Source of Airtha

Under the surface of the world is the source of Airtha. It is a philosophic question what this Source is - no one has travelled deep enough in the surface of Airtha to reach the Source.
Some say it is the source of all life, the energy that makes the living beings alive. Other say it might be a deadly gas, because the mines are full of deadly gasses. And some claim it might be an enormous well, where all the water in the world comes from, a gigantic reservoir that quenches all life. Or perhaps it is the place where the gods are, or more specific, Gräins. A mysterious place it has to be, because strange things come out of the earth¹ .
There have not been expeditions to the source of Airtha yet, but daring miners have searched for entrances to this mysterious realm while working in the deepest tunnels of the known mines.

There is one man who claims to have seen the Source, but he did not find the way back there. Eventually, he had to be put in the sanatorium for bruised splinters and broken minds, where he lived only a couple of years before he died there. He died of an overdose of Tuijon, trying to find the peace and quietness of the Source in the hallucinating dreams summoned by the disastrous drink.
Here is a poem the man wrote just a few days before he died:

In the darkness of the mine she greeted me on her throne of bones
Of lost men and tortured lives piled upon stone cones coming up
And pointing down, pinning my mind to a place, that dark place
Where a pool of night was lighted by the splinters of the lost
No noise no sound swelled as she stood and took my body
Only to throw it away, out of the Source, but she kept my mind
And here I am, longing for what is mine, in the mine
At the Source of life where mine has ended.

¹ The children of Daleth are in some regions told that babies grow out of the soil, or are taken from large mushrooms that look like eggs. In other regions, the children are told the babies come out of the water, but then the well that is the source of the world might feed that water too...

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