Jake Omaze

Jake Omaze was an "accidental explorer" and adventurer who lived during the Fifth Age. He is most notable for surviving over thrity-one years lost on the Duat.

Early Life

Jake was born in the city of Sun's Beacon where he lived into adolesence. He was the sun of a middle-class banker and home-maker. He and his friends would often play and excplore in the ruins interpsersed throughout the city, paying little head to "Warning" and "Keep Out". "Danger" typically necessitated the use of flashlights and, on rare occasions, closed-toed shoes.

He was about twelve when he and his friends first stumbled upon what he would later know as the entrance to the Duat. On the surface the place looked like little more than a vacant lot with the scant ruins of some ancient building. In a small corner, a game gone wrong broke through the slab and revealed it to be a rough. Or, rather, what was thought to be the building's foundation, was actually the ceiling of it's first floor. The road level had changed that much. The boys had found an abandoned building, filled mostly with debris and garbage. But they explored it all the same, and found their way into a basement with similar, if lesser, trappings, and finally into a well-preserved sub-basement.

It was mostly empty, but the presence of rusted cells told them this had probably once been a guard house of some sort. At the far back corner, three stories underground, behind a rotting book case, Jake and his friends found a deep, rock-cut passageway that extended into the earth. This, Jake would later say, was where his adventure began.

Duat Expedition

For three years, Jake and his friends played in the guard-house ruins, building forts and inventing games. Only occasionally, usually on a dare or to impress girls, would they take the steep decending passage that opened, over a hundred feet beneath the surface, on a natural cavern. With his friends he never dared venture more than a few steps into that deep sub-terrace world, but alone Jake would sometimes explore the passages for hundreds, even thousands of feat. At this time, he still did not know what he and his friends had carelessly discovered, and he made a rather juvenile mistake: he believed that the caves could only go so far, and that, properly equipped and provisioned, he should be able to explore them.

He told his friends of his aspirations many times, but could convince none of them to accompany him. Enamored by the cave, he resolved to go alone.

Jake packed a bag with food, water, camping equipment, and lots of flashlights. He was by no means an experienced caver and had not even camped in real wilderness. Had he told his parents or anyone in authority, he would not have been allowed to go. A few friends knew, but were sworn to secrecy. Having told hi parents he was spending the weekend with a friend, Jake set off.

"A few thousand feet from [the natural cave] entrance, I found the remains of a wooden wall and door, and what had been a store room. A bit past that, I found a brick cistern. All the while I was walking on packed earth or paved with rough cobbles and shards of shale. The place clearly hadn't been touched in forever, but this presence of human workmanshape had me re-assured. This wasn't a mysterious cavern, it was like being in a park!"

Jake walked for hours before he found himself on the beach of an underground lake. A rotted-out rowboat sat on the sand while the remains of a wooden peer disappeared into the inky black waters. He followed the shoreline and into anther tunnel, and kept on walking.

"The first night wasn't bad. I had candy bars, comic books, my sleeping bag. I was scared, but only because I'd never spent a night alone before. The darkness didn't bother me, I was only scared like any kid would be. I didn't get really scared until I ran out of food... three days later."

Jake later recalled his first moment of real apprehension.

"I was walking through a passageway. Gravel, sand, and rocks at my feet. The walls slopped up, but the cave was so wide, I couldn't see them. The ceiling was so far above me. And all I could think, as my flashlight began to die, was that how could something this big exist beneath the city, and no one know about it?"

Search and Rescue Operation

Jake's absence was not discovered for three days, and it took another two before his friends, under intense questioning, told of the cave. Even then there was considerably dispute as no one knew for sure if he had gone into the caves or been kidnapped. He hadn't told his friends, they only knew of the abandoned building and the secret entrance, and Jake's fascination.

Still, city guards and rescue workers, aided by volunteers, searched for ten days, with no luck. Jake's passage into the cavern hadn't even yielded any discernible trail, and the conclusion was finally reached that he had more likely been kidnapped or ran away. The entrance was sealed from the surface, though in such a way as to keep other children out, just in case. Jake was declared a missing person, and after several months, the case went cold.

