It began, as all great obsessions do, with a misplaced spoon. Not just any spoon, mind you. This was a spoon of polished obsidian, unearthed during the excavation of the submerged city of Veridia. Veridia, you see, wasn’t built for sunlight. It thrived in perpetual twilight, sustained by colossal, bioluminescent fungi and the obsessive cultivation of…syrup. The obsidian spoon, according to the fragmented glyphs subsequently recovered, was used to measure the “Essence of Sweet Sorrow,” the primary ingredient in Veridia’s famed syrups.
The glyphs, rendered in a viscous, amber-colored resin, depict figures – the “Glazers,” they called themselves – meticulously extracting sap from the Gloomflowers, a species that blooms only under the light of fractured moons. The sap wasn't simply sweet; it contained echoes of emotion, harvested and carefully layered to create flavors that induced states of profound melancholy, ecstatic joy, or, occasionally, a disconcerting blend of both. The Glazers believed these syrups held the key to unlocking forgotten memories, to experiencing life through the lens of someone else’s heartbreak.
“Taste the rain of a lost god,” one glyph reads. “Feel the weight of a thousand unanswered prayers.”
Their society was built around this process. Each citizen was assigned a ‘Sweet Role’, determined by their resonance with a particular syrup. The ‘Saffron Sorrow’ Glazers, for instance, were responsible for maintaining the city’s melancholic atmosphere, while the ‘Caramel Catharsis’ Glazers produced syrups designed to trigger moments of intense emotional release. It was, in essence, a chemically-induced society, governed by the viscosity of its desires.
The city of Veridia didn't simply vanish. It *dissolved*. Not in a dramatic, volcanic eruption, but in a slow, agonizing subsidence. Theories abound, of course. Some blame a catastrophic over-saturation of the Essence, resulting in the city’s structural integrity collapsing under the weight of accumulated emotions. Others suggest a deliberate act – a final, desperate experiment by the Glazers, attempting to synthesize a syrup capable of erasing all memory, all feeling. The most unsettling theory involves a rogue species of sentient syrup, grown from the concentrated emotional residue, that simply…consumed the city from the inside out.
What remains are ruins, submerged in a sea of viscous, swirling syrup. Explorers occasionally report experiencing vivid, fragmented memories – sensations of profound sadness, overwhelming joy, or a disconcerting awareness of being simultaneously every and no one. Artifacts recovered from the ruins are often found coated in the syrup, exhibiting strange and unpredictable properties. A polished obsidian spoon, for example, might induce a sudden, uncontrollable urge to weep, while a fragment of a Gloomflower petal could trigger a cascade of forgotten childhood dreams.
“Beware the sweetness that remembers,” one recovered glyph warns. “It will eventually claim you.”