Respect Your Elders v2 - Galactic Boogaloo [Warhammer Lizardmen Quest]

This was what they were here for. It was unusual, but not entirely unknown, for Relic Priests to reside in underwater tombs. Water was the stuff of Tzunki, the substance of life that had given rise to the lizardmen since ancient days. Submerging oneself entirely within its currents was considered by some to be a method to obtain wisdom within the purview of the Old One. Ironic then, that the few who could best experience such revelations were those who could share them only rarely.

Given the opportunity to exercise their limbs, Slann made for adequate swimmers, relying on their natural buoyancy and webbed feet to navigate aquatic environments. There had not been such an occasion in a long time, however, and the mage-priests were only loosely constrained by the demands of biology. A simple enchantment to weave orbs of self-rejuvenating air around their heads and ample application of telekinesis was enough to permit the lizardmen to descend into the pool and make their way into the tunnel. Still seated atop their stone disks, the Slann found that a subtle but powerful current came into effect just inside the tunnel's mouth, and allowed it to pull them into the dark, their guards and attendants not far behind.

Where the water in the pool had been tepid, clouded in places by particulate and the refracted light of the glowing flowers, the hall they now entered was as cold and clear as glass, the water remaining utterly undisturbed by their presence no matter the degree of their movement. The walls were arranged in a pattern of repeating decagons, the vertices and angles of the shapes crossing over but somehow not overlapping each other. A Relic Priest hovered in the center of the chamber, its bones wrapped so thickly in seaweed that it seemed to be made of plant matter underneath its golden death mask.



The words came from all around the Slann, for they were spoken within the hidden currents of the dead one's sunken tomb. Yes, they projected into their surroundings with silent intent. The inner workings of what we are must be unraveled if we are to ever return you to life.

Something twisted in the outskirts of the chamber, and a visible ripple coursed inwards towards the center, the water shimmering and thickening around the Relic Priest. As it closed in, the space around the dead Slann hardened and crystallized into a sphere of ice that enveloped the Priest in its entirety.



Something moved inside the ice, boring small, squirming tunnels towards the outside of the sphere, and the Slann felt something within them move in unison with it. The water around the Relic Priest began to be suctioned into the sphere of ice, vanishing into some unknowable space within.



As the last of the water was suctioned into the sphere, exposing the lizardmen to dry, briny air, the Slann continued to feel water coursing through their throats. It filled their stomachs and circled through their lungs and with every breath they saw things.

A great scaly hand cuts itself open, spilling blue blood into a stone chalice. The cup overflows, torrents of water running off the sides, and scaled life clambers forth upon the goblet's rim. Their scales are lined with sapphire and their limbs are lined with fins. They live on the goblet's rim, and when they die their blood runs back into the chalice.

The chalice dries up and a desert sprouts in its place. The creatures continue to live and die, and even though the water is gone, their blood still runs blue, and still recedes into the chalice of their birth when they die.

The desert is slowly stripped away, and underneath it lies a sea of blue.

The sphere of ice shattered, and in a flash dozens of tendrils of water forced themselves down the throats of the Slann, allowing no air in whatsoever. The Relic Priest's voice transmitted itself down these tendrils, echoing a single thought irrevocably into their minds, over and over again.



The Slann awoke some time later in a completely different corridor, their Skink priest attendants having exhausted themselves extracting hundreds of liters of water from each mage-lord's lungs. None of the other lizardmen professed any memory of what had happened once they had entered the pool, nor how they had found themselves where they were.

Once the health of the Slann had been assured, the expedition made its way forth once more, and quickly found themselves emerging through a hidden tunnel up into a spawning cavern. As if triggered by their arrival, the pools glowed with the radiance of a completed spawning sequence, and a cohort of Skinks clambered forth from the pools, each bearing the distinct fins, gills, and teal scales of Tzunki's mark.

Secret of Tzunki uncovered: the water that made you never fully dried up. It flows through your veins even now, kept from the withering world by the shelter of your being.

Patterns were not accidental. Their existence denoted the presence of thought or intent in the world. There were certain things that were simply more efficient than others when it came to conservation of energy, and given time even the most simplistic of creatures would adhere to the expressions of these laws. Terradons flew in formation over long distances to avoid wasting their stamina. Communal insects such as bees built their hives in repeating layers of hexagons so as to maximize the available space used within and regulate proper airflow. The coatl constructed their gardens in accordance with the metaphysical principles of whichever aspect of magic they wished to express.

The fractured, glinting shards of purple light moved around the walls of the chamber in patterns that were faint, nigh unrecognizable, but unmistakably present.

The thoughts of the Slann coursed out and silenced the rippling waves of the pool. The water flattened and smoothed out under their gaze, becoming as clear and unmoving as glass. As the glowing white flowers ceased to bob up and down, the rays of light given off by their petals converged and stabilized, and began to form a cohesive image.

An archway of light formed above the pool, framing a set of blank white doors equal in size to any the lizardmen had come across thus far. A preliminary test with a Skink holding a thirty foot pole revealed that they were, in fact, solid, and not merely a three-dimensional illusion - their substance had been materialized in some unknown fashion. Multiple Kroxigors were then assigned to push or pry the doors open, to no avail. Though the Slann used their telekinesis to allow the Kroxigors to walk upon the water and push or pull from directly in front of the gates, their prodigious strength was to no avail.

The Slann descended into deliberation of arcane variables amongst themselves, and the rest of the lizardmen conferred with those of their caste for a time. It was only when a Skink scribe approached the now-placid pool, curious about whether anything was maintaining its stillness, that a discovery was made. One of the Temple Guard had tracked the motion, alert for anything that could harm its master, and its sharp eyes spotted something that had not previously been noticed. Sensing the thoughts of the guardian, the Slann emerged from their discussion, interrupting the Kroxigors who had been constructing a battering ram in the meantime, and bade their servants to look upon the pool.

Reflected in the mirror-smooth water below the ivory arch of light was an identical copy, with its gates wide open to reveal an aperture of purest night.

"He is hidden where you look," a Slann intoned, quoting a lecture that the ancient Slann Chaacalot had given on the Old One Huanchi's purview some millennia ago. The rest of the Slann acknowledged the quip with a chorus of rumbling croaks, and the lizardmen stepped forth, their path now clear.

Entering the proper gate was a simple matter of not disturbing the water in which its reflection-form resided and walking towards it with their intentions set upon entering. Space warped around them as their trajectory inverted, their bodies entering the reflection without touching the water. They stood before the gate, in a void where nothing else was present, and went through its yawning threshold.

The chamber of the Relic Priest was not far in coming - in fact, they found it almost immediately. The party stood upon one plinth, its edges falling away into uncertain depths, and a short distance away, the dead Slann reclined upon another. Its death mask was dark as obsidian, and its bones hardly seemed to be there, fading in and out of view as the eye idly wandered.


The words did not appear in their minds so much as unveil themselves, revealing what had been there from the start of their journey. One of the Slann moved forth and replied. "What is there to learn about the soul?" Their query echoed out into the dark. "What must we discover within ourselves to comprehend what we are?"

The words echoed off the unseen walls of the chamber, gradually washing back over the Slann as an indecipherable jumble. The words truly spoken in reply made themselves known in the silences where nothing was spoken.


The silences bloomed like spreading mold, swallowing the sounds of their shifting feet, of their breath, of their blinking eyes and beating hearts.


