18.ii
The Leuhtąnae Cradle is a sight to behold. The place of the forging! The birthplace of the heavenly body which shelters us! The place where Asherah descended and worked with man to make a place of peaceful dreaming for our souls! The edifice is vast and I found it beyond all impressive!
I am told that before the Leuhtąnae that the three canals had once bridged clear across the city. Now they feed directly into the cradle lake at the heart of Burning Depths Ford on their way into the abyss.
It is difficult to believe that such a vastness as the Cradle could have been put in place by mortal hands. Put into the path of the rivers as it has been. That men even working with the divinity of the heavens and the power of a wyrm could do what I witnessed with my own eyes?
I still struggled to believe! Just as you will when you make the journey!
When you stand before it, at the iron shores of all one thousand nine hundred and sixty eight feet of is width, when you witness the great waterfall spouts that now cascade into the circle of the cradle’s blessed Leuhta Lake, when you truly witness the form that held man’s place in the heavens as it grew? The artifice which created our soul’s security? It seems impossible. A thing so vast when you only even apprehend its surface, carefully rounded at the edges into a circle of perfection, water which is still even as torrents pour into and out of it, but then you go deeper into this layered city? That is when the true scale of the wonder becomes apparent.
The Great Temple of Asherah is at the lip of the cauldron, shining in the sun, I myself made the journey to be re-anointed and blessed by Asherah’s priests there of course, reaffirmed my place in the Leuhtąnae in the place of its birth and I drank of the waters that fill where divinity touched earth and took it up into the heavens.
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But below, beside the vast vessel are structures, holy shrines, shops and all manner of relic dealers and altars for blessing to Asherah. You can purchase the very waters of the Leuhta Lake for just a haepenny a dram! The great saint Ursula is prominent in the statues, as are some of the most fantastic sculptures of Asherah’s tree I’ve ever witnessed, detailed so beautifully at all sizes upon the skin of the cauldron!
There are also all-manner of metal wonders to witness around the cradle, moving statues of animals who guard and watch the shrines, shining birds which sing prayers and complement the petitioner’s hymns to Asherah.
And there are off to the side in the surroundings even token and talisman dealers who sell very reasonably priced protections, slivers of the cauldron itself suspended in the divine soul silver!
And yet, and yet, and yet there is even more than that! As you descend into the city around the cradle I was taken by the way it was much like descending into a deeply forested valley, the hallow presence of the divine so thick and soothing, the gentle gloom and dappled light. It is much like the forests of home!
The only thing I must sincerely warn is that unfortunately the teeming crowds are so thick and the cradle so vast that if you do not find a local guide you can become terribly lost, with all of the up and down of stairs and crossing of bridges above and below.
I admit to needing the charity of a local to find my way back to my lodgings that first evening.
So embarrassing!
-Journal of Glefirya accounting her Pilgrimage to Burning Depth’s Ford.