World

The ancient island of Erytheia, now more commonly styled Red Caye, once lay at the perilous periphery of the known world, where the three-headed giant Geryon guarded his crimson-hided cattle until he fell beneath the club of Heracles in that labor which men count the tenth. Bereft of its monstrous warden, the island, loosed from its moorings, drifted through the waste of seas, until Eris, goddess of discord, with a hand at once tender and inexorable, drew it to the very heart of her dominion; thus was the remotest peril of the periphery made the central sanctuary of discord.

Around this cradle of strife there gathers a mist of sanguine hue, where neither wind nor compass finds its virtue, where no light pierces, and no sound endures. Those rash enough to enter are heard of no more; for there, it is whispered, even time stands still, weary of its own motion. Yet of that hidden place we are not wholly ignorant; for having endured the rite of passage within the temple of Eris, each of us has beheld its confines and by her indulgence, has escaped that place.

The mystery is still being set to parchment and shall be unveiled in due time.

The conflagration at Troy, having been ignited by the hand of Eris, served not to quench, but merely to whet, the goddess’s singular appetite for discord. She perceived, however, that a continued and open interference in the affairs of mortals would assuredly animate the collected jealousy of Olympus.

Therefore, with a cunning equal to her malignity, she resolved upon a new, and more subtle, design. Her invitations were dispatched with a studied obscurity, an enterprise calculated to escape divine notice; for the Olympians, in their distant majesty, have ever been loath to concern themselves with the voluntary follies to which mankind is so naturally inclined. Thus, without public proclamation or the praise of poets, the Great Game was commenced.

The perpetuity of the Great Game may be ascribed, not to the constant interventions of its architect, but to the inherent disposition of the participants themselves. Those souls who accept her dark summons are, by a studied and deliberate selection, entirely destitute of that public virtue which the philosophers name prudence.

They proceed, as is their nature, to erect their fleeting empires, to contrive their brittle alliances, and to prosecute their endless wars of subjugation; each revolution of this miserable cycle serving only to gratify the cold satisfaction of Eris. A cessation of these calamities would, by necessity, demand a universal accord in the pursuit of peace. Yet such a harmony must remain forever unattainable, for any soul possessed of that tranquil or placid disposition was, from the very beginning, purposefully omitted from the invitation.