The eyes of the living Slann flared, and the silences retreated for a moment, pushed away by light and sound. "We serve the will of the Old Ones. We guard their words and further their cause, until we find them once again." As if in response, the silence surged once again, engulfing sight and sound and touch until each lizardman stood alone, a sole sentinel in an infinity of darkness, with nowhere to look but inside themselves.


And with nothing else to perceive, within themselves they saw something looking back at them, something -

Secret of Huanchi uncovered: What you think you search for, you shall never truly find. You seek what was lost, and shall know it only when you realize that you were the reason they never truly left.

No guardian, however formidable, could be allowed to impede the lizardmen's search for knowledge. A word rose from among the Slann, and the Saurus in their party hefted their weapons with instinctive acknowledgment.

Loq'gar. Attack until death.

The gaping jaw of the skeletal titan swung open like death's door, the colossus understanding the command just as well as the lizardmen. The sound that emerged was less a scream and more a wall of solidified noise, a million death rattles combined to form something that shook the flesh and tore at the mind, the stone floor shaking under its force. Sparks of violet light lit up in its empty sockets, focusing balefully upon the small creatures before it.

The Slann vanished in a whuff of displaced air, taking their Skink scribes with them as the creature raised a gargantuan limb. The Saurus guards, having formed a tactical hierarchy and battle plan in seconds with the use of body language and War-Speak, their breed's language, scattered into multiple squads going every which way, some dragging confused Kroxigors along with them.

The titan's claw swept through the area where the lizardmen had previously been, carrying a great gust of wind along with it. The air howled as it was forced to circulate around the walls of the pit, sending clouds of grave dust into the air. Multiple Saurus, having dashed to just beyond its arc, jumped and clambered onto the massive limb, hanging on with claw and fang as they began to climb towards the shoulder.

As the godling reared back, lifting its other limb towards its unexpected passengers, a beacon of light was birthed in the air above it. A cold, white sun burned away much of the darkness surrounding the titan, illuminating the battlefield for the rest of the lizardmen. The Slann had spaced themselves out in a wide circle, placing themselves temporarily out of the godling's reach. The bulk of the Saurus had dashed towards the colossal ribcage, taking the Kroxigors with them. As the bony titan's attention was drawn by the Saurus closer to its head, the Kroxigors reached out with long, hooked poles, managing to get ahold of one of the massive rib bones. Groaning with effort, the Kroxigors pulled the rib closer, the bone audibly creaking as it bent, until it was low enough that the Saurus with them could clamber upon the great pale spur.

Saurus bodies fell to the floor, smashed halfway into paste as the titan ran a claw down its limb, scraping many of the warrior caste off. But despite its efforts, the creature was slow, and many of the Saurus were able to evade its swipes, continuing their climb upward and reaching their goal of its shoulder joint. They remained there for a few seconds only, enough time to wedge several clawfuls of Glyph Spheres into the gaps of the bone, before the creature bucked wildly enough to throw them off entirely.

Half of the spheres had been set to lower the temperature around them as far as their energy reserves would allow. The other half, which went off a split second afterwards, increased the temperature to the opposite extreme. The air shook and screeched as the magic rippled outwards, thermal shock causing the enormous shoulder joint to tear itself apart, erupting in a hail of bony splinters. The creature soundlessly wailed as its forelimb came free, the weight of its massive torso bearing down upon the Saurus who had felled it.

Down by the building-sized ribcage, the second team continued to labor. Skeletal insects the size of a Skink's head swarmed and stung them with bony stingers, and the titan's fall had shaken loose several of their number, sending them down to the floor far below. The rest of them had clustered around a single rib, the Saurus raising shields and warding off the insects as best they could while their Kroxigor hefted sharp-toothed saws and cut into the bone. The bleeding, beating heart that served as the insect-creature's hive was too high for them to reach and had proved impervious to gunfire, so they would spear it with its own rib.

The godling's hollow eye sockets flared as it propped itself up on one limb, glaring at the Slann that surrounded it. With a great dusty sigh, it exhaled a cloud of grey particulate that rushed towards the mage-priests, drawn to them like iron to a magnet. It crashed against their glowing shields, thrashing against the barriers with temporarily-formed limbs and faces that fell back into the morass just as quickly as they formed. The Slann grimaced with effort, having to extend their shields to encompass their Skink retainers, increasing the necessary energy expenditure considerably.

The creature's rib came loose with a gruesome krak as the Kroxigors finished their work, wrenching the massive yellow-white spur loose. The swarm of bees redoubled their ferocity, chewing on exposed eyes with thorny mandibles and slipping their stingers in between the gaps of obsinite plate. Their furious buzzing drowned out almost all sound, and the Kroxigors nearly buckled under the weight of the rib as the venom pumping through them began to take effect. They were supported by the entirety of the Saurus team, however, who held them up and aimed their limbs and helped to shove the rib home.

The heart was pierced through in a single thrust and the Slann saw their chance. A heavy thrum went out through the chamber as their eyes glowed in unison, and they channeled their considerable combined might into the godling's heart through the medium of the rib. Sight was drowned out as bolts of searing plasma and fractal vines of solidified light coursed into the titan's center, and the room shook with one final screech.

Silence descended, and sight returned to reveal the titan slumped in defeat, its bony exterior crumbling into dust and blowing away upon insubstantial winds. Only the heart was left, bereft of blood and bees, towering above even the Kroxigors as the lizardmen slowly gathered around it.

As if drawn with a blade, a thin line appeared down the center of the massive organ, mirrored on the opposite side. As the two met at the top of the heart, gravity seemed to take hold of it, and it split open, each half falling to one side like a discarded fruit peel. A blood-soaked Relic Priest sat on a plinth inside the bisected heart, its bones stained so heavily they were almost maroon. A sensation rippled out from the corpse as they beheld it, palpable through the rhythm of their blood as words.


The Slann replied as one, their thoughts projecting with enough force that the air around them shook. "What is inside the souls of our kind? We are of no use if we do not know."

The answer came as something seized the force of their telekinetic expression and turned that power back upon them, an invisible pressure playing off of their skin in a manner that was just shy of painful.


"The power and knowledge of the Old Ones rendered them beyond reproach," the Slann replied. "How could they have struggled?"

The Relic Priest spoke in truth then, and the words it carved into reality around itself were of such shocking content that the Slann spat blood, such was their anger. Yet they never had the chance to act upon it, for almost as soon as they heard the words, they were crushed out of their minds by an immense flowing pressure, the law of causality forbidding such a revelation to be had in linear time. The Priest spoke again.


"With everything that we are."


With each word, the floor beneath the Relic Priest cracked, an unidentifiable crimson radiance shining through the gaps. As the dead Slann's pronouncement rang out, the cracks yawned wider and wider, until the floor was hardly holding together at all.


At the final word, the floor crumbled away, and the lizardmen fell into the red, everything that they were dissolving away into the light.
.
.
.
As the Slann blinked the lingering light out of their eyes and contemplated what they had heard, their Saurus - even, curiously enough, those who had died fighting the god-beast - were scanning their immediate surroundings. "Safe exit, lord," a Temple Guard hissed, inclining their head towards a nearby tunnel in the catacomb wall, marked with a glyph indicating its use. "Proceed?"

A wave of the hand was all the reply the Slann gave - their minds were occupied by matters both distant and near.

Secret of Tlanxla uncovered: The Old Ones did not war against mere corporeal foes, but the foundations of an imperfect world. By continuing that struggle, you continue them.

