The Book of Habidabad - The Gelfling ruins

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The Gelfling ruins

"the houses of the Old Ones"

These ruins are more than just one house. Through the dilapidated doorway, other walls and courtyards come into view. The stonework is graceful, with the remains of carvings evident here and there. The floors, where they are not covered with debris from the caved-in roofs, are apparently tiled.

The Pod People would never go inside. Bad things happened here once. The Old Ones were killed by the Skeksis.

Everything is made with Gelfling proportion and workmanship. It has a deft taste in decoration. Though ruined, the buildings still possess a dignity, a noble bearing. The passageways are made at right angles. Doorways open onto small chambers that no longer bear any trace of their furnishings. The roofs had been thatched, or at least covered in some kind of vegetable matter, branches perhaps, to judge by the litter of dead wood and shriveled fronds on the floor. Where any roofing at all remains, it consists only of a few joists, now open to the sky. Throughout, the floors are tiled in terra-cotta. On some of the tiles traces of a pattern can be seen, but never in sufficient number to convey the meaning of the grand design. Windows had been plentiful. In many places, the wall had collapsed above the lintel, leaving a sort of crenellation. Bushes and grasses have taken up habitation, as have scuttling spiders.

An open archway leads into a much larger and lighter room. On the walls are scraps of fabric, faded and tattered evidence of some richer hangings, tapestries possibly. Most striking of all, in the middle of a long wall stands a chair, seat, or throne of curious and elliptical design. In size, it would have suited Jen handsomely. It seems to be fashioned from a single piece of material that is more delicate than marble, possibly from the shell of one giant mollusc. It softly glistens like mother-of-pearl. The light strikes iridescent gleams from it. The throne is intricately inlaid with filigree designs in bright metal and gems. It is so intimately responsive to the light that at the slightest movement of your head you can see it shimmer through a thousand transmuted rainbows. The iridian glitter continues to change as though answering the atomically measured dance of the suns.

The Pod People are deeply superstitious about this place and believe it haunted by spirits.

At the farthest end of the room is a grand archway where a magnificently carved wooden door studded with iron stands. It is a long room, a gallery of sorts. The walls remain nearly intact. A plastered wall covered in frescoes, or, rather, one long fresco, framed within a broad, elaborately detailed border can be found. Many creatures and events are pictured. Gelfling, in costumes of an antique nobility, form the centerpiece of each tableau. Apart from their robes, the figures could have been those of Jen and Kira. A Gelfling queen is seen enthroned, attended by an aged vizier and young courtiers bearing flowers, and around them Gelfling farmers, carpenters, smiths crafting jewelry, dancers, celebrants with pokals, and musicians, including a long-haired Gelfling girl playing a forked flute that replicates Jen's. Between each tableau are emblems of trees and leaves.

The pictures are painted in earth colors. They celebrate, not just a way of life, but unfold a narrative. In the broad border, which runs around the entire perimeter of the fresco, images of a Gelfling village being destroyed by Garthim can be found. Above a mountain, three concentric suns are depicted with a triangle--the Great Conjunction. Depicted next was a Crystal with eighteen creatures which might be Skeksis or the urRu. The Crystal is pictured again, darker in color and an even darker dagger-shaped form painted in it. Alongside this is a picture of the shard. Next to the shard, two lines of creatures--eighteen in each line, are pictured emerging from the Crystal, the lines radiate out in opposite directions. These creatures are unambiguous. One line is of Skeksis, the other line of urRu. The mountain reappears, this time transformed into the shape of a castle, at the center of which the Crystal is pictured once more. The destruction of more Gelfling by Garthim and the three concentric suns are shown again.

The surfaces of the figures do not appear to have been formed by any sort of edged tool but through some process involving intense local heat. The rock in which they are formed is nonfossiliferous and of unusual microcrystalline homogencity.

Around the outer edge of the border are runes. The hieroglyphs are punctuated by a picture of the concentric suns surmounting the shard.

The Wall of Destiny

When single shines the triple sun,

What was sundered and undone

Shall be whole, the two made one

By Gelfling hand, or else by none.

Thra

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