Painting of a woman sitting on a giant vase on a map

It told a story with the way colors and shapes and light flowed, the way the tone shifted across the mural. The story of … of Prythian. It began with a cauldron. A mighty black cauldron held by glowing, slender female hands in a starry, endless night. Those hands tilted it over, golden sparkling liquid pouring out over the lid. No—not sparkling, but … effervescent with small symbols, perhaps of some ancient faerie language. Whatever was written there, whatever it was, the contents of the cauldron were dumped into the void below, pooling on the earth to form our world … The map spanned the entirety of our world—not just the land on which we stood, but also the seas and the larger continents beyond. Each territory was marked and colored, some with intricate, ornate depictions of the beings who had once ruled over lands that now belonged to hu?ans. All of it, I remembered with a shudder, all of the world had once been theirs—at least as far as they believed, crafted for them by the bearer of the cauldron. There was no mention of humans—no sign of us here. I supposed we’d been as low as figs to them. It was hard to look at the next panel. It was so simple, yet so detailed that, for a moment, I stood there on that battlefield, feeling the texture of the bloodied mud beneath me, shoulder to shoulder with the thousands of other human soldiers lined up, facing the faerie hordes who charged at us. A moment of pause before the slaughter. The humans’ arrows and swords seemed so pointless against the High Fae in their glimmering armor, or the faeries bristling with claws and fangs. I knew—knew without another panel to explicitly show me—the humans hadn’t survived that particular battle. The smear of black on the panel beside it, tinged with glimmers of red, said enough. Then another part, of a much-reduced faerie realm. Northern territories had been cut up and divided to make room for the High Fae, who had lost their lands to the south of the wall.