sky kids: I have faced the Eye of Eden, the calamity that took this people and killed it cold. I have faced it time and time again, a vicious cycle, and each outcome is no different. Death, rebirth, death, rebirth… And yet the world is no more healed than a raindrop fills the sea. Why must I die for the sins of a corrupted king I’d never met? This realization, this apotheosis at our first chance encounter: it’s no enlightenment, but a burden - an infinite pain - that I must shoulder until the end of days.
[Image Description: Two filtered pictures with texts of two skykids implied to be one and the same. The first picture has a moth skykid standing over the ledge in Isle of Dawn overlooking butterflies flying over sunken boats afar, an upright ledge even further, and the sihouette of the bell tower even further at the horizon. The picture’s text reads “Every journey has its final day.” The second picture has a skykid dressed in a fancier cosmetic hunched over in the opening area of Eye of Eden. The picture’s text reads “Don’t rush”. End ID.]
You know how skykids basically live forever? Even if they die, they are always reborn again and go to re-experience the same story again, collect the same winged lights, see the same places, try and save the same kingdom. Once you think about it, the life of a skykid kind of becomes a living nightmare. The spirits they rescue are forever stuck reliving the same memories. The elders they meet are forever performing the same motions in the lonely cutscenes. Even the land around them is forever resetting itself. Mantas and krill follow the same paths day after day. Dark plants always grow back.
Only the skykids change. They grow and witness the passing of seasons, they learn new emotes and gain new cosmetics, yet none of it is of avail in the face in the endless repetition of the rest of the world.
Don’t you think they would grow numb to it all? Don’t you think they would cease to feel altogether, forever repeating the pattern:
go to Eden, die, repeat.
And yet that’s not what happens.
We persevere, even when it seems like nothing we do makes a difference, we keep going. We keep looking at the world of sky in awe and wonder. We keep exploring.
Even when we’ve seen the same Isle of Dawn, or Daylight Prairie, or any other realm countless times before, we see beauty. We see beauty in the ruins of what was once magnificent, and we make it something else. No longer the foundations of a great empire, it becomes the cradle of a new world, a world that is given life by us. The players.
Even though that wonder from the first life may long be lost, we still find beauty, even in the same scenery. Even when nothing we do seems to make a change, we still continue.
We persevere.
I think that’s one of the best things about this game.
Was thinking about how we now know that the areas in sky that are deserts used to be fields and meadows, which lead to wondering why is Golden Wasteland called Golden Wasteland if it was originally fields?
Whichthen made me think, where did the realm names even come from?
Did the Skykids make them up? which explains the literal descriptions: Isle of Dawn is (to begin with) a place that looks like an island and the sky looks like dawn, Golden Wasteland is a ruined desert with gold statues, Valley of Triumph is a valley where you win etc
Or are they casual nicknames that the Ancestors had for them? Isle of Dawn is where they first arrived and therefore the “Dawn” of their society, Hidden Forest is a hard to reach forest with hidden factories and houses within it, Vault of Knowledge is a vault storing the knowledge of the kingdom. So, was Golden Wasteland a jab at the fact that it was an elaborate area of golden statues and massive factories, but no residents? It was a wasteland because no one lived in the place, it was just an empty shell churning out pollution and weapons surrounded in the golden markers of the Kings growing ego and paranoia? Or was it a name that only came about after the fighting there destroyed so much of the area? If so what was its original “nickname”? What were the real names of the realms?
And as a final point, whichever of these possibilities is true (if either are) its interesting that Eden has a more definite name rather than a description. If the Skykids named the realms, how did they know that this one was called Eden before? Were they told? By Lamed in the final cutscene? Did they always just subconsciously know, as a way of reinforcing their end goal?
Who decided on the name? King? His city at the peak of the kingdom, the highest point that the Ancestors reached both as a civilisation and physically (that then ended up being the location of their fall, from Kings perspective ironically adding to the symbolism). Or again, was it a sarcastic nickname by the Ancestors who saw the originally bright plans for the city devolve into the sprawling factory and darkstone experiment site that it is now?
Hey what if the red crystals in Eden are made of an ice-like substance
It’d serve a good parallel to the idea of flames and connection, seeing as darkness represents isolation/a lack of connection, and cold is itself a lack of heat, physically speaking
It’d also explain the difference between the regular rocks that stream through Eden, versus the kind that fall in Stormlock
Actually, going back to the physics aspect, if the red crystals were in fact very cold (in a metaphysical sense), that’d explain why they sap away our light: heat moves from high concentration (us) to low concentration (the crystals)
sky kids: I have faced the Eye of Eden, the calamity that took this people and killed it cold. I have faced it time and time again, a vicious cycle, and each outcome is no different. Death, rebirth, death, rebirth… And yet the world is no more healed than a raindrop fills the sea. Why must I die for the sins of a corrupted king I’d never met? This realization, this apotheosis at our first chance encounter: it’s no enlightenment, but a burden - an infinite pain - that I must shoulder until the end of days.