Jake, meanwhile, had already walked over fifty miles into the Duat, and was over a mile underground.

Early Years

When he began his journey, Jake made no attempt to count his lights, he simply took every flashlight and battery in the house. With careful rationing, he made them last nearly a month. Food was a much more urgent concern, but as luck would have it, he found another store room.

"This one was in a dryer part of the cave. The food was so old. I don't even know, maybe it was from the Mage Wars. I didn't know. There was some salted meats that tasted like ash, and something that I think was bread once. The bread turned out to be the best. It was barely edible, but it saited my hunger."

There was enough old food in the long forgotten store room to last a long time, but there was no water near it. Had he had water, he might have found an exit to the surface than and there--the store room could not have been too deep--but he had to keep going. When his flashlights died, he crawled along the ground, finding bits of water and searching for any sign of light.

Jake describes his first long-term camp thusly:

"I'd been in the dark I don't know how long. Weeks, maybe? It felt like months, years even. The light I saw was pale blue, like the light from a digital wrist-watch. It was far off and I had to swim to get to it, I got all my supplies and my sleeping bag wet, and for all my trouble it was nothing but a tiny, muddy island. The glow came from bio-luminescent algae growing on the side of a rock that made up one side of my camp. I found then that my own watch had stopped, maybe it died from getting wet, maybe it just ran out, I'll never know. I had no more sense of time; the light never ebbed or waned. I lived there a long while. Not years. Definitely more than a month. It was terrible.

"There were fish swimming in the lake. They were easy to catch, they had no fear of me. I could eat my fill--though I had to eat them raw. Still, the ancient bread I'd brought with my had been ruined, so fish was all I had. I didn't know what else to do. I couldn't leave this place. There was food, there was water. It was cold, dirty, and damp. Toiletries were perhaps the worst part, though.

"I couldn't simply go right there in the lake. It was my drinking water. I had to walk out, away from my camp, one, maybe two hundred yards through chest-high water, to a sandy beach. I could turn around and still see the glowing rock, but I couldn't see my own hands. I had to do my buisness in the dark and clean off as best I could with sand and rocks, then back to my camp to shiver until I was dry."

Eventually, Jake discovered that many of the fish were themselves bio-luminescent. He trapped some in a clear plastic water bottle, and with that light, continued his journey.

"I shudder to think of how I almost died on that tiny, muddy island. That rock was like the beacon, the gateway. Had I had the courage to press on away from it sooner, I would have been happier."

Beyond the rock he found a fabulous world of bio-luminescent plants. Fish were the only animals, they lived mostly in the lake. It was an odd paradise, but in it, Jake found the key to his salvation. His fish gave off little light and died after only a few days, but here he found enough algage to fill two of the plastic bottles he'd brought. When concentrated, it was better than his flashlights. He found salt collected in rivluts and preserves fish, and by this light, he continued his journey in search of a way out.

"My life, then, was curious sort," Jake recalls. "Its hard to describe much about it. I'd lost all sense of time. Yet the changes were there. My backpack seemed smaller, my shoes wore away, my clothing turned to rags. I wasn't... happy. My life was about nothing beyond survival. There were no days, no nights. I'd learned to stay alive in the duat. How to find rivers with fish, how to keep the algae that lit up the darkness. I never remained still, hoping each new tunnel would lead me back to the surface, so sunlight. I didn't know how much time had passed.

The Duani

{Note: what follows is an account based souly on Jake Omaze, no other Duat explorer has ever lent credence to this tale).

"They are queer folk with pale skin and big eyes. They are human, or I think were, once, but not one amongst their number has ever glimpsed the sky."

While wondering deep in the Duat, Jake claims to have encountered a race of men, long-adapted to the darkness, who had no knowledge of the surface world. They used the luminous algae for light and coult make fire, though they used it only for cooking(fuel was so scarce) and kept fish as livestock in a series of natural and artificial pools. They had no metal, only stone tools, and wore clothing made from fish-skin.

"When I first met the Duani, I was nearly dead. Half-staved and injured from a fall. I didn't believe it, at first. I'd had many halucinations. I spent days in their village, being nursed back to health by their women, before I came to accept what I saw around me. At first, I believed them to be my salvation, and was sadened beyond all measure when I found what they weren't, and what had become of myself."

