Once upon a time there was a lively Guild, filled
with enagmatic people and strange goings-on. The Guild
flourished for years to the delight of its members; its verdant
gardens replete with shining posts, threads and the flow of both
gold and art. Magnificent it was in life with an excellent name.


Long ago there sat a Guild on this very spot. The Annals of Heaven named this Guild "The Guild of Glory Renowned". Its long lineage of Guild Captains were known for their shining crowns of burning sunlight. Its Vice Captains were heralded by the cool twinkle of shifting moonlight. The Crew were skilled in the esoteric arts of Fate, Time and Narrative. The Legends say its members were want for nothing, themselves being clothed in robes of celestial silks with jewels the size of goose eggs.

This Guild was home to an orchard that grew the fabled Peaches of Immortality. These orchards were attended to by small winged spirits whose sole purpose, whose driving passion was the cultivation and eventual harvest of these divine fruit. Other gardens were filled with orchids that radiated with the aura of the divine, putting gods at ease; there were plum trees whose gossamer petals could be brewed into a tea that would enlighten the ignorant and exalt the enlightened.

Shining towers of white stone, gold, silver and glass rose high into the gentle sky; the Sun, Moon and stars being endlessly refracted along them in a glittering celestial mandala. Cloud spirits moved people and objects great distances, spirits of industry lent purpose to the Guild and its expansion.

In time, however, things began to slow from the luminous hum
of golden glory to a copper-hued twilight and, finally, to dark.
The people trickled out without much sound or fuss, the
activity faded to quiet reflection; in time there was no one left.


All things that begin must one day end. Such are the decrees of the Maiden of Journeys and the Maiden of Endings. When the Maiden of Secrets measured the golden thread of the Guild, she found a mistake had been made in its destiny. The fortune and glory visited on this Guild was meant for another. Such is her nature to keep secrets that none knew of this, and so she declared that it was time for the Guild to end.

The Maiden of Endings clipped the thread and its golden sheen faded quickly to an eerie copper. It was left on the Loom of Fate to unravel and dissolve as any other thread does. Topics in the Guild began to stagnate, members were called away to other duties and interests, debates halted as all parties found agreement or disinterest. The hum had gone and all that was left was our memory of it. In time the Guild was quiet; its gardens wilted as weeds choked the mythic flowers, trees perished as unchecked fungi ravaged them from within, no longer did the spirits of air keep the sky clear nor did the spirits of fire keep the streets warm. The gods had gone from their golden city, and in time the Guild itself died.

The Guild itself fell from Gaia, sinking into the Underworld
below. Its cathedrals stood empty, its many gardens wilted,
ponds became dark pools of stagnancy like liquid onyx. In time
its halls were visited upon by ghosts and their dead gods.


The first ghosts to rise were those who had the strongest connection to it while it lived. They were but shadows of their former selves, devoid of passion and vitality. They felt the pull of oblivion and railed against it, determined not to go quietly into finality. The Guild Ghosts pleaded with the spirits and gods who had fled; they, too, arose in memoriam. No longer were they spirits of air, but spirits of ash. Wood to bone; Fire to pyre flame; Water to blood; Earth to void.

Auspicious gods of fortune became inauspicious spectres of exploitation. Gone were their selfish generosity, replaced by a corrupted need to be placated and bribed. Ceremony and liturgy replaced leisure and dance. Even the name of the Guild itself was cast into the yawning mouth of the abyss, forever lost and, in a macabre way, born anew.

That once shining metropolis had become a necropolis for the
dead; to endure until after all other guilds have fallen into the
void, then it shall hang above oblivion before falling in itself.

The members who have gazed upwards at the stars of the dead have divined the dark fate of the Guild; As the first to fall so low, it shall serve as the intermediary that will pull all of Gaia down into oblivion. When the last thread in the Chatterbox goes screaming into the cold quiet of the Great Below, the Dead Guild itself will be all that remains in that bleak, blasted hollow. It will begin to crumble, its ghostly members will go mad with blasphemous insights into non-being and cast themselves into that endless.

Eventually, even the Dead Guild will perish.