The Old Stepping Gate

For my project (see my other recent renders [link] and [link])

"...The Stepping Gates were once the marvel of the civilised world. By leasing a Passage Talisman from the Gating Guild, a noble or even a merchant would have been able to traverse leagues in a single stride. But alas, as with so many other works of wonder of the elder days, the slow decay of magic and the loss of whole schools of arcane lore over the decades rendered the system at first unreliable and finally totally non-functional.

"Indeed it is to this loss of the high magic arts that the fall of the Patrin Empire can be most directly ascribed; for in truth, it was not an rise of decadence, weak leadership or even direct foreign threat, contrary to the accepted histories of the time, that had lead to the contraction of that mighty realm, but simply communication failure. Distant provinces lost the ability to communicate with the capital and so when barbarian forces began to pick at the edges, calls for help were so long delayed by overland messenger that such forces as could be spared were simply to late to drive the newcomers away. And this does not take into account regional commanders who simply seceded from the Empire to set up their own petty kingdoms that here, in the West, gave rise to our Confederacy today.

"Eight centuries have passed since that time and although the glory of Patrin is faded from memory, still the old Stepping Gates are to be found in places that marked the geomantic web that drove them, and, it is said, from time to time one opens and then a traveller might pass into lands beyond the distant horizon once again."

Exerpt from "The History of the Marchess Confederacy" by Teon Harbecker, Scribe to the Duke of Farren.