In the southern hemisphere of Intaki Prime, the looming volcano, Yasur, casts its sweaty glare over an open salty bay. This was one of the places the Gallente first landed.
The people who lived here were simple, then. Their brown toes crumbled the settled ash into a fine grey powder, dusting their feet pale. When the Gallente came, they showed off cargo from their ships, glittering things, things of which the people who live below Yasur had never dreamed.
In the shadows of overhanging palms, they spoke with the newcomers, who told them wondrous things – that beyond the white sands that were the only borders they had known was more than they could imagine; that each of the bright spots in the fundament was a star, just like their bright hot one, and that each of those stars had worlds.
They stood and watched the ships take off, then grow distant, then disappear altogether, leaving behind a dream of mysterious and esoteric cargo. And that night, Yasur flared, glowing red tendrils streaking out into the cosmos.
Despite their belief in the Ida, Yasur loomed large in the people’s consciousness, a great and terrible thing, able at a whim to destroy, but the source of fertility for all the soil in the region. They spoke to the grim mountain, and believed it spoke to them.
Great globs of molten stone drizzled the ground around, and soft flows trickled from the lip of the rock. Yasur cried that night, cried that it was losing its children.
Then, it was morning, and a fresh blanket of ash had drifted along the cane huts the people had cowered in overnight. The people went out and spoke to Yasur, to reassure the mountain that they would not leave it, but it was silent.
Even now, people travel to Yasur from all over the Federation, Intaki descended from that humble tribe, begging the mountain to speak again.
But Yasur slumbers on.