This relic was powerful. The detached, isolated nature of the Relic Tombs lent it substance, and the weight of the ideas that had gone into its makeup gave it strength. Even though Ayotzl had claimed the place of god of death among the lizardmen, the metaphysical strength of the ideas that made up this titan of bone was still formidable. Were it given substance and identity and cast out into the Warp, it would doubtlessly be able to fend for itself, even on its own in that tumultuous ocean.

No matter its strength, however, it was still a relic. It resided in the utmost depths of the Tombs because the lizardmen had chosen to set its concepts aside, and it could not ever leave without their assistance. For all that its power was evident and its aura pressed against their minds, its purpose was to serve them, and it would be treated accordingly.

As the crocodilian's head pressed in, wafting the cold reek of the grave before it, the Slann shaped their magic and pushed it into their servants and into the air around them, meeting the scent of death with an opposing aura, a cloud that smelled of danger and dominance. The rest of the lizardmen stood up straighter as they breathed it in; their pupils widened, crests stood aloft, and their scales and claws seemed to shine a little brighter in the dim light of the bony titan's eye sockets and the lavender flames dancing within. As one, the lizardmen took a step forward, and a voice arose from within their ranks that was neither Slann nor Saurus nor Skink nor Kroxigor.

"Kneel, servant," it rumbled in a voice that hinted at flesh-rending teeth and merciless appetite. "Kneel or become prey."

The skeletal colossus drew back for a moment at the sheer force of intent that was present in the declaration. As the instant passed, however, an adjoining rumble built up in its spectral gullet. It was no feckless scavenger that would flee at the first sign of opposition, especially from the place that it had made its home. It lunged forwards, ivory talons biting meters deep into stone tile, and unleashed a scream that went beyond the bounds of ordinary sound. It was the frenzied howl of a hundred thousand souls that had resigned themselves to death in battle, the wailing and lamentation of ten million unconsecrated bodies, a numberless rush of harsh, soundless sighs of those who would never be born. It cracked stone tiles in its path, blew Skinks off their feet, and stripped the Slann palanquins of their ornamentation with its sheer force.

Silence reigned for a moment, and clouds of grave-dust continued to rise into the air, carried by the residual force of the titan's roar. They churned and twisted as hidden air currents made themselves known, obscuring both sides of the confrontation.

The unified stomp of marching feet broke the tenuous silence, as the lizardmen again pushed forwards in unison. Each individual body was minuscule in comparison with the deathless crocodile, but the dust clouds parted before them as they advanced, as if to make way for a much larger foe. They stopped at the titan's feet, and met the unblinking fire of its eyes with their own once again.

From the most grizzled of the Saurus to the lowliest of the Skinks, not one of them was cowed - if anything, their gaze was sharper, clashing against the aura of intent that surrounded the god-creature. There was a collective intake of breath, steady and purposeful, and the rumbling of the Slann could be heard as the mage-priests crafted a spell.

The roar that the lizardmen retaliated with was not louder in the sense of decibels generated, or the amount of air displaced. It established its superiority in the sense of threat that it projected, the psychic force of their collective predatorial intent. It crashed against the mind with the speed of a Cold One's ambush, the force of a Stegadon's charge, the unstoppable tenacity of a Ripperdactyl's pursuit. It was a sound perfectly calibrated to induce panic, to resonate with the part of a being that knew it would be extinguished if it did not fight or flee or submit. The Slann had distilled the essence of hierarchal dominance and suffused the voices of their servants with its power. It was impossible to hear it and remain unaffected.

The titan took a small, incremental step back.

The voice among the lizardmen boomed out again, and they stepped forward, fangs gleaming. "Submit."

The skeletal crocodilian stepped back again, setting its weight as if to charge forwards.

The lizardmen stepped forth in response, the collective thunder of their feet upon the stone floor booming sharply. "Submit!

Spiritual energy flared upwards, and the titan roared once more, projecting all its mental strength forwards in a single act of aggression. The eyes of the Slann flared in response, and a spear of amber force tore forwards, tearing the titan's aura asunder in an instant. The voice rang out one final time, crackling with barely constrained fury. "Submit!"

With a groaning sound akin to the start of a rockslide, the titan's knees bent, each hitting the floor in quick succession and shaking the room with sheer force. It bent its head low to the floor as the lizardmen marched past it, revealing the shrine it had been concealing with its bulk. A Relic Priest sat atop of it, its bones covered with a cloak made from the skin of a Dread Saurian.


"We know the patterns of nature, Silent Elder, but we do not know our souls," the Slann replied. "The substance and form of our inner selves must be revealed to us if we are to ever find our makers."


"Of course."


"We are."


The Relic Priest's form seemed to shift somehow. In an odd shift of perspective, it grew taller and taller upon its shrine, until it towered over the entire party. The teeth in its death mask seemed sharper than before, and the scales upon its cloak bristled and moved as if alive.


The Relic Priest's maw wrenched open, bristling with needle-sharp teeth. Its empty eyes gleaming, its head plunged down upon the lizardmen, engulfing them all in one swift motion, and within the cavernous abyss of its jaws they saw themselves, and within their own eyes, looking back out at them -

Secret of Itzl uncovered: To enforce your will upon the world is the same thing as to live within it. Existence is a continuous act of dominance. Contemplate this and you will understand the truth inscribed within your soul.

The titan closed in, and the lizardmen stayed unbowed.

It was natural for mortal creatures to fear the approach of death. When one's time was limited, each moment became a precious, irreplaceable thing, never to be seen again. The proper use of time was paramount when you knew in your gut that there was only so much of it available to you. Whether one did everything they could to extend their allotted time, embraced the end with open arms, or was cut down by outside circumstance before they would otherwise naturally die, a mortal could not live without coming to terms with their death. It was not so with lizardmen - they were ageless, their lifespan an endless continuation, able to contemplate depths of time that would render the wisest of sages insensate. Each of their moments was less than dust to them, shrinking to meaninglesness in the face of the eternity they would endure.

And each and every one of them knew they would die. With lives that stretched into the unfathomable endlessness of epochs, it was an inevitability that misfortune would find them, or a foe would best them, or a calamity completely outside of their control would sweep them away. This was a thing understood instinctively - their natural immortality guaranteed their inevitable deaths. Fearing the end was a pointless endeavor, its arrival no more significant than any of the other countless events a lizardman would experience in its time.

The crocodilian titan glared, its immense presence pressing in upon the lizardmen's minds with the accumulated weight of a million potential lifetimes. The lizardmen were assailed with visions of countless deaths, dizzying in their variety. The skull of a Saurus caved in on the battlefield, the loss of cognition arriving in a quick burst of agony. A Skink priest struggling to maintain a spell, pouring more and more of themselves into their incantations until their heart burst from the strain and they collapsed, blood leaking from their eyes and mouth. A Kroxigor, maimed by cruel weapons, holding up a collapsing building until their companions had escaped, and then being crushed to paste under the weight of rubble. A Slann, driven blind by the poison searing through their veins, choking to death upon the blood and flesh of skaven.

The specters dashed themselves against the lizardmen's minds in their hundreds, thousands, more than could be counted. They found no purchase upon the minds of the scaled ones, no fear to grasp onto, no acknowledgement to feed off of. There was nothing but cold, unrelenting will, a shield that deflected all their assaults with contemptuous indifference. The lizardmen locked eyes with the abyss, the personification of the oblivion that claimed all living things, and neither blinked nor wavered.

