From the Hidden City (Warhammer Lizardmen Temple-City Quest)

Vote Closed, Don't Bring Archmages in won.

Day 73 Chotec's Season, 11644

No.

Zille'mi decided she would not be drawn into such… playacting by the warmbloods. Months and seasons and years wasted in back and forth as the warmbloods 'consulted' with Isobar, Tyrecmion, and Amnil— who would ultimately consult with herself and Awanbil'tat and the other priests and masons of Zlatlan. Wasting time. Theirs, hers. Time which could be better spent on other tasks.

She could feel her tail stilling in agitation, so she forced it back into motion and took a deep breath before fixing her gaze on the warmbloods. Clenching her staff in hand she met their expectant expressions.

"We will aid you," Zille'mi said, gesturing to herself and Awanabil'tat beside her.

His tail twitched excitedly as he nodded enthusiastically.

"Your— ah," the architect stopped as he considered how to translate from zar'xim to eltharin before giving up and turning to Zille'mi, "Atax'pati?"

She thought a moment, "Memory-vision of… paths."

"Darlith'tal Ismuir," he repeated, "Sketches, designs, schematics of all you have done so far. We will require all of it."


Menalur barely reacted, his mouth twitching for an instant before it returned to its usual, smiling expression and he gave a shallow nod of his head. "Of course." Beside him the reactions of his mages were decidedly less well schooled.

For a moment all three of the mages wearing robes of House Nadraion colors, bristled; their postures drawing upright, hands flexing on the hafts of their staffs, and their eyes narrowing in her direction. But with Meanlur's words they each smothered those reactions behind placid, blank expressions, though some were quicker about it than others. Moon and crystal staff were soon pictures of acceptance, but talon staff (Calith, she thought he was named) wore a sneering contempt on his face for long enough for his patron to note it.

Teclanaera, swathed in her purple robes, only raised one finely sculpted eyebrow while beside her Thynaraeg wore an expression closer to resigned disappointment.

"You will have what you need," said Menalur, his eyes sweeping across the five mages.

After a moment all of them nodded, some choppily.

Chotec's Season to Caxuatn's Season, 11644

They were given rooms in one of the guest houses. Organized as a small fortress, with the outer rooms arranged around a small courtyard containing a central hall that rises two stories up, with the upper level composed of a trio of small rooms. Dozens could easily be fitted into the small complex and so the less than one dozen that comprise the party confine themselves to the central hall.

Though the escorting saurus and kroxigor make circuits around the outer rooms daily.

Within hours the first set papers arrived from the tower base. At the top were scattered and disconnected sketches of individual components, designs for windows and doorways and balconies annotated in at least seven different hands. Awanbil'tat could not read the runes of eltharin and so it fell to Zille'mi to translate for them both— judging the location secure enough she directed one of their saurus guards to request scribes from the harbor who could assist her. Most were discarded musing and little else. Scrawled notes from the mundane warmblood crafters noting where and why certain proposed designs were impossible, followed in some cases by notes from one or two of the mages describing how those limitations could be overcome, but mostly simply abandoned afterward.

After that there were several layers of more complete schematics on rolls of heavy parchment showing proposed designs for the upper levels of the tower. Smooth walled spires, sprouting narrow limbs from which sprain shoots of yet more towers. Towering pillars that rose up from the foundations of the base itself, their peaks topped by domes of crystal or massive braziers. Others rising trunklike from the center, rings of balconies placed evenly up their length and at a top a blank space marked only with the rune cadaith.

Progress was slow at first as Zille'mi had to go through each paper and translate the writing for Awanabil'tat, but then the requested scribes arrived and their pace nearly doubled.


It was clear soon enough that though their plans were confused and scattered, there was little fundamentally wrong with any of the proposed towers. From furiously scrawled notes on two pairs of drawings they could tell which had been started and then abandoned— a smooth walled variant and one of the dome topped behemoths. There were dozens of minor inefficiencies; places where angles were off slightly or where elements were too close together, sections that did nothing but take of space, connections between rooms longer or shorter than ideal.

