The Tale of the Seven Voices
A common old wives tale told over pints inside The Strumpet’s Sister (and more often by The Sister’s Regulars than by anyone else) is The Tale of the Seven Voices. It’s a yarn about the birth, death, and rebirth of the Clarkwoods Literary Universe, and an intriguing one at that.
Summary
The tale is best summed up by two paragraphs found on a piece of parchment inside the Sister ages ago. The parchment, which The Barkeep keeps hung on the wall behind the bar for safekeeping, reads:
All that is, that was, and that ever will be was born of the seven voices. Facing the doom of their own world, they sang into the abyss, across the river without end, and they made this place that we call home.
Their voices are lost amongst ours now, but one day we must find them again. For when it is time for our own world to end, we must do as they did and sing the next one into existence.
The commonly held belief is that these seven voices are “the gods,” and that they walk unknowingly among us either by choice or as a side-effect of the power and effort involved in resurrecting a universe.
Historical Basis
It’s impossible to know whether the tale is rooted in historical fact, though it seems like there must be a kernel of truth in there somewhere.
We do know from studying the nature of The River Without End that it is responsible for the “big crunch” at the end of one iteration of reality, but we don’t yet full understand the mechanism by which the “big bang” which starts the next iteration begins. Could that rebirth be the result of seven voices singing out into the void?
Well, why not? What better explanation do you have?
Spread
The tale has not, to the best of our knowledge, spread beyond the walls of the Strumpet’s Sister—at least not out into the wider universe. It is extraordinarily popular in the walled-off land of Eden, however.
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