The specters were the first to falter - the ruthless calm of the lizardmen provided none of the fear, sorrow, or even acknowledgement that the spirits required to sustain themselves, and eventually their energy reserves exhausted themselves and they collapsed into a spiritual haze. Only the eyes of the Slann could be seen through the slowly dissipating cloud of warp-stuff, shining like cold stars as they once more met the gaze of the towering god-thing of bone and blood and lavender flame.

The buzzing heart of the spirit, formerly content to slowly pulsate as skeletal bees buzzed in and out of its ventricles, began to speed up. Gouts of black fluid coursed out of tears in its musculature, and the horrid droning of the hive within it intensified further as it spasmodically heaved and writhed. The hollow booming of expelled air sounded out in a discordant rhythm, and as the toothy jaw of the titan gaped further and further open, a faint glow could be spotted at the back of its skull.

The crocodilian god-thing's eyes flared like purple pyres, and a tidal wave of buzzing insects poured out of its cavernous maw, each of them engulfed in an aura of amaranthine flame. The enormous mass flew towards the lizardmen at tremendous speeds, the sound of millions of pairs of buzzing wings combining with the crackling shriek of a wall of fire to produce an unholy cacophony that was horrendous enough to burst eardrums.

The Slann spoke a singular, indecipherable word in response, their syllables ringing and cutting the air they were spoken upon to form a knife-edged prow of solidified thought ahead of them. The tide of flaming bees crashed upon this shield, and were split into separate streams, flowing around either side of the lizardmen under the power of their own unstoppable momentum. The insects faded away mere moments after impact, unable to sustain their forms outside of the god-thing's body, but there were always more to replace them, an unending river of flaming bodies that flowed on and on. It was a contest of whether the will of the Slann would falter before the reserves of a godling ran dry.

After some time, it became apparent which side was dominating the exchange. Mortal peoples rose and fell with time, gods built empires with ambition and toppled them with whim, but the will of the lizardmen was immoveable. The flaming swarm went from a raging river to a mere stream, and the godling closed its cavernous jaws once more.

In the ringing silence that followed, a single word echoed outwards. "Insufficient," the lizardmen rasped, and the god-thing recoiled as if stung by the dry pronouncement. With a series of impacts that shook the foundations of the room, it stomped forward and rose onto its distant hind legs, towering so far above the lizardmen that the flames boiling in its empty eye sockets seemed like distant stars. It rumbled something indecipherable in return, its speech washing over them like thunder from a distant shore. Then, it began to fall.

It came down like a crumbling mountainside, seeming to grow in size as it descended. Its mighty claws stretched for hundreds of meters, and its jaw gaped wide enough to swallow a city. Ahead of it came a wind with the force of a hurricane, and in its howling was the sound of every soul to have died in winter. It lunged at the lizardmen with the momentum of a falling star, poised to crush them under the weight of the abyss.

Gods were nothing more than personified tricks of perception, born from shadows dancing along the walls of the cave that was the mind. Without the flame of thought to give them form and substance, they were immaterial, irrelevant things. It was only the mortal need to understand the world that gave them any purchase in reality, for with perception came belief, and with belief came power.

The lizardmen stayed unmoved, and the titan's bony mass turned to dust as it came into contact with them, transubstantiated by their sheer, overwhelming immunity to its existence. The grand spectacle and horror of death incarnated was as consequential to them as the dust on the walls of the catacombs, and so the grand illusion that was the godling fell apart, becoming nothing more than a cloud of grey particulate that washed over the lizardmen, muffling every sense.

The cloud faded in time, as all things did, and its last remnants hovered above the lizardmen, a diffuse cloud that swirled and turned, patterns slowly emerging as the particles drew closer together. A five-spoked star shape formed, the boundaries shifting, limbs becoming more defined, the white pallor of bone emerging. A Relic Priest manifested, its desiccated remains covered by no wrappings or jewelry. The only part of it that was covered was its head, where an obsinite helm had been fitted, fashioned so that it had no holes for eyes, mouth, or anything else. Sigils shaped to resemble eyes glared out from the appropriate spots on its harsh, angular slopes, the lifeless symbols seeming to look into one's eyes from any angle they were observed from.



The response of the Slann was immediate. "We must learn the secrets within the soul of our kind. We will not leave the catacombs without an answer." The force of their speech raised small eddies of dust from the large swathe coating the floor, which were only disturbed more as the corpse replied, dancing in intricate patterns as force pulsed through the air.



The patterns in the dust crystallized, recognizable silhouettes forming. Flames danced over broken cities, cast in pale grey. The faces of daemons stretched and warped, cackling and drooling. Orks bayed with tusked maws. Skaven chittered and schemed. The images multiplied and grew, converting more and more of the upraised dust, until another part of it solidified. The image of a lizardman formed, its caste different to every individual that looked upon it. Where the other images were distorted, flickering in and out of coherency, the lizardman's image was defined, solid. Where it moved, nothing else could form, and the efforts of the other dust creatures to convert it were for naught - they washed over it and were dispersed into nothingness.



The space around the lizardman image smoothed out, then spread in a growing ripple, erasing everything in the swirling cloud until it was alone in a blank slate of grey once more. The cloud began to grow as more and more bone dust rose from the floor to join it, enveloping first the Relic Priest, then the rest of the lizardmen.



The dust blew around them with fearsome force, but the lizardmen stayed unmoved, and a great stretch of space behind them was shielded by their presence. Before the storm thickened and swallowed the last of their vision, the Slann perceived a kind of truth in that shape.

Secret of Tlazcotl uncovered: A stone thrown into water will generate ripples, and leave a fading mark on the world. A stone that stands unmoved by the waves will shape the ocean around it, and its presence will be continued forever.

The Slann would throw up a semi-permeable barrier around the party that would halt the sharp obsidian fragments from cutting the lizardmen to pieces. The shards of stone held potent anti-magic energies within themselves, however, and it would take much of the attention of the Slann to maintain their ward. They would be exposed to the force of the windstorm, the arcane force of which blew not only at the flesh, but the soul. It would be a trial of will and spiritual resilience to make it through to the temple's interior.

The gusts began to blow almost as soon as the first of the lizardmen stepped onto the temple walkway, accelerating swiftly until the air was screaming off of the temple stones with a howl fit to wake the dead. The air was painfully cold, cutting like knives through the armor of the lizardmen, penetrating effortlessly through their flesh and finding purchase on something more fundamental to their being. The pain from having one's soul frayed and dissolved, inch by inch, was peculiar, for no nerves were triggered and no physical injuries manifested, and yet even the implacable Temple Guard staggered as the magic of the winds began to flay them. If they were not swift, the storm would strip away their identities, their memories, and after that their ties to existence itself.

A quiet hum rose from the ranks of the lizardmen as they set their weight against the storm and began to slowly march forward. It was a calming rhythm of concentration and perseverance, commonly adopted by work crews who had entered their fifth consecutive day of labor. Its rolling intonations underlaid the storm now, reminding the lizardmen of their purpose even as the arcane winds wore away at their wills. They stepped forth, set their weight, and stepped again, their voices thrumming in unison all the while.

