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The origins of the Forgotten Ark

Lore post! Using the murals on the Ark to interpret how the Forgotten Ark (and it’s magic) came to be. I will be using screenshots taken in order of going around the boat so you can all see too if you don’t want to go through the effort of actually going there in-game to look at it.

So first off, screenshots!

I’m going to presume this is the first one and say that this is a krill and some clouds! Totally not an obvious observation, but if this is the first mural, the implication that krill may have existed for much longer than the Kingdom’s corruption is definitely an interesting one.

Next up, a storm. There are also a few murals after this that depict light creatures and stars appearing from that storm, but I didn’t take pictures of them.

Some people hanging around, and what looks to be an aurora borealis.

A bit hard to tell in this pic, but it basically depicts stars falling down and the people collecting them and turning them into spells.

People learning to use said spells and magic to do things, including create fire apparently!

Bunch of people going off on a big boat (presumably the Ark) and carrying their spells with them.

Said boat being flipped upside down by a storm and the people all falling out.

So, those are the screenshots I’ve taken, and now I will share my interpretation of them!

I already talked a bit about the Ark in my super-long lore post, but I wanted to go into more detail here.

I know I said this already, but I do find it interesting that krill seemingly existed before anything else did, presuming that this is the origin story of the spellcasting community.

I also find the storm that appears to produce the light creatures and the stars very poetic, because it is also the thing that ends the lives of the people on the boat.

Now, the people. It seems that they are at first hiding under umbrellas, probably to protect themselves from falling stars. And did the original spell stars come from an aurora borealis? It’s also a bit odd that falling stars seem to produce both sentient children and things such as spells. Makes you wonder how much these two things are related.

The next image, they are taking those stars from the ground and transforming them into spells. I argue that this can be compared to humanity’s discovery of fire and how useful of a tool it could be. I also find it interesting that in the first image with the Skyfolk, none of them have those little crests on their heads. By the image where they are discovering spellcasting, a few of them actually do have the little head-crests.

And to add to the “Skyfolk’s discovery of spellcasting versus humanity’s discovery of fire” thing, the next image prominently features a campfire that has presumably been produced by a spell. It also seems to contain people practicing using the spells.

The next image is probably a long timeskip later, but it shows a group of people (and now ALL of them have headcrests) on a boat, carrying spells to some distant place. I could not guess for the life of me why they were moving, but they seemed to act as a close-knit community.

And finally, a storm comes and knocks the ship over, scattering the people inside and presumably killing many if not all of them.

So, two things. First, the headcrests. The more adept the spellcasting community seems to be at magic, the more of them are depicted with those little crests. Many of the people in Vault have those crests, including the Levitating Adept, whose whole thing is making objects float; and the Meditating Monastic, who can levitate in the air. My conclusion? Those little headcrests are symbols of magical prowess, and people who have them have a fair bit of skill and experience in some form of magic.

The second thing is those smaller boats that are depicted in the mural alongside the bigger one. When I initially saw the bigger boat flipped over with none of the smaller boats in sight, my reaction was “oh hey! Maybe they made it away to spread their influence elsewhere!” But then I went back to check and NOPE. There are definitely smaller boat ruins around the Forgotten Ark, and also this really big anchor.

Look at this cool anchor I found.

Anyways, using this anchor as proof that the whole area was a body of water (maybe a body of clouds?) when all the boats sank. But clearly someone must have survived them, they seem to have been spruced up post-crash to make it viable for use as a storefront.

Anyway, that was my ramble about the Forgotten Ark, I spent too much time putting this together 😅