Those sorts of things.

Nothing that should have caused the Winds of Magic to snarl— that was not the result of improper sacred geometries. Poorly constructed structures were most often simply neutral to the flow of magic through them.

Knots of magic, or snarls, as opposed to the usual pooling of magical energies, where magic flowed towards a point and concentrated tended to quickly turn into dhar as the inflowing energies trapped other energies between successive layers too fast for the naturally repellent properties of most aethyric energies to shunt them out of the snarled energy. Winds in particular were prone to forming dhar incredibly rapidly. Such knots or snarls were difficult to create by accident under most conditions.

Certain alignments of temples could form areas of low aethyric viscosity where the Winds and other magical energies more easily flowed together and the drag on magic from reality itself was felt lesser. Useful properties for a great many rituals and spells. And dangerous enough that Zlatlan was very careful to ensure such regions were entirely temporary in nature, controlled by slann or priests within the temples.

That indicated sabotage by one of the mages involved. Though for what purpose Zille'mi was unsure.

She was preparing to bring the matter to Menalur and let him deal with the consequences when Awanabil'tat stopped her. Laying a hand across her path his eyes remained firmly fixed on the schematic before him.

On it a proposed flow of magical energies was outlined in the neat, blocky handwriting of the mage Thynaraeg— over the last several weeks they had come to recognize each of the individual mages' hands along with at least a few of the mundane crafters. Though the latter not by name.

"Described flows… very high," he said.

That was something else they had noted so far, many of the intended enchantments of the tower were suitable for the high aethyr environment of Ulthuan, but inefficient for Huitzacatlan. None would outright fail to function. They simply would not function as well as desired.
She intended to alert them to the matter, but only once the underlying difficulties had been identified. After all, the inefficiency only mattered if they actually completed the tower.

"Yes, yes, I will warn them."

"No," he shook his head, pointing again to the central column of energy indicated on the paper, "High, but they did not complain of lack."

Zille'mi blinked. That was true, the mages had not complained of insufficient flows of magic. She'd thought at first that they simply hadn't noticed, but if they were capable of noting nascent snarls or voids in their construction they would have noticed a lower than expected flow of magic.

And that they hadn't meant that there wasn't.

But ambient levels of the Winds could not account for such a flow and drawing them in would have created obvious signs that even a saurus would have noted. Unless… they were tapping into the Geomantic Web somehow. It relatively close on its way from Zlatlan to Nahuantl, but not close enough for a—

Of course. Warmbloods though they were, she had been underestimating them too much. Each knew that they had little experience outside of Ulthuan, Menalur had said so himself, but they had ties to those that did and even if they could not come themselves they could be asked for advice, for information. She had been to Ulthuan, Zille'mi knew that they were able to tap into existing ley lines, she had seen the crude city-glyphs of Tor Anroc and Lothern and Tor Elyr.

It was obvious. In order to work as they were used to, they had grasped at the next source of raw power available to them; the ley lines. Ignorant of the fact that these were not the meandering ley lines of what the warmbloods called Elthin Arvan whose courses followed the natural geomantic faults of the world's crust.

Somehow their unintended geomantic tap had formed a resonance with other nearby portions of the Geomantic Web and induced a region of low aethyric viscosity. Exactly how depended on how they had done so, but that they had done so was obvious to Zille'mi now.


Alas that they were not forthcoming with the answers.

That indeed something had been done they readily admitted to but beyond that, the mages insisted that details of such workings were the sole property of the Ten Kingdoms, sacred secrets of Hoeth they could not divulge.

"Worry not," had opined Calith, "I can assure you, there is no worry of interference with whatever… artifacts reside in your city."

Zille'mi had nearly growled at that, but bit back on the instinct. Her tail still as a shadow she turned to Menalur but the Prince of Tiranoc only looked back pityingly.

He made a helpless motion, "Some secrets not even fealty can compel."