With each step they took forward, the wind blew harder, cutting deeper into the inner selves of the lizardmen. Its cruel, cold gusts wore away at their memories like fire gnawing the edge of a paper. The details of events in the distant past were the first to leave, becoming little more than blank spots that could be palpably felt by the mind, and these holes only grew, taking not only the specifics but the whole of the memory as well – before long there were great swathes of nothing that screamed in their minds to be filled, imperceptible chasms that ate away at their thoughts with a ravenous hunger. There was no pain to endure, no resistance against their flesh that the wind offered – it was the perilous agony of feeling one's own self slip away, an irreversible degree of ego death that had come upon them. No mortal creature could withstand such an onslaught.

And yet even as their thoughts dissolved, the lizardmen hummed and stepped forward. Even as their memories were sandblasted away, the lizardmen pressed against the wind. Even as its icy currents lashed at their identities and cut away their names, their unspoken song continued. The wind could not touch their resolve – it could take every other part of them, cut away their hearts until all that was left of them was empty husks of meat that moved without knowing why, but their decision would not be swayed.

The wind howled. The wind cut. Their souls bled, but their rhythm was undisturbed, and their step never faltered. Inch by inch they pressed on, and inch by inch they passed through the temple's gateway, where the wind could not reach.

They rested there for some time, until the chill of the wind had left them and their Slann masters had begun to restore their minds. Fully recovering from the ordeal would take decades, but functionality was simple enough to achieve. They rose on unsteady legs, claws clacking across milk-white stone as they proceeded into the temple proper.

They walked only for a short time, proceeding down a hallway of smooth, unbroken stone with circular, sloping walls. They shimmered with a faint iridescent aura when stepped upon, gently lighting the way forward. The glow grew brighter as they went onward, until they found themselves in a chamber resembling nothing so much as the inside of an egg. Round, white walls curved high above their heads, covered with a soothing aurora of a color that could not be named. Ahead of them, in the center of the chamber, the smooth floor rose up as a mound, and seated upon that rise was a Relic Priest.

The dead Slann was encased in a ceramic sarcophagus of pale rose-colored material, cunningly shaped so as to resemble the body it had possessed in life. Every detail was exactingly simulated, from the slight wrinkles at the corners of flabby lips to the tiny pores speckling its skin. The only discrepancy was in the eyes, where there was no material whatsoever, only two empty voids that the palpable intent of the Relic Priest could be felt emanating from.



The voice of the Relic Priest came from everywhere and nowhere. It was the hum of a city's enchantments running smoothly, the quiet ringing in the ears that came from contemplation within a silent temple, the steady rhythm of calming breaths. It washed over the weary delvers, who stood a little straighter as the Slann silently composed a response. The oldest of the mage-priests who were present responded in projected thought, for it was clear that the rumble of spoken words would disrupt the serene atmosphere of the chamber.

We come seeking clarification, honored remnant. The trials faced to stand here have taxed our collective spirits, the inner workings of which are no longer known to the living Communion. Without the answers of the ancients, our knowledge will remain muddied and unclear for cycles to come. What drives the soul, dead elder? What lies beneath mind and will, that our kin could push forwards even as their inner selves were stripped and torn away?

The Relic Priest was silent for a time, although the shifting kaleidoscopes of color on the chamber's walls did begin to shift faster as the question was asked. Perhaps it was a trick of the light, but the expression on the ceramic tomb seemed to shift, its facial features spread in an expression of peaceful bemusement.



Nothing, the living Slann faintly intoned, even as the coffin-sculpture before them began to rise into the air without a hint of any spell being cast, or any magic being drawn upon. Without cognition, active existence is an impossibility.

A faint groaning began to sound out as the walls of the chamber shifted a fraction of an inch.



"No," the Slann boomed as one unit, the word forcing itself from their lips in a burst of energy. "They exist. All of us know this."

With the harsh scrape of stone on stone, the chamber walls began to rotate, concealing the entrance and causing the luminescence on the walls to swirl and twist in strange, differing patterns. The room began to brighten as the walls sped up, energy coursing through veins of stone and flowing towards the Relic Priest, the coffin of which began to glow.



The room turned, faster and faster, the shifting patterns of the glow beginning to blend together into moving images. The Slann looked upon them and saw diagrams of grand complexity, details flashing through their visual receptors for scant instants at a time. Sigils of the Old Ones pressed themselves into their grey matter in looping, fractal patterns, and amidst the synesthetic barrage of information, a snippet of truth shone through. The empty eyes of the Relic Priest blazed like twin stars as the thoughts of the Slann shifted to accommodate their revelation.



The Relic Priest's coffin burst asunder, and an overwhelming tide of light filled the chamber, everything else fading away before its soothing glory.

Secret of Potec uncovered: Death is only a momentary event, a ripple in the ocean of time. By introducing utmost serenity, the waves flatten, and such moments may be bypassed at will.

The Slann had devised a spell to rob the fearsome winds of their magical properties, allowing the souls of the lizardmen to pass unscathed. In return, however, their underlings would need to endure the onslaught of the shards of obsidian as they made their way through. The fragments of stone bore potent energies of dispellation and cutting, and would undoubtedly shred their protective equipment on the way into the temple. It would be left to the fortitude of their bodies and their ability to push through the damage they took to get them through to the temple interior.

With unflinching stoicism, the lizardmen stepped onto the stone bridge, arraying themselves in a protective formation - Kroxigors at the outskirts, forming an interlocking wall of tower shields. Lines of Saurus formed up behind them, bracing the forms of their larger brethren. Skinks scattered themselves throughout, holding glyph spheres primed with enchantments to repair broken flesh. At the core were, of course, the Slann, who had collectively sunk into a deep trance. An inaudible hum issued out from them, a vibration that was felt on a layer of being deeper than bone and sinew.

As if in response, the wind began to howl, its tones of piercing cold reaching through flesh to scour the soul. The magic of the Slann, however, intervened - their humming intertwined itself with the arcane strands of the wind, coiling around them in a complementary harmony. Opposing wavelengths of thaumic energy merged with one another in a grand interlocking chain, each element's neutralization spurring the next. So long as the Slann kept up their inaudible chant, the chill of the wind would bite no deeper than the lizardmen's scales.

Carried by the cruel gusts, however, were the second trial of the temple. They began as flakes of black sand, scoring the surface of the shields they were blown into, but swiftly grew as the gale picked up speed, becoming a hail of obsidian leaf-sized fragments, leaving deeper and deeper cuts on the lizardmen's armor with each passing second.

They made it a third of the way across the bridge before their shields fell to pieces and the shards began to cut through the flesh of the Kroxigors. They were halfway when the scaled giants began falling, the razor edges of the obsidian storm flensing flesh from bone and watering the bridge with enough blood that it began to run off the side, falling into the void beneath like crimson rain. Saurus stepped up to fill the gap as the Kroxigors were dragged back to the core of the formation, glyph spheres and Ghyran Skinks pouring out waves of emerald light that knit flesh back together as it passed.

It was not long before the Saurus were also forced to retreat, and the Kroxigors, their wounds only partially healed, stepped up once more to shield their brethren. With each step the storm struck at their bodies, obsidian shards cutting through flesh and scouring bone like the wrath of a sandstorm, and yet the lizardmen pressed onward. Again and again the Saurus and Kroxigors shielded their kin with their bodies, and again and again the Skinks did what they could to close their wounds and keep them alive. It was a mutually sustaining cycle of sacrifice, and each arduous step across the bridge was paid for dearly in blood and pain. Yet not one of them ever backed down, or faltered when it was their turn to take the brunt of the storm. The Skinks ran themselves ragged, each doing their part to serve and help their larger brethren, and the Slann continued to sing, trusting their underlings to brave one danger while they kept another at bay.

