#157 The Ouranisphere

Age: Billions of years

Hidden or Lost?: Lost

History: At the bottom of a craggy red ravine, deep into the impossible Desert of Mists, lies a colossal metal orb pocked with countless portals, each one, the blinded eye of the long, dead creature within.

Long millennia ago, before life crawled blinking from the primordial soup, there was a battle in heaven. Fantastic cosmic powers clashed in the sky and the loser of the battle fell through the atmosphere, landing in the shallow valley that would become the ravine that exists today. The sphere was the shellcraft of a being known as a Recorder. Strange, giant creatures whose holy mission was to document all aspects of the universe and its history. This particular recorder had accidentally witnessed a cruel and forgotten god-being working its influence on the still evolving lands. The two battled, and the recorder was cast down, assumed dead. In reality the recorder simply slipped into a kind of healing coma.

Billions of years later, scholars, wizards, explorers, and civilizations appeared in the world, and the recorder was discovered by archaeologists who could not understand what they had found. The excavators of the recorder entered its titanic shell, finding chambers filled with strange machinery, floating amoeba with long cilia that burned at the touch; cavernous chambers filled with lightly pulsating flesh engines, fiercely guarded by wide-eyed silent sentinels; and countless windows that seemed to gaze out onto Distant vistas. Different worlds and different times. At its heart they found the Memory Star, an impossible knot of psychic energy that drove all who gazed upon it mad as it attempted to download all the recorder had seen into their feeble mortal minds

Dubbing the fallen recorder, the “Ouranisphere,” it was deemed too dangerous to be explored further and all record of the site was hidden or destroyed. Centuries passed and the Ouranisphere was forgotten. However a dark cult to the lost elder gods has risen receiving, whispers from long dead powers, urging them to find the Memory Star and learn the first secrets. These dark whispers have reached not just the cult, but also the recorder itself, causing the ancient consciousness to stir and summon champions of its own. The race for the true history of the world has begun.