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

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It WOULD make sense, actually, if Isendral's counterpart was of Kurnous, mirroring their gods and making the stone related to the counterpart.
 
Did we send 1 slaan for the whole plan, or 63 slaan for 1/63rd of the plan there? Because it sounds like a LOT of slaan were briefly there.
 
The description says that "And without a nearby temple-city to aid the established outpost, only the might of the slann can shift such a mass of rock. Effect: Attempt to excavate the ship from under the northern mountain. Any number of slann may be devoted to this action." So I bet we are looking at a City-Action Sized task. it takes 50 5th gen slaan to equal 1 city action so.....1/50th or more?
 
Glad we're finally getting back in the groove.

I think some of the confusion/conflation comes from Eldar religion meaning that Isendral literally embodies Isha, and her partner does the same for Kurnous. So it's both the problem with Isendral being upset that her partner is gone, but also some metaphysical woo that we don't fully understand yet.
 
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Turn 13 - Into The Tombs
  • Threadmarks
    • Consult the Relic Priests - Spawning - Try To Ask About Soul Structure (250 Slannpower)
    Consult the Relic Priests - Enigmas - Examine the Stone (225 Slannpower)

    The catacombs of the Relic Priests were far and away from the world above. The rhythms of day and night, life and death, and waking and dreaming had no part in their labyrinthine hallways, which wove through layers of time and memory until one had found whatever it was they were seeking, regardless of whether they knew it or not. Thus the Slann and their escorts who ventured down into those dank passageways were spared from the rain and thunder of gun and bomb, and they heard not the frenzied roaring of the green tide on the surface. They were kept company instead by the ringing silence of their own minds, which somehow seemed to be all the louder.

    — — — — —​

    The steps descending into a tomb complex were invariably narrow sets of stairs, the gleaming obsinite material kept immaculately clean by rotating crews of Skink cohorts. They were guarded by doors with shining bronze locks, attended by relatively young Temple Guard no more than two hundred years old. They stepped forth and asked in grating tones for the names of those who would visit the dead, and acknowledged each toad-priest in turn. They allowed the Slann through one at a time, for the doors were only just wide enough for a single palanquin to pass. The guards inclined their heads to each Slann as they passed, rumbled quiet greetings to their Eternity Wardens and various attendants, and reached out with blue-scaled arms to close the doors behind the mage-priests as they passed within.

    The stairs continued downwards for some time, with the passage inside the doors extending wide enough to allow for the group to proceed side by side. The space was lit by stone torches along the walls that burned with spherical, non-wavering flames, kept burning without fuel or air by the barrier spells surrounding their light. The walls and stairs were engraved with pictographs that detailed the history of the city and explained the purpose of the tombs below. Into each step the titles of a single Relic Priest were carved - some left the stone almost bare, while others had needed to be written in minuscule size to accommodate everything.

    The lizardmen proceeded down the steps for some time, going deeper and deeper into the earth. Every so often there stood a pair of Temple Guard, resting within hidden alcoves carved into the stairwell that concealed them from view until they were passed. As the Slann continued down the steps, the scales of each successive sentinel grew thicker, their claws more gnarled, their coloration more and more pale. Each of them was covered in skins of dust that lent them the appearance of statues, disproven only by their sharp eyes that darted to and fro. The air grew thicker as the mages proceeded downward, the passage grew wider, and the torches began to be spaced further and further apart. Darkness grew in the spaces between, gradually swallowing more and more of the ambient light, until a glance up the stairs revealed that the last of the torches was very far away indeed.

    The landing at the bottom of the steps was a chamber large enough to house a hundred Saurus, with a ceiling higher than three stacked Kroxigors. At the far end was a gate that stretched from floor to ceiling, emblazoned with sigils of the Old Ones that spiraled in towards an aperture at the center of the doors, growing smaller as they went. There was no light save for the dim glow of the many enspelled items the visitors wore, which cast thin veils of illumination ahead of themselves like ripples in a pond.

    Faint shapes emerged from the gloom as the Slann drew near to the massive gate - the true guardians of the Relic Priests, Saurus who had stood watch for millennia without pause, who had not seen the sun since the First Generation of Slann had set them to their posts. They seemed almost like a part of the walls themselves, so bereft of movement that the eyes of many Skink scribes rolled over them at first glance. The only sign that they were even alive was their sudden absence when a second glance was given, and the subtle shifting of air currents that signaled razor-sharp halberds materializing at the throats of every non-Slann present.

    "Reason for entry," a voice scraped out of the dark, distorted by the blanket of quiet in the air so that it was impossible to tell if it came from one throat or many. The Slann considered their response, manifold thoughts returning to the thing that had brought them down here while their younger kin battled and died on the surface.