Jake describes spending time learning their language, both written and oral(and it is through his accounts of their tongue that the best proof of their existence comes; for Jake remembered their language, and had neither the training nor the wherewithal to invent such a complex tongue himself). It was also while living with the Duani that Jake got a look in a mirror, and saw, in his own reflection, how much time had passed. He had been a boy when he began his expedition, and he was a man now. Years had passed. A great many, but he could not count.

The Duani, he discovered, had no real sense of time. They slept when they were tired, took rest from their work when they felt they were entitled. Even the concept of aging was difficult to communicate, in the constant waning halflight of the caverns, a Duani would change little from the day he reached maturity until he was deep into old age.

They were a simple people. Like him, their lives were largely dominated by survival. They worshiped light as a supreme diety, and spoke of ancient beings of darkness which, long ago, had stolen the great light from their people. Jake tried to tell them of the sun, of the surface world, but they would hear none of it. Their version of existence was nothing but the caves. "Up", they said, was dry. It got dryer the higher you went, until there was no water and you would die of thirst. "Down" became wet and dark, until the very darkness drowned you.

Jake estimates that he spent perhaps three or four years with the Duani.

"They were a simple people, and it was a simple life. I liked having friends to talk to, not being afraid of finding my next meal, having clothes to wear and the warmth of an occasional fire... but as time went on, I think... I just feel I was bigger than them. They couldn't comprehend of a sky, or of electricity, or any of the things I'd grown up with. I loved their company and will never forget the friends I made. But I couldn't stay there. It was a little like living with a pack of stray yet affectionate dogs. The companionship is wonderful, but its not like humans."

Jake estimates there were around 30,000 Duani. They had no real tribal system, and occupied one contiguous network of caverns in which they'd cultivated plants and constructed elaborate networks of fish ponds. There was no leadership, no money. Just thousands upon thousands of them, living their lives, trying to preserve enough of themselves for the next generation. Jake reports that they had books and he was allowed access to a great library, but was not allowed to take any of it with him.

The Carns

"Deep beneath the surface lies a treasure so wondrous it would excit academic minds for centuries to come."

After bidding heartfelt goodbye the Duani, Jake set out again in search of an exit to the surface. By this time he had begun tracking time himself, going simply by his patterns of sleep. Each 'sleep' he reckoned, counted for a day. And he counted over four hundred sleeps and many hundreds of miles of wandering between the Duani and his next great discovery.

"I always thought, when I made it outside, I wouldn't know it," Jake mused. "Because of these large caverns. I'd come across them sometimes, acres in size, so huge my light cannot show me all of it. I would laugh to myself in these caves, that it was night and I was really outside on the surface again."

"And, again, I walked for days before I knew what I was seeing to be true."

Jake had still not made his way back to the surface, but was closer than he had been in a decade.

"You wouldn't think it, but in the vast infinence of the Duat and nature's work, it gets hard to tell dressed stone from the natural stuff. A dozen times a day I'd see a rock too regular to be an accident, or walls I'd swear were brick. It doesn't help that the first few hours of my journay, many years ago, took me past many definite manmade artifacts."

"So, one can understand my schepticism when I felt I might be walking through a row of statues."

"Not helping matters were that they were buried half in sand and silt, and that there features had worn smooth. But the placement was too regular, and the stone the wrong type for the area. I stooped to examine one and was elated when it proved to be a most definite work of the hand. I followed the row until I found a cavern in which an entire army, ten thousand strong, stood at attention. Each made of stone and each buried to his chest in gravel. They guarded a fabulous mausoleum made in the form of traced gardens, were flowers carefully carved of stone waited through eternity for no one but me."

"At first, I believed I had just found something made by the ancestors of the Duani, but a mural inside the mausoleum proved without a doubt that whoever made this had seen the sun. I was ealted, something this big had to take an army of workers many years to construct! There was simply no way there wasn't a large road out."

"I was, as you can guess, notably dissapointed when more images told the rest of the story."