By the time the lizardmen reached the entrance to the temple itself, taking shelter underneath the yawning overhang of white marble, many of their number were a hair's breadth from dying. A trail of blood and viscera covered the pristine surface of the bridge, interspersed by scattered shards of what had used to be armor. Even these were worn away by the relentless force of the winds, however - though the force of the storm had begun to die down once the lizardmen crossed the temple threshold, it was still several minutes before the winds dissipated entirely, taking with them any trace of the blood and broken things they had extracted as their toll.

The power of the Slann flowed into their servants, repairing their broken and depleted bodies. They would need time to recuperate for the healing to fully set, but as it was they would be adequately functional until the end of their current trial.

They proceeded on through an alabaster corridor with sharply angled walls split into many separate tiles, carved upon each of which was the name of a temple guardian who had saved a Slann from an otherwise certain demise. Many of the names were remembered by the Slann - some of them were still alive, having become ancient, stalwart defenders of their charges. Others were long dead, yet more were known but had not yet been assigned to the detail of a mage-priest, and a few names had never been heard by any of the lizardmen present at all.

Onward they went, and soon enough came to a set of stairs leading down to a perfectly cubical chamber with a Relic Priest in the exact center, illuminated from above by a pale light that had no clear origin. Surrounding the priest were hundreds of mummified, skeletal Temple Guard, packed shoulder to shoulder in a defensive formation, shields raised and halberds grasped. They were clearly dead, one and all - no flesh was present on any of their bodies, only bleached bone and resin-soaked bandages - but something about their posture, the way that their skeletal fingers still gripped the hafts of their weapons, suggested that there remained some element of vigilance in them still.

As the lizardmen strode down the stairs, their bloodied, battered, and above all living flesh in stark contrast to the unrelenting pale coloration of the temple, something shifted. In between one blink and the next, as the eyes of the lizardmen darted about to process their surroundings, they looked back upon the formation of Temple Guard to find every single halberd pointed directly at them. The dust coating the room was still undisturbed, the limbs and eyes of the mummified figures before them just as cold and lifeless as before. Nothing had directly moved, but it was undeniable that something in the room had acknowledged their presence.



The word was not heard, nor felt. It did not make itself known in the minds of those witnessing it - it was simply an immutable fact of the room it was in. It demanded an answer with the same implacable solidity that an immutably-sealed doorway offered to those who came before it. The blades of the dead Temple Guard shone brightly in the light.

That which is within our souls is unknown to us, the Slann spoke in reply, the syllables of their thoughts echoing in the mind like repetitive knocks upon a door. We seek that knowledge, that we may rise to greater heights and greet our makers once more.

For a moment there was silence and stillness so profound that the slightest rasp of breath seemed like a cacophony. Then another statement revealed itself, the transition between it being present and not just as seamless and intangible as the fact that the skeletal guard were now standing back at attention, as if they had never moved at all.



The light shifted, and the formation of dead Temple Guard were clothed in flesh - not ordinary scale and meat and bone, but an ethereal copy, a colorless, translucent illusion wrought with such skill that individual marks on the scales of the guardians had been portrayed. Were it not for their transparency and ghostly pallor, it would be as if an entire cohort of ancients stood before the lizardmen, restored to the world of the living.



With a thunderous crash, the ancient armor of the ghostly guardians burst asunder, their pieces burning at the edges like fire-touched parchment until they vanished from sight, leaving only the ethereal flesh and the bone beneath.



The ectoplasmic flesh of the Temple Guard withered away with supernatural speed, undergoing decades, centuries of decay in mere moments. Their bones, too, began to wither and crumble into dust, vanishing into nothingness like a forgotten thought. Only a faint outline of their forms remained, a set of absences in the air shaped like Saurus, all housing a single pinprick of steady light that hovered where the brains of the Temple Guard would have been.



The pinpricks flickered out one by one, fading away along with the strange ambient light source that had filled the room until this point. Every part of the Temple Guard was now gone, and yet an unmistakable impression remained - the steely, unending gazes of the guardians could still be felt upon the scales, never blinking, eternally vigilant.



Silence reigned, and the Slann did not speak. It was a Kroxigor, one of those who had gone through the gauntlet of obsidian repeatedly for their brethren, and nearly died a dozen times over without speaking a word. The vocalization rumbled out of their gullet, slotting into place with ease. "Armor," the Kroxigor rasped, and the air grew taut.

The Relic Priest, which had until now stirred not at all, was suddenly clothed in flesh that was stone, with eyes of sparkling gemstones that shone without light. It looked upon the lizardmen with crystalline gaze, its attention falling heavily upon them.



And know they did. It was the certainty that lay at the core of every lizardman, the thing that allowed them to labor eternally without complaint as their bodies were damaged by the world and the things within it, that had given them strength as an empire even after going through millennia of decline.

"We were made for the Old Ones."

Any of them could have been the one that said it - the youngest of Skinks or the oldest of Slann. The weight of realization drowned out the voice of whichever of them had vocalized it, as the facts the Relic Priest had stated slotted into each other like bricks in a wall.



The stone flesh and gemstone eyes of the Relic Priest turned to dust and fell away. The stairs leading up and out of the chamber vanished under the same invisible erosive force, followed by the tiles of the walls and ceiling, exposing an endless black void in their place. The floor vanished tile by tile, everything falling down into the abyss. The last thing to disappear was the ghostly formation of Temple Guard, leaving the lizardmen in utter darkness, without any way to tell if they were still standing or plummeting through nothingness.

With nothing left outside of them to look towards, their vision turned inwards, and they saw the truth of the Relic Priest's words.

SECRET OF QUETZL revealed: Nothing exists for its own sake. Just as the body exists to protect the mind, and the mind exists to protect the soul, so too does the soul exist to protect something vital.

Though the golems on the first level were relatively few, and only the size of Skinks, they rapidly increased in numbers and size as the steppes continued upwards, growing until they were much larger than Kroxigors, with the tallest level the lizardmen could see containing ones that rivaled the giants of Mallus in height and girth. Additionally, the magesight of the Slann could see potent, complex matrices of spellwork arrayed over every inch of stone plating, giving even the smallest of the constructs supernatural levels of strength, durability, speed, and regeneration. Fighting their way through the guardians of this temple would not be an option.

It was fortunate, then, that the keys to their victory were placed so handily within reach.

The Slann weaved gossamer nets of glimmering enchantments and cast them towards the closest of the stone constructs, the spellwork cunningly sinking into the internal workings of those golems in the process of self-repair. As the internal energy reservoirs of the golems refilled, the magic of the Slann hijacked the arcane processes that determined where the constructs went and what they did, effectively giving them control over a third of the constructs. As their newfound puppets rose, the Slann sent them to bludgeon their uncontrolled brethren into submission, coordinating their movements with thought. While the other golems did turn and fight their controlled counterparts as they approached, they fought individually, and continued to oppose each other at times, while the Slann directed their new minions to outnumber the opponents they targeted, resulting in a slew of swift victories. With each construct that fell, the Slann seized control of it as it regenerated itself, adding more bodies to their army until all the golems on the first level had fallen under their control.

The lizardmen marched behind as the Slann guided their army of constructs up to the next level, and kept themselves in a protective formation as the golems engaged in battle once more. This battle was harder fought, for despite the numbers and coordination of the Slann-controlled constructs, the ones they now faced were a head taller, their step heavier and their blows more formidable. Many of the controlled golems were smashed into powder, but the Slann persevered, channeling magical energies into the remainder, causing the constructs to glow with a tremendous inner light as their movements sped up and they began to hit with more force than their larger opponents.

