Museum of the Edge

There were models as far as the eye could see, little houses and people and mountains up to your waist. The ceiling was painted like a night sky and dotted with stars, with little fluffy clouds hanging all around for the orc visitors to bang their heads into. The whole world was under that roof, it felt like. And now it's gone.

— Kiry Frezman

The Museum of the Edge was a museum in Taufa dedicated to the preservation of history in the form of meticulously crafted dioramas. It, and the majority of its contents, were lost alongside the city during its collapse in 3256.

Contents

Over the course of recorded history, hundreds of islands have been taken over the World's Edge by the Current, damning them to an unknown fate. The Museum of the Edge sought to record the stories of these islands and landmasses before their destruction by creating a series of dioramas for each one, depicting their settlements, shorelines, and people.
Each area would have its dioramas displayed together in the museum, roughly grouped according to the recorded date of loss, alongside names and descriptions. Guides would take visitors on tours of each floor, regaling them with tales of each land - some true and even first-hand, others imagined as the years stretched on.

History

The Museum of the Edge began initially as an artistic project by one Fovonur Jed, a self-proclaimed master of realistic dioramas. At the request of someone who was relocating to the city of Taufa from their soon-to-be-destroyed island, Jed set about crafting them a scale model of their home and surrounding area as a memento. His research process caught the attention of many of the locals, who saw in the project a way to immortalise their homes. Once he had finished his commission, he found himself bombarded by requests from the town, and set about on a larger creation.
This work, a scale model of an entire town and a nearby hill of import, took 4 years to craft, during which time the island was drawn over the World's Edge and destroyed. When Jed presented the completed diorama to the surviving residents, they bought a small house near their new homes and turned it into a memorial, dramatically calling it the Museum of the Edge.
Initially only frequented by survivors from the island, the little museum soon attracted attention from others throughout the city, and eventually from the resident of another island that would soon enter the void. Bon Chasut sought out Jed to ask for a diorama of their own home, and offered to assist extensively in the research and construction, swiftly becoming Jed's apprentice.
Not long after, the two met with the Museum and reached an agreement to present Chasut's diorama alongside the existing one, marking what many consider the Museum's "official" founding and change to presenting multiple dioramas and lost lands.
Around 3062, nearly a century after its founding, the Museum began to shift from crafting on commission to proactively seeking out lands to document, hoping to gain more time with the doomed locations to allow for more detailed dioramas. It was also around this time that they began extensive renovations of their small building to accommodate the mess of models they had created, resulting in one of the tallest buildings in that part of the city.
The Museum's work officially ended in 3256 when it, along with the rest of Taufa, was plunged into the Finuhit Ocean after one of the city's pillars collapsed. A small handful of works were rescued in the moments before the fall, but the vast majority was lost, including Jed's original dioramas and those done by Chasut. While some of the city's survivors aim to resurrect the project in their new home, it won't be quite the same.

RUINED STRUCTURE
3256

Founding Date

2983

Alternative Names

Diorama Capital, Museum of Memories

Type

Museum

Ruins of Taufa by Y S

Lost Context

While some dioramas survived the fall of Taufa, many of them are incomplete. For some this is in the form of missing buildings and landforms, while for others it is in the form of missing nameplates and stories.
The latter is particularly devastating for surviving fans of the Museum, who saw it as a way of preserving places that have long since been destroyed by the void and lost anyone to advocate for their existence. They now exist in a haphazard collection in the museum's successor in Balkehir, nameless and unknown.

I've been asking everyone for anything they know - every street, every house, every park and tree. The entire back room is full of maps and sketches, anything we can get our hands on. Hupquad's already started on her home street in rough, and Opueg has a lot of the east port roughed in.
Hopefully, soon, we'll have a diorama of Taufa, before none of us can remember it.

— Dack Jebblaroms