rock changes around you: cut stone giving way to raw seams of ore, then to stone so old it has no seams at all, only grain, compressed by everything above it.
You come out into a space too large to call a cavern, and too alive: the walls breathe slowly, or seem to, and the ground beneath your feet is warm in a way that has nothing to do with fire. Pale roots thread through the ceiling. Somewhere, water moves.
A woman is here. She is enormous, or she is ordinary and the space makes her seem enormous, and you cannot quite tell which. She is facing away from you, her hand pressed flat against the stone wall, listening to something inside it. She knows something is wrong. She has been trying to find it for a long time.
She turns partway toward you but her eyes don't quite land. "There were names," she says. Her voice is low and very old. "I held them all. Every name that came after me. I can feel the places where they were."
She presses her hand harder against the stone. "Something is missing. Several things. I had children, and they had children, and those children built..." She stops. "I cannot find the rest."
Quintus speaks quietly beside you. "She's the oldest thing we've met. Older than the forge, older than the hearth. And she's lost more than either of them." He looks at the flame in your hand, bright and steady in the deep dark, and then at Tellus. "We've been carrying names with us this whole journey. Vesta. Vulcan. The Cyclopes. Jupiter. She needs to hear them."
The flame leans toward her, patient and warm, waiting to be offered.
Prompt: Tellus has lost the names of her own descendants and the memory of what they built. You have met them. Speak their names to her, show her the flame, and help her remember what she set in motion. Which name do you speak first, and why?
