For many years in dreams I had crossed the red desert into the Kingdom of sand and the City of Ireem.
I had grown familiar with the City and the surrounding lands where I had dreamed many strange and exotic adventures.
Then one evening as the sun began to set, I found myself talking with a dark stranger I had happened to meet in one of the high towers of the city.
As we talked I noticed on the western horizon what appeared to be the domes and spires of a small town. I checked my bearings. This could not be, I was sure I had been in this tower many times before and not noticed this far off place. I asked the stranger if she to could see the town whose coloured domes now shone in the deep red of the setting sun.
“Yes“, she replied softly, “That is Kashkar, the place of return, where the souls of tired and weary travellers find rest from their Journeys through life”
She said that in these lands they still remembered the old gods who roamed the minds of men when they were still young and free.
I asked if I may go there and she told me I may, but that I should beware, as it was not an easy place to leave.
She told me the path I should take through the desert.
Taking the western road out of the city I would pass the Necropolis, high in the hills, built to honour Lord Thanatos the great Daemon of death.
She warned not to pause here lest I be taken by Undead creatures, The children of Hora Ma, who rise up from the tombs beneath the rocks
I would pass beneath the broken bridge of Nephili and beyond would see the river and the town.
“Many adventures you will find there” she said, for the town is ancient and full of mysteries to discover.
To the North of the town, facing the ocean, she told me of the Isle of Mer. This is the place of the children of Mer who gather in the halls of Posidon and Neptune and the old ones.
But the Isle of Mer is also a place of music and dance, and the terraces on the high rocks are watched over by Lalita, the goddess of movement and pleasure.