This name refers to different things in 2 worlds; the versions are not merged.
| Type | Island (Antiterra); colossal turtle (Vala) |
| Spanish entry | La Tortuga |
In Antiterra
In Antiterra, Tortuga is an island — not a city — near the Bay of Blood and Antigua, from which a ship sails regularly to America. A port of the damned: caverns with prostitutes and slave trading, and fierce punishments.
Its temple holds a huge turtle with empty sockets where the eyes should be. It wakes, probably in reaction to the purifying fire of the mine. The chroniclers of the Northern Crown add that the Turtle is the last animal floating on the primordial waters, on whose back the mud that multiplies the land is placed.
In Vala
The chroniclers of the Caldero record two threads that may be one: a mythical turtle that must bear or sustain the world, tied to redemption and subjected to trials; and a colossal living creature — some hundred meters long, perhaps celestial and elemental — whose engraved shell served a company as transport and refuge to “get off the island”. Inside it holds a safe, impregnable fortress; it fires projectiles from near its head; it can detect the thoughts of those traveling inside. It was seen advancing slowly across limestone rocks with a mountain in the distance, charged with reaching the center of the Caldero without deaths or destruction.
Conflicting accounts
- If it grew naturally and continuously, it would be some 26,000 years old.
- One voice of uncertain reliability suggests it is an artifact brought from another world or an earlier reality (a connection attributed to “Titi Frei”).
The engravings on its shell tell of an undersea island where the turtle lives, where visitors called “Tacrabartino” and other beings, “the wheel”, found it — names recorded as heard.
Open questions
- Whether the island is named after the temple’s beast, or the beast holds up the island.
- What the awakened turtle of Antiterra does; what trial redeems the one that bears the world.