The level ended much as the last one had, with the Slann seizing control of any fallen golems and adding them to their ranks as the fighting continued. Gradually the tide turned, with fewer and fewer uncontrolled constructs to stand against the lizardmen, until they were all brought under control. In preparation for the next level, which housed golems that were even bigger and more formidable, the Slann molded the forms of their golems with aethyric energy, fusing smaller constructs into bigger ones, arranging multiple sets of limbs on each golem so they could strike faster, and shaping the blunt, clublike ends of their stony fists into curved spikes that would penetrate better through the stone plates of their foes.

Onward and upward the lizardmen went, their army of controlled golems sweeping the way for them. Level by level, they meticulously disassembled their opponents and added them to their ranks, and level by level the battles they observed grew larger. It was not long before the golems they faced were as large as Kroxigors, numbering in the thousands, with each of them able to spew searing beams of light out in addition to their crushing stomps and punches. The noise of the two sides fighting was like that of opposing avalanches, the scrape of rock on rock overpowering almost everything else.

The Slann heard nothing - every iota of their concentration was bent towards the operation of their rapidly-growing golem army, every ounce of their mana directed towards reinforcing flagging constructs, accelerating the process of their repair, boosting their speed and power. It was a task that would drain any lesser mage to the bone in minutes, and by the later levels they were forced to utilize much of the stored power in the lizardmen's equipment so as to avoid total magical exhaustion on their part.

After ascending dozens of successive levels, the last of which housed ten thousand golems taller than giants, with fists coated in plasmatic light and force enough in their steps to crack the stone beneath them, the lizardmen finally came to a halt. Behind them was an army of golems that bore little resemblance to their original forms - they had been fused together and molded by the alien imaginations of the Slann until many resembled creatures of the Warp more than their original humanoid body plans. There were many-limbed spiderlike ones, great grinding wheels of stone turning within each other over a core of light, golems resembling a swarm of spiked balls held together by flickering strands of magical energy, and a myriad of other designs. All of them now held themselves still, the command of the Slann to halt impressed firmly upon their control matrices.

Ahead of the lizardmen, at the end of a thin precipice of stone which stretched out to the very center of the room, directly over the deepest part of the pit, was their goal. It was the sun, a radiant orb of incandescence that shone upon the entire chamber with fierce heat. It was a flame as tall as a Slann, burning orange and blue and white, a perfect teardrop of fire that neither wavered nor flickered. It was a Relic Priest with bones charred black and eyes of dancing flame. Its aura was palpable even from a distance, radiant heat coursing over scale and filling cold-blooded flesh with renewed vitality.


The words rippled over the lizardmen as they approached along the narrow causeway, washing over them like successive heatwaves. With each syllable, their bodies were restored closer to optimal condition, their systems that had worked without food, water, or rest for many days revitalized and rejuvenated. It was as if they had taken only the first step on their journey, instead of the last, and so it was with a strong voice that the Slann replied, speaking as one.

"The body may grow weary, the mind may become tired, but the soul never loses its energy," they boomed, the words echoing off the walls in a great ripple of excess magic. "What is the source of this flame within us? The Communion has forgotten much, and must re-learn to properly kindle the flame of spirit if we are ever to fulfill our purpose."

The words echoed on the walls of the chamber for a time, fading only slowly, and the aura of heat and light around the Relic Priest flickered as it internalized their appeal.


"Why then do you remain dead," the Slann rumbled in reply. "The restoration of the Tomb Collective is our goal, but it cannot be accomplished without mastery of the spirit. If birth and death are no different, why do you persist?"

The Relic Priest's eyes of flame flared hotter, turning a merciless blue.


Nictitating membranes slid down over the eyes of the Slann as they glided closer, seeing a hint of the answer they craved in the flames. "The vitality of our souls is not inherent to us."

The flaming aura of the Relic Priest blazed yet hotter, a glowing white mass so bright it was almost impossible to look at.



The aura surrounding the Relic Priest grew brighter and brighter, until it was as if the sun had descended in truth, standing before them in incandescent glory. As their vision was seared by incalculable brightness even through their protective membranes, the lizardmen closed their eyes and found themselves faced by a fire of equal magnitude - one that had sprung from within themselves, that had no end, and the name of which they had known since the moment they came into existence.

They spoke the word upon their lips, and the light swallowed everything.

Secret of Chotec revealed: The fire at the core of your being springs not from yourself or the world, but from something deeper, more fundamentally infinite. It is not for ourselves that we conduct our eternal duty.

Every puzzle had a solution, every building had a keystone, and every living thing had a way to die. Just as these were immutable constants, so too was the case with magic - no matter how vast, how intricate, how powerful the spell, there was always a way to undo it, an arrangement of aethyric strands that, when pulled correctly, would unravel the entire enchantment.

"Bring one of the constructs to us," the Slann bade their servants. "We must examine their internal architecture."

A short time later, a struggling golem was brought before the mage-priests, having been temporarily paralyzed with the use of a Glyph Sphere and held in place afterwards by four Kroxigors, each of which grasped one limb in an immovable grip. Up close, the intricacy of its construction could truly be appreciated – its exterior was plain, rough stone, shaped into simple geometric shapes, the only visible ornamentation present as a circular sigil etched in gold upon what could be called its head. Every part of it interlocked with a neighboring piece in some way – the stone had been cunningly cut so that its joints were capable of a fully articulated range of motion, and though there was no visible component that prevented the golem's pieces from simply falling apart, it moved as if it were one contiguous piece of rock.

To the eyes of the Slann, every part of the construct was awash with information. Its limbs housed subsidiary batteries of magical energy within them, fitted with specifically-aligned channels resembling arteries or veins that automatically dispensed certain degrees of power into each motion, dialing up or down according to the baseline force exerted by the limb. While the present configuration they viewed only imparted increased momentum and density to a limb when it struck something, the channels were laid out in such a way that a logical method of progression and expansion of those capabilities was implied by the design, which fit the increasing size of the golems on each successive level. This was also the case for the shifting skein of what could be described as magical connective tissue that stretched out over the surface of the golem, the much larger battery of self-attracting regenerative magic that hummed deep in a cavity in its chest, and the array of sensory enchantments linked up to randomized probability generating spells housed in its head – each feature was built in such a way that scaling it up was intuitively implied by the design itself.

No ordinary attack, whether physical or magical, would suffice to permanently destroy these golems – even if one were to be completely dismantled and its battery of repair magics broken, there were intangible ties binding each construct on a level to each other, with the existence of one supporting the existence of others. Any energy imparted to them, whether it was kinetic, electromagnetic, or magical, would be taken and repurposed by their networks of capacitors, and the endless cycle of repair would continue. With brute force, there was no way for the lizardmen to triumph. With the knowledge and understanding the Slann had acquired from their examinations, however, came the path to victory – the correct form of power, and the correct way in which to apply it.