    The pitch black of the gateway was illuminated by a sudden stark brightness as the Slann unravelled enchantments of concealment and obscurity over the unremarkable stone carried in their midst. Bereft of shrouding, it shone like a cold beacon in the dark, surrounding itself with a nimbus of pale, wavering light that radiated outward, casting jagged shadows on the walls of the massive chamber.

    "This must be known," the Slann intoned in a deep, reverberating chorus. "Whether it must be harnessed or destroyed or hidden cannot be determined until its mysteries are obliterated."

    …

    "Pass below."

    The sound of grinding stone silenced all other noises, and a recess slowly formed in the floor, stone tiles pulling autonomously apart from each other to reveal a set of stairs descending downward, carved in a far rougher fashion than any other part of the catacombs thus far. It resembled a cave mouth or sinkhole that had opened in the earth, and chiselled into the rough shape of a passageway. The smell of limestone wafted up from the aperture, and the faint drip, drip of water could be heard from within, though nothing could be seen against the crushing darkness.

    The lizardmen marched down the stairs in steady formation, their vision brightening and becoming clearer as the Slann laid a spell to pierce the dark over their eyes. They passed through a jagged, roughly-hewn tunnel for a short time, the stairs turning back and forth at irregular intervals before stopping at the exiting mouth of the tunnel. The lizardmen walked out and found themselves in a massive cavern, at least twice the size of the grand gate's hall. Pools of water, their calm, dark surfaces hiding unknown depths, blanketed much of the floor, and stalactites and stalagmites stretched from floor and ceiling like conical stone teeth. In some places they had met as they grew, and fused together to form thick grey columns like tree trunks. A film of blue glowing algae blanketed much of the cavern in swathes and splotches of color, providing a steady haze of light with which to see by. The quiet gurgle of water underlaid the quiet atmosphere as subterranean streams moved through hidden passageways.

    It was a perfect replication of one of the cenote caverns beneath lost Lustria – perhaps the magic of the Deliverance had brought it with them, or perhaps Mochantia simply possessed similar cave systems that the Relic Tombs had somehow co-opted. Whatever the case, their destination was clear – at the center of the cavern, upon an island that was formed by a conflux of multiple streams of water and connected by a thin bridge of stone to the rest of the cavern, was an unmistakable altar adorned with symbols of the Old Ones, and the faint silhouettes of many Relic Priests seated upon obsinite thrones.

    The altar seemed to grow taller as they approached it, a grand stone mural of an ancient temple-city that had been carved out of the stone of the island, which rose up to form a small hill. Its grooves were filled in with gold that seemed to glow in the dim blue light. Standing before it, small in comparison, was a plinth made of obsinite that was so smoothly cut it was more akin to a diagram than a physical object. The only irregularity in its mirror-like surfaces was a divot on its upper face, one perfectly sized to fit the glowing stone the lizardmen had brought with them. As the expedition approached, the shadows surrounding the altar retreated slightly, revealing a collection of Relic Priests seated within alcoves carved into the rock that surrounded the altar. They said nothing, but the feeling of unseen eyes crawling over the lizardmen's scales was omnipresent.

    There was no deliberation needed, for the will of their elders was clear. A Skink emissary strode forth, clutching the stone carefully, and placed it gently upon the altar, slotting it into the divot with a quiet click.

    For a moment, there was no reaction, no sound beyond the continued drip, drip of the stalactites and the quiet gurgling of the subterranean streams. Then, the stone began to glow as it laid upon the plinth, a piercing white radiance. Brighter and brighter it shone, and yet the light did not emanate outwards, but was instead sucked into the obsinite surrounding it, spreading out through the black stone as a network of angular white tendril-like patterns that moved on their own and crossed over each other in complex patterns. A lattice of light was soon formed, spreading over the plinth in its entirety like a finely-woven net, which continued to suck in the light radiating out from the stone, drinking it deeper and deeper until the stone grew dim and the pattern sunk within the obsinite, its glow vanishing.

    The mural began to shift as the process continued, its surface slowly becoming covered by a hazy layer of distorted, shimmering air. As the light of the stone was drained, the layer began to glow, growing brighter until it was a sheet of even white iridescence.

    Upon the altar, the stone began to flicker with irregular pulses of light, and the image upon the mural changed. Lines of faint shadow began to sketch themselves out, linking themselves together, forming a crude figure – bipedal, with a smooth oval for a torso and stick-like arms and legs and the faint suggestion of a head. There were dimmer marks that suggested facial features, but they were too dim to make out clearly, and swam together besides. The figure began to run as the lizardmen watched, racing past indistinct backgrounds, the simplistic pieces of its body moving awkwardly, unnaturally. There was no indication of what it was racing towards, but its strides grew longer, its gait more urgent.

