Some visitors go unforgotten, regardless of the years that pass our meetings by - their feet rest still upon our doorsteps, though their greetings and their faces have long fled upon the wind. So it is that even now, some forty years along the road, I hear their voices at my window and the ready roll of coin, and that most difficult of siren songs, that of a dream you've walked on.
     Even now I smell the smoke and know the creaking of the carriage underneath me, and I feel the crumbling parchment as they tear it from my hands. My brow, now creased, is wet with ancient floods, my heart filled up with distant days which none will ever know.
     They took from me my work, my every aspiration - and from them I stole that dearest, direst motivation, that cold, immortal fire, revenge. - Dr. Elias Morrel.

An old environmental sketch for a game concept I've been planning out.  This was the second piece of pixel art I ever made.  As an experiment in color, and because I had not yet decided what sort of palette I was going for with the game itself, I decided to use DawnBringer's 16-bit palette as a starting point.

Looking back, I have a few complaints with this piece. The colors are a bit too vibrant for the story itself; the gateways don't give off quite the right feeling of foreboding to me, and I feel like there's something wrong with the ocean waves in the background, among other things.  That said, it was both experimental and an early piece, so I can't really expect perfection.

The game's story is loosely based on the Breton legend of Ys (sort of a western-European Atlantis, for those not in the know), and takes place in the fictional Kingdom of Aldoir. Basically, there was once this city ruled by a wise, just king, who, while in his travels, married a mysterious sorceress.  Said sorceress gave birth to a daughter and then disappeared, and said daughter went on to unlock the city's floodgates and destroy the whole dang place. Or so the legend says.

There are stories along those lines floating around all over, but very little of the truth has been made clear - hence people like Professor Morrel, who devote their academic lives to finding out just what happened in this province of Aldoir so very long ago. Dr. Morrel once came very close to discovering something groundbreaking, something so unexpected that it would have turned the entire study of the Aldoir Ruins upside-down. Unfortunately, his patron - that's 'sponsor' in contemporary speak - absconded with the artifacts he needed to prove his findings, thus ruining his academic credibility.

Forty years later, his patron has returned - and, strangely, appears not to have aged a day. Though he is understandably suspicious at her arrival, and worried by the presence of her mysterious associates, the call of the ruins still reaches something in his heart - and he's tempted by the opportunity to set old wrongs aright. What will he find? Your guess is good as mine.