The Slann began to sing, ribbons of power flowing from their voluminous throats and gliding forth in intricate patterns carved by their intonations. The air began to fuzz and distort as they worked their craft, forcing their attendants to turn their backs in order to keep their vision intact. A seed of force was meticulously shaped, imbued with energy of repulsion and fluidity. Layered around it, woven in seamless patterns over and around each other, were threads of green, gold, and white – growth, structure, and unrelenting control spiraling into a hollow sphere around the core seed. More and more layers of magic were sung into being and deftly arranged into place around the growing spell – components shaped to disarm defensive mechanisms, instructions that allowed for the appropriation and use of stores of specifically-keyed energy, code that allowed for the replication of the enchantment as a whole. In a storm of melodious croaking, the Slann had crafted a short-lived magical virus, visible only as a bead of light that was smaller than a grain of sand. With a final ribbited intonation, they inserted it into the golem they had been brought, watching it sink into its core with unblinking eyes.

There was silence for a time as the spell fed off the energy in the construct's reservoirs, replicating and growing within the stone figure. Its effects took place all at once as the enchantment reached a point of critical mass – the magic that held the golem together failed and its components simply fell apart, clattering into a heap of stone. As it did so, residual links to the other golems activated, the larger mass of constructs donating a portion of energy to restore the deactivated golem. As they did so, the virus spell was passed onto them, jumping across physical distances on intangible strings of magical energy. It was not long before every golem on the level had fallen apart, leaving a notable hole in the overall array of power the various levels of the chamber formed.

Like a small rolling stone precipitated a rockslide, so too did the first level's collapse cause the others to fail. The persistent attempts of the networks of golems to repair each other only allowed for the Slann's contagious enchantment to spread, burning itself out as it went. The levels fell one by one like a row of dominoes, and the lizardmen walked up the now-empty path completely unmolested, striding to behold what awaited them at the peak of the chamber.

As expected, a Relic Priest awaited them at the top, an aura of power visibly shimmering around it. It was housed within a translucent crystal the size of a small house that appeared smooth at first glance, but upon inspection actually had countless small facets, each of which caught and refracted the light coming through it in such a way as to form a thread of color extending back to the Relic Priest at its center. There were thousands of these threads, in every imaginable shade and hue, and they all seemed to end in the bones of the dead Slann, which themselves seemed to be formed of a crystalline material that refracted the light travelling through them into physically impossible colors. The whole arrangement resembled nothing so much as a gigantic eye, with the Relic Priest as the shining pupil in the middle of a spectral iris.


The strands of color surrounding the Relic Priest thrummed and vibrated as the dead Slann's words rang out, a symphony of sound that was made of light. The voice of the living mage-priests rang out in reply, picking up on the harmonies present in the intonations of their elder and spinning it into different, complimentary notes. "We seek that which is not seen in the soul, knowledge that the living Communion is blind to," they sang. "We cannot grasp the secret that will allow your rebirth without knowing it."

The haze of color generated by their speech shimmered and split like oil from water, separating into eight distinct hues that circled around each other in a rotating, interlocking wheel. Each color blended into the next, gold giving way to green, shifting to blue-white and grey and lilac, eight spectrums of magic weaving themselves closer together as the wheel shrunk in on itself, compressing more and more until a tessellated diamond that shone with every color and none was formed.


The Slann looked within themselves and found the answer was missing. There had been some instruction among themselves when it came to higher forms of magic, true, but their base aptitude for spellcraft had not come from any external source – they had simply been born with the knowledge and ability to do so, as though it were an intrinsic part of their beings. "The ability was not externally granted," they ribbited in reply. "We were made with it."


The crystalline shape of compressed magic that floated before the Slann suddenly doubled in size, vertices multiplying as additional facets extruded themselves outward. Each of its faces began to shine with a different hue, strands of light dancing outwards in patterns the minds of the Slann were able to instantly recognize as bearing similarities to basic spells of various singular magical frequencies. And yet, as the crystal grew bigger, the Slann could see that it was not the outward structure that was directing the movement of the refracted light – at its exact center was another, smaller crystalline structure, one far more complex in its composition. It moved and shifted according to its own pattern, exuding strands of light that were then refracted outwards through the larger crystal.


The floating crystal grew larger and larger, growing until the Slann could clearly see themselves reflected in a single one of its surfaces, their image given in perfect clarity. The reflection changed, growing closer to their glowing eyes, sinking deeper and deeper into their gaze until naught but stark, harsh white could be seen. The light of their own reflected vision began to radiate outwards from the crystal, swallowing the room in a blinding haze.

Just before the last of their sight was overtaken, the Slann glimpsed something looking back at them, hidden in the magnified depths of their own soul. A fragment, nothing more, but it was enough to convey understanding.

Secret of Tepok uncovered: It is not your eye that sees, not your hand that guides, not your breath that shapes the winds. Look deep into your own vision and you will see the truth gazing back.

Their arrival here had been anticipated, their passage planned for long ago. What need did they have to manufacture stratagems to defeat this place's guardians, or to find their way around them? The only reason the constructs would expend the energy to deviate from their programming and attack something was if that thing was not supposed to be present. They would not attack lizardmen any sooner than they would collapse into rubble - to do so was antithetical for their inbuilt purpose.

So it was that the lizardmen climbed the steps up the many levels of this final chamber with no hesitation or deviation, and were untouched by any of the battling golems. Indeed, the constructs actively moved aside from the path of the cold-blooded seekers, and trailed behind them as they ascended level after level, ceasing their struggles against one another and marching in lockstep. Plateau after plateau, each filled with golems more magically enhanced and deadly than the last, and all of them followed after the lizardmen as they climbed towards their fated destination.

At the summit, a Relic Priest awaited them, draped with no special ornaments and housed in a simple, roughly-carved throne of plain granite. To all mundane appearances it was nothing more than a pile of discarded bones, but the empty eye sockets shone with the blue that was only seen in the deepest of skies - a gaze that held vastness in its depths, and yet saw only you.



The words washed over the lizardmen like a return to the past and a portal into the future, unbound certainty through the uncaring principles of the universe. With each syllable, the lizardmen present straightened up, knowledge of past and purpose flowing into their minds. This conversation had been predicted for an eternity, every instant meticulously mapped out.

As one, the Slann intoned their question in the language of thought and will, reading the script that had been written and playing their parts in this grand cosmic play. "We look for the clarity that we are missing, the purpose of our animus and our ultimate fateline, present and past," they said, letting the destined flow of this encounter guide their speech. "We must find our fates in this new universe if we are to ever fulfill the cosmic design left to us."

They found themselves murmuring the words of the reply as they were revealed, as though they were reliving a vivid memory they had not yet experienced.



Visions flashed through the minds of the lizardmen, showing them paths they had not taken, puzzles they had chosen to pass by, foes they had not slain on their way to this, their inevitable destination. The experiences of a multitude of potential timelines pressed down upon their grey matter, gifting them answer after answer until the bounds of the proper inquiry made themselves clear, highlighting it like a photographic negative. "Any other set of events would have lead to this meeting not coming to pass. Whose decision was it that we arrived here?"



The manifold trains of thought in the minds of the Slann inexorably narrowed down onto a single track, racing without pause to a destination that had been laid out for them before they even started moving. "We were guided," they ribbited in revelatory tones. "Every step was marked out for us, a trail to follow. There had to be other paths to go down, but this was always at the end."



The lizardmen witnessed their own souls in that moment, with greater clarity than would ever be possible with their own vision. They saw the hands that clasped theirs, the footprints they walked in, and heard the voices that had decided their current course of action before their existence was ever even conceived. A momentary glimpse, nothing more, but it was enough.

You had always been with them.

Secret of Xhotl uncovered: You have never been alone. Nothing happens to you by chance. Even the dead are not beyond guidance.