    The image began to grow smaller, the figure shrinking and zooming out as it became apparent that it was only part of a larger picture. The smooth line the figure ran across became curved, and was gradually revealed to be the interior surface of a smooth circle, the figure running around and around endlessly, never ceasing. The circle, the Slann noted, was the exact same shape as the stone.

    As the figure ran, looping around and around the interior of the stone, it grew bigger – or perhaps the stone shrunk around it. It began to stoop when the circle became too small to stand fully. When that did not suffice, it slumped onto its hands and knees, then crawled along its belly, and after some time there was no room for it to move at all, only to curl up in an increasingly hunched, compressed shape as the stone endlessly closed in around it. As the figure's head touched its crudely-rendered knees, its head was finally rendered in enough detail for the Slann to notice something – the shifting lines that they had initially assumed were obscured facial features were in fact a cloud of minuscule arcane sigils that shifted and spun. They were noxious things, with tendrils and spikes that hooked and stabbed into the surface of the figure's head. Sigils of paranoia, of fear and pain and frenzy, linked together in thrashing chains. It was a cunning framework, one that the Slann could now see was woven into the inner surface of the circle that the figure was contained within.

    The image began to fade and the stone went quiet once again, revealing the original surface of the mural. As the Skink who had deposited it nervously scuttled over and retrieved it from the obsinite plinth, the mural rumbled and a line appeared down its middle, both sides of the stone swinging inward and opening like a massive gate, with naught but blackness on the other side. With the knowledge they had come here for buzzing inside their minds, the lizardmen stepped through.
    The lizardmen were down here to obtain answers that only their deceased kindred had ever investigated. The soul was all that bound the cobweb minds of the Tomb Collective to their broken bodies, the forever-burning engine that the Slann delved into to obtain magic, the gossamer-thin skein that brought them together into Communion. It was the central component of what they were, and yet so little of its secrets were truly known. The lizardmen's immortality, for instance, was known to be a product of a specific section of their soul, one that all Children of the Old Ones shared - but how it granted this capability was a mystery. We will never comprehend our makers until we understand ourselves, the Slann proclaimed as one, and the words resonated out through the darkness, illuminating the whole of the gate for a brief instant.


    …


    "Accepted."

    The blades vanished away from the escorts of the Slann, and the gate groaned as ancient mechanisms rumbled to life, clouds of dust gouting out from between cracks. Each of the sigils of the Old Ones in turn receded into the stone with a clunk, until at last the central piece fell away and the gates opened inward without a single further sound.

    The lizardmen marched onwards, the youngest among the group casting their eyes about in attempts to determine where the tomb's guardians had gone. The hallway they entered was somehow not as dark as the previous chamber, though there were no visible light sources within. A faint grey radiance illuminated in part the pallid black stone floor, lined on both sides with alcoves of varying size. At first they were uniformly empty, but as the expedition tread further down the path, they began to come across the mummified occupants. None of these were Slann - Saurus and Skinks and Kroxigor alike resided in skeletal repose, their bones wrapped in resin-soaked bandages and adorned with bands of gold and gems.

    Neatly-written plaques sat at the base of each occupied alcove, detailing the name, deeds, and death of each of these figures; upon examination, it was found that they had all been noted servants of one Slann or another that had perished in their service, often saving the life of their master from the depredations of daemons. For their service, they had been treated to the same honors as a Slann, and placed in their tombs to wait out eternity.

    They stopped reading the plaques after a Skink found an empty alcove with their name and identifying details written upon it, along with a cause of death that they refused to divulge.

    At great length, the Slann and their attendants came to the end of the hallway, emerging into a tall, rectangular room that was filled almost in its entirety by a massive pit that seemed to fall endlessly into impenetrable darkness. Dim, pale light drifted downwards from the unseeable ceiling, faintly illuminating a narrow outcropping that wound its way around the edge of the pit, spiraling down until it could no longer be seen. Stretching ahead of the Slann, a platform extended a ways out into the open air before abruptly terminating some thirty feet over the edge of the abyss - just far enough to see the other side of the room in the distance, with a door matching the one they had just entered through. In the slowly-shifting lighting, faint specks of stone could be seen floating above the void, suspended by unknown means.

    The Slann considered their next move.

    "Into the deep."

