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The Awakening

I've always liked AURORA's music. During our car rides all across Cleveland, I'd often put her music in the background. Awakening was only one of the dozen AURORA songs in my playlist - and I never gave it too much attention until it popped up on the afternoon we came back from visiting the Cleveland Museum of Art. Something in the lyrics caught my eye.

"And she's going on a journey / Always walking down the road / And the water is always calling / My little child, please come home / And the stars were brightly shining / Shen she reached out they were gone / And the water started calling / My little child, please come home..."

There was something powerful that I couldn't quite place that afternoon, something I think I now have a better understanding as this project comes to its conclusion. 

Our original intent was never to make a game. In fact, I couldn't really believe that we could achieve that in merely three weeks until our capstone was finished in front of my eyes. The initial idea was only to visit the historical sites, and there was no form of documentation. In a sense, we never planned to be the storytellers, the ancient oracles singing epics with their lyre. But we knew there was something missing, and together we found what we really wanted. It was inadequate to merely know the history and not tell it, those lines carved into time too precious to be so easily lost. So we came up with a plan to introduce what we've seen and learned to others - and that's the birth of something quite magical.

It's impossible to retrieve what we've lost to time. When visiting the CMA, the librarian told us that it's impossible to find the complete provenance of Praxiteles' Apollo, much the same for many other artworks. Its journey will never be seen in its entirety; all we could do is pick up the pieces and try to fill in the final pieces in an incomplete puzzle. Apollo is always walking down the road, and we're much the same. Time is indifferent to every one. Tyrants who dreamed of immortality and soldiers who died young on sand and rust are all the same. It's the river forever rushing forward, occasionally swirling pebbles and breaking starlight reflected upon its surface, but constantly tumbling towards the sea. It's a calling no one can resist. In this project, we are, in some ways, picking up the scattered remnants carried away by the river. It's not a physical preservation but a spiritual one, with something powerful found in unearthing the secrets of in aminate art pieces. 

I hope that you can feel this, too. From every word etched and every stroke of ink and color, understanding that there's much more beneath the world made of code in front of your screen, much more beneath the meager portions of what we've been able to retell. But treasure them all the same, as we're able to bring the broken starlights home.

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