Sweeping her gaze across the assembled warmbloods she swallowed the words that wanted to spill from her tongue— that Lord Wik'keer'mal had taught them the greatest of their secrets. Such provocations would do no good though. And so instead she swept forward in a deep bow, nearly touching her snout to the marble of the room they were gathered in.

"I will take my leave."

When she straightened and turned, Zille'mi caught a glimpse of the deep frown on Menalur's face as his elven arrogance warred with his diplomatic acumen over whether the insult she had delivered was intended or not.

BREAK

Over the weeks that followed Zille'mi spent many hours each day in meditation and contemplation; her aethyric senses opened to their fullest and turned downwards against the shifting mass of Winds buried beneath tower base. Sensing magic through meters of earth was no great feat. Even when that magic was not actively doing anything beyond allowing more magic to flow upward through it, as Zille'mi suspected the enchantments beneath the tower were.

But she was not simply after direction and distance, no, she wanted details. Zille'mi wanted to be able to reconstruct the enchantment in enough detail, to dissect their spell work so thoroughly, that the warmbloods would be forced to listen.


Awanabil'tat proved immeasurably helpful, his own aethyric senses were paltry compared to her own, he was nearly deaf in comparison— being able only to perceive the Geomantic Web itself, but he had also attuned himself so exactingly to those energies that Awanabil'tat was able to detect details that she could not. She had had few better collaborators in all her years.

To her the energies of magic were color and shade, shadow and light; gossamer strands of rippling color that pulsed and shone. And through the meters and meters of rock Zille'mi was able to slowly, day by day, piece together an image of the enchantment below. Shifting spots of shadow and light gave her clues as to the arrangement of the various components of the enchantment, the ways in which they stretched and moved told her something of the interactions. Hues told her which Winds were involved and where they were used.

It was qhaysh that much was certain, though she had suspected it from the beginning. All eight Winds melded together seamlessly. Balanced against one another in a web of tensions that ensured no part could collapse into dhar without the whole unravelling. Hysh, chamon, and ghyran arranged in a column of toroidal matrices, braids of ulgu and azyr spiraling around cores of aqshy as they coiled through the center of the tori. Spars of ghur and shyish woven through the matrices and around the braids like chains.

Stretching down, down, down into the earth, towards the distant thrumming roil of the Geomantic Web.

Her senses could not pierce so far into the flesh of the world, not with enough clarity, to tell Zille'mi how the enchantment interacted with the Web though; there hundreds of meters of stone defeated her. But they did not defeat Awanabil'tat. His own well honed sense of the Geomantic Web proved superior.

Every day, as she meditated and opened her soul up to the aethyr he paced the perimeter of the tower, straining his own magical sense. He heard the magic of the Web in tones and voiceless choruses, felt the dissonance and harmony of its parts in his bones. Around and around he went listening to each basso hum and keening cry, attentive to the ache in his marrow.

In doing so Awanabil'tat was able to gain an understanding of how the enchantment placed on the foundations of the tower interacted with the ley line of the Geomantic Web. From a point deep below the tower to the ley line connecting Nahuantl and Zlatlan. Not quite perpendicular to the line vector of the ley line itself, this new link completed a particular sacred geometric form with the harbor citadel and the highway running along the shoreline. One with low aethyric viscosity.

Thankfully as the tower itself was not built out the effect was minor, centered on the tower itself— and likely the citadel and highway, waxing and waning with progress on the upper levels of the tower. It was a stupendously unlikely sequence of events. Only possible because the techniques used by the mages of House Nadraion relied on similar principles as those used by Zlatlan itself. Even with a complete tower the region of low aethyric viscosity would never have extended beyond the nearest ten meters around the tower, the citadel, and the highway; the effect could never have propagated over such an area. Not without a massively expanded Geomantic Web to draw on and further reinforcing points.