    So the Slann had bidden, perhaps sensing that something of import lay in the inky blackness of the pit below. Perhaps they did not trust that whatever mechanism was in place to allow for the navigation of the room was still functional. Perhaps it was simply an arbitrary whim. Regardless of the reasoning, the lizardmen's course was set. The deep darkness beckoned, and they would not keep it waiting.

    The walkway was narrow enough to force the party to venture forth in single file. The majority of the Skinks present marched in the front of the line, so placed as to better spot potential obstacles. The Saurus primarily clustered around the Slann in the middle of the formation, with the few Kroxigors present following at the rear. Each step was taken carefully, for the stone of the path was very smooth and it crested downwards at a deceptive angle. Many of the lizardmen used one hand to grip at the stone of the wall with their claws, so as to steady themselves and not risk tripping. The soft thumps of footsteps and the quiet scraping of dozens of claws on stone echoed out into the dark, almost seeming to be swallowed by the pit.

    The ambient light level, already low in the previous chamber, quickly dropped to nothing at all as the lizardmen descended. Orders were relayed, plans consulted, and every fifth lizardman pulled out a stone rod with a gemstone embedded in one end. With some murmuring and hissing, the tools were activated, hidden stores of energy in the rods shining out through the gemstones like iridescent torches of various colors. The dark seemed to loom in on these small bubbles of light, for the illumination did not reach far, but it was enough to navigate by.

    So did the lizardmen in their chain of lights walk down the ever-descending steps for some time. There was no discernible way to mark the passage of time, for the walls of the pit were smooth and unchanging, and the darkness of the pit had obscured any hint of the room above them. It was as if they were on the edge of the world, looking out into the unformed void of the abyss beyond in search of answers.

    Eventually they happened across something. The path widened, so slowly it was almost imperceptible, and blooms of color began to appear on the wall. Grand murals, stretching higher than their lights could illuminate, crept into being, telling a story that all the Slann were familiar with - they had, after all, lived through it. The first murals were of the world of Mallus, charts documenting its position in its solar system, topographic layouts of its land masses in ancient days. The next sequence told of the Arrival - gleaming silver ships, their shapes obscured, swept down from the heavens, and from their bellies amphibian creatures with crystal hearts descended, shaping the ground below with gesture and thought. Ziggurats sprouted up from the ground to meet their descent, and the toad-things stood atop their pyramids, holding golden tablets aloft in supplication, or perhaps thanks, to the silver ships above them.

    The world in the murals changed as the lizardmen marched downward - the amphibians bent to their labor, joined by others of differing shape but with the same shining crystal in their breasts. Continents shifted, oceans swelled and shrank. More pyramids arose, and each time a tablet was held aloft to the ships of silver. Great arches were built to the north and south, and opals were placed inside them, lending the appearance of shimmering portals.

    A jagged rift in the stone marred the next mural, stretching from up above the reach of their lights and running across the path proper. It was difficult to make out any detail in this one - there were shapes resembling daemons, and flames enveloping near everything, but the Slann figures on top of the pyramids had vanished, as well as the silver vessels above. In the next mural, the Slann were returned, many amidst broken rubble, but the ships were gone.

    Something about the broken mural drew the Slann's attention. Whatever irregularity was there was not immediately apparent, but their minds sensed a disparity.

    The Slann called a halt. Something they were looking for was close at hand, and they would be remiss to pass it by.

    Everywhere on the mural were marks of destruction - symbols notating time and date were scratched out, the swathes of color denoting continents were warped and runny, and evil faces with eyes of flame and teeth of ice leered out from every nook and cranny. It was the Catastrophe rendered without words, the voiceless representation of the lizardmen's downfall where daemons had bloomed like weeds.

    "Why then," the Slann pondered, "Is the rift itself bare?"

    Indeed, the jagged crack that had split the stone in twain was not shown with flames or daemons or tendrils bursting out from within. Several other features of the mural had been made around the imperfection, yet nothing was shown coming from it, only deforming around it. It was a break in the pattern.

    At the Slann's command, the crack was investigated. Their Temple Guard shone their torches close to its surface and peered closely at every square inch, but their sharp eyes saw nothing. Skinks inserted long, thin rods, colored so as to measure depth sequentially, but found no end to the chasm. Their Kroxigor attendants were consulted, and the quiet giants performed sounding checks, tapping on the edges of the crevice and listening with their sensitive ears for echoes to judge the depth. After much listening, they unanimously agreed - there was an empty space on the other side of the crevice, a tunnel leading off into the rock. The only question was how to access it.

    Something occurred to the Slann then, a saying that had passed itself down from the most ancient of the mage-priests all the way to the youngest of their number.

