"Nodd knows that its built from other realities.

A big portion of Nodd's origin myth describes how the God Yami traveled from world to world and reality to reality basically cherry picking the aspects of each he liked best, and then his retreat to a new universe where he made a planet, placed all these elements, and tried to get them to mesh.

The story acknowledge and accepts that there were failures in this process, many, in fact, but it doesn't really talk about what those were. It mentioned two 'fallen' civilizations, those of the Dragons and the Aviens, and some lost ones, though usually the only one mentioned are Merfolk.

I know there are way, way more failures than those mentioned in the origin myth. I know there were species that Yami wanted for this world that didn't work, because he wanted all of the species to be able to interbreed, meld, and mesh. I know he populated the world with a good many monsters that he let die off because he didn't like watching his People suffer. The number of things Nodd has lost over the history of its existence is, in fact, larger than the number of things it still has. Like, there used to be bug people in Nodd. Centoid, six limbed, mandible having bug people. But since Nodd doesn't do much research into its own history, I doubt anyone living there even knows about this. There aren't stories, at least not that I've heard, and Nodd doesn't even have any archeologists yet.

Boy are those folks going to have interesting lives, if that profession ever comes into existence in that world.

Part of this whole smashed together realities and letting the shrapnel fall and be forgotten thing is that there's a bunch of art that is really, really hard to explain, if it's discovered at all.

This is what I thought about as I looked at the frieze I had found. Sitting in a valley, where none of Nodd's current people live, I looked around at what was clearly, at some point, a city meant to emulate some combination of ancient Greece and Rome. A Middle School student's understanding of that place on Earth in that time. The abandoned buildings that nature had nearly totally reclaimed were all made of white stone with inlaid gold trim. There was a stature of an owl holding scrolls and paint brushes in its claws, and a building that had clearly been modded on the pantheon. Give this place another hundred years or so and any layperson walking through it wouldn't notice it had ever been here.

But all of that was a little less interesting than the frieze. It was a Female Husky head, with dreadlocks like hair that had eyes on the ends. Running my fingers over one of these sets of eyes, I wondered if there had ever actually been any Medusa like creatures in Nodd. Certainly it was possible, but why would Yami have picked something so horrible to subject his people to? And why did this one look like a person that was alive in Nodd today?

I slung off my pack, got out my sketchbook, and made a drawing of the frieze, also noting where I had found it. I hadn't gotten around to drawing maps of anywhere in Nodd yet, but if I ever did, I'd use the medusa head to mark where this city had once been."

World: Knights of Nodd.
Characters: Alexander "Driver" Taxi.
Media: Easy Paint Tool SAI and Microsoft Paint.
Art, characters, designs, and ideas © me.

-Topknot