Zille'mi had planned simply to demonstrate to the mages that she understood their 'secret' spell by reconstructing it for them. Had. Awanabil'tat had a suggestion of his own that would more sharply puncture their warmblood egos and resolve the issue until more permanent adjustments could be made elsewhere to ensure it could not reoccur.

Day 31 Yuxa's Season, 11644

Weeks later Zille'mi and Awanabil'tat emerged from their loaned quarters flanked by saurus guards and trailed by a column of skink scribes and a trio of kroxigor, two of whom hefted a meter long object wrapped in a shroud of sailcloth silk between them. Making their way to the tower base they brushed past the warmblood guards at the entrance, aided by a small working of azyr to stun them, and marched right into the central chamber.

Though the rest of the tower was not yet complete, the floor at the center had already been finished with a mosaic of ten colored eltharin runes in a circle around a blank hexagonal tile. Awanabil'tat had noted the blank piece of flooring during his investigations and suggested that whatever intention the warmbloods might eventually have for it, it could be used for their own ends. Marking the center with her staff, Zille'mi gestured the three kroxigor forward and stepped back to let the architect put his own expertise to use.

Letting the cloth covering fall away revealed the pitch black of obsinite, capped at one end by a flat hexagon and tapering to a bronze-gold tipped point at the other.

All around the hammering of working warmblood crafters stopped, and a hush of whispers built. Distantly she heard shouting.

Two for the kroxigor raised the obsinite nail until it was standing tip down on the point she had marked, Awanabil'tat gestured to them and they turned it slightly. With a look the architect let her know it was in place.

"Drive," she said to the third kroxigor, stepping past its bulk and towards the nearest opening into the chamber.

With a huff the kroxigor lifted its great maul over its head and let it fall squarely on the cap of the nail. There was a crack as marble tile split and crack, slivers of stone went flying, sending the scribe ducking with anxious chitters and peppering the backs of the saurus standing guard in a circle around them. Shouts of dismay filled the chamber as the onlooking masons and carpenters and other workers watched another blow land, driving the nail centimeters more into the stone beneath the tile.

At the entrance more guards appeared and with them Menalur and two of the mages, Thynaraeg and one of the House Nadraion— Athanfin or Fardrielle, she did not remember which was which.

Another blow rang out and the nail sank further.

"Priestess, what is the meaning of this?" He demanded, striding forward as the kroxigor drove the obsinite nail yet again.

Beside him his mage was not nearly so composed, they gaped and choked out, "What— "

"This," she said, weaving azyr into the gentle currents of the chamber so that they amplified her voice, "Is your solution."

Her words echoed, reverberating through the air just over the beating of stone on obsinite so that none could claim not to have heard. Menalur frowned for a moment before he arched high one brow.

"Might not have some… consultation been appropriate before such hasty actions? Who knows what misunderstandings might arise otherwise."

Another blow and the nail sank further yet again, now only less than a quarter of a meter from the floor.

"Your mages' misunderstandings have already caused damage," she said, "We are repairing it. If you wish for our aid to be less hasty in the future," Zille'mi paused to let the last few blows drive the obsinite nail flush with the surrounding marble.

Awanabil'tat began to mutter hurried rites of consecration over the glyph of Tepok etched into the obsinite. Simple invocations which activated the magic within the stone, the words resonating with the aethyr itself.

"They would do well to consult Zlatlan before meddling with 'secrets.' "

Even as she spoke there was a thrum beneath their feet, a twisting in the air beyond the physical. With a crack the connection created by the warmblood enchantments snapped taut, aligning itself at a new angle. From the nail a pulse of magic burst out of the ground, washing over the entire chamber, enchanted tools and the staffs of the mages flared briefly before guttering out as the room was momentarily cast into darkness as even the sun above seemed to fade away.

Just as quickly the light returned and the glow of enchantment and magic returned to tool and staff. And from the nail a fountain of earthbound magic slowly rose into the air.

Action Complete.

Notes: No vote this time. I might be able to get the next turn up early this week, we'll see. Comment, critique, etc.