One need not wander far from the carefully paved paths and the amenities of modern civilization to stumble upon shadows of the earlier era, shadows which faith and science alike have thus far failed to illumine. In the moldering backwater towns left depopulated by the steady advance of endless industrialization there are still those who half-remember the words of an ancient past turned to tenebrous myth and legendry, a past which the nation of Elysia once shared with the wider world.<br/><br/>But those days are long gone, and it is only by chasing flickering half-truths and forgotten scraps of folklore that a foreigner was able to see what the natives had suppressed. Perhaps something in her own cultural consciousness and worldview had allowed the seeker to find the trail, or perhaps it was due to her connection to a destiny involving that elder cycle which hurled her toward the forlorn temple complex which hid itself between two massive oaks each with trunks as thick as a church building itself. The ruined sanctuary sat overgrown, swallowed up by nature and earth and time, yet still a white stone archway could just barely be seen under the choking kudzu. Beyond that stairway sat a flight of six hundred stairs cut into the rock, leading further and further down into the earth to the sacred space where witch-priests once gathered centuries prior.<br/><br/>The archway seemed almost to beckon to her, the first person in an unknowable length of time to truly see the temple for what it was, inviting her to pass between its stones and witness a civilizational cycle even more alien to her than that of modern Elysia. Here, the ruins promised, was a piece of that which she had been seeking.