"The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that
become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten
when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the
Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, the blazing sun
hung high over the barren desert known as the Aiel Wastes. The sun
was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to
the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a
beginning."
[Three-fold Land, Outside Hold]
A mile ahead of you stands a tight cluster of tall, sheer-sided buttes.
To your left the land runs off in patches of tough grass and leafless
spiny plants, scattered thorny bushes and low trees. It spans across
arid hills and jagged cliffs, past giant stone columns to jagged mountains
far in the distance. To your right the land is much the same, except
the cracked yellowish clay lays flatter and the mountains closer. It
could be any other place you'd been in the Wastes so far.
You search around the rockface and finally find the largest fissure in
the sheer stone wall, ten or twelve paces across at its broadest, and shadowed
by the height of its sheer sides as it weaves deeper and deeper, dark and
even cool beneath a ribbon of bright blue sky. It feels odd to finally
be in so much shade after your long trip through the barren desert.
[Three-fold Land, Cold Rocks Hold]
Rounding another curve the fissure opens abruptly into a wide canyon,
long and almost straight. The canyon walls are green with narrow terraces
climbing halfway up both sides. Not all are really terraces though,
some are small, flat-roofed houses of gray stone or yellow clay that seem
to be stacked practically atop of one another. Mazes of paths wind
in between these houses, and every roof is a garden for beans and squashes,
peppers and melons and plants you've never seen before. Chickens are
running loose, redder than any you've seen, and some strange sort of fowl,
larger and speckled gray, is running loose with the hens. Children,
most garbed like their elders, and tall white-robed Aiel move along the rows
with big clay pitchers, apparently watering the individual plants, careful
to make sure no water is wasted.
Cautiously you approach the nearest pair of these stone houses, two modest
rectangles of large yellow-clay bricks with narrow, glassless windows covered
by plain white curtains, nearly identicle. Like the others there is a
vegetable garden on each of the flat rooves and another in front of a small
terrace which seperates the houses under them by a narrow path paved
with flat gray stones. Big enough for two rooms, maybe. They
look much like the other structures except for the square bronze gong hanging
beside each of their doors, this is the feature that probably drew you to
these two houses rather than choosing another sitting just beside them in
the first place.
Now you must now make a decision whether to
visit Jollien (as
she is known in Elanthia)...
or, on the other-hand, to visist Jolleusia (as she is known in Greece).
(Jolleusia's page now has two options, either
graphical (more
like traditional pages), or
text-based (like
this page you are on now). The graphical is easier to get quickly in
and out, get what you want and go, the graphical is for those that want to
experience the full beauty of my Hold, choose wisely. . .)