    The Makers come
    In argent ships
    Like dust upon the wind
    The storm has blown

    Away they slip

    The memories pass within    ​
    The world has ripped

    Their words are stone

    They will be back again    ​

    With spider-like tendrils of telekinetic force, the Slann reached within the crevice and touched the orbs of silver that were hidden just on the other side. With an abrupt rumble and the grinding of hidden mechanisms, the stone shook and parted, revealing a hidden hallway that delved into the rock until it passed out of sight. Their attention to detail vindicated, the lizardmen ventured within, their trail of light swiftly vanishing from the pit until it was as if they had never been there at all.

    The last vestiges of light were suppressed as the lizardmen entered the tunnel. The dark here was so thick that it had physical substance to it; an omnipresent weight in the air that crushed and pressed down upon the crystal torches of the lizardmen until they went out. Even the magic of the Slann could not conjure any light in such an atmosphere, and they were forced to travel in absolute blackness for a time. Their Temple Guard formed a ring around the expedition, marching in lockstep so as to avoid any member becoming lost.

    They walked through the passageway for three thousand Slann heartbeats - the stone they walked on absorbed all sound, and the crushing dark removed all other methods of telling time. Eventually, however, the darkness was pierced, and a soft blue glow appeared ahead of them, accompanied by the sound of waves running over rock.

    A set of steps lead steadily downwards into a pool of rippling teal water, illuminated by glowing pictographs engraved into the walls. A layer of algae covered the bottom, and fronds of underwater plant life poked up here and there from the layer of green, stretching up to the surface where they bloomed as pale white, glowing flowers. At one end of the pool there was an opening to a submerged tunnel, with sigils carved around the outside that denoted this as the resting place of a Relic Priest of great age. The light of the flowers spun and danced against the walls of the chamber as the water's surface sloshed and churned. They almost seemed to form a tangible pattern at times.

    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.


    You seek for what lives in the soul.​

    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.


    Water is the foundation of life. Where it flows, vitality follows. When it stops, stasis is inevitable. What controls the currents?​

    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.


    Though the spring no longer flows, and the banks of the river are dry, and the ocean itself has receded, the water never left. Look within yourselves and drink of the truth.​

    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 water was never gone.​

    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.

    You have come here seeking answers. What questions did you find?​

    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.

    You perceive too much. It has inhibited your vision.​

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

    What one was made from is unimportant. Why you were crafted, carefully hidden until you were strong, those are the true answers to seek, for they are already found.​

    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.

    How do you know that you ever lost them?​

    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.
    After some deliberation, the Slann continued onwards. Despite the oddity of the mural, their true goal lay at the bottom of the pit. They could feel it like a film of moss over their minds.

    As the lizardmen continued down the steps, they began to sense something ahead of them. It was akin to a subtle pressure in the air, as though they were walking through a headwind. Invisible currents coiled against their scales, gradually increasing in strength as they went further down. Each step became an effort, their limbs involuntarily driven to turn back as if repulsed by an inverted magnet. The lizardmen's pace slowed to a crawl as they were forced to push forward step by grueling step, their Saurus brethren directing them with growled commands to move in sync.

    They forged onwards, an unspoken awareness slowly growing within them that they were walking into danger. Something was there in the pit with them, something old and cold and burning with malicious intent. It knew of their presence, and tracked their progress with a gaze so sharp it could be heard grinding against their scales. It was bigger, stronger, faster than them, it wanted them gone and it was within the pit they delved ever deeper into. It wanted them gone and they were growing ever closer to granting its wish, closer to claws and teeth and tearing flesh and that terrible, burning, inextinguishable will that pressed in on them with the weight of a fathomless abyss. It wanted them gone and if they strayed any further they would be dead.

    They continued downwards, some clutching turtle-bone talismans. Death held no fear for the lizardmen, particularly in pursuit of a worthy cause.

    The length of stairs came at last to an end, giving way to an expanse of grey stone tiles. Standing here was like sinking to the bottom of the ocean, feeling miles of water weighing down on their fragile, small forms. The light of their beacons extended only a short distance beyond them, beyond which the abyss loomed. The scraping and clicking of claws and scales on stone echoed tentatively out into the dark as they pushed forwards.

    Something echoed back, the sound of something massive grinding against stone issuing out from all around them. The Slann flared their magic and drove back the dark and before them was a thing from the utmost depths of forgotten time and misplaced shadow. A gargantuan, crocodilian skull the size of a stegadon loomed over the top of the lizardmen, mounted atop a tree-trunk spine studded with ancient jewelry and draped with mildew-soaked strips of black cloth. The suggestion of a rib cage large enough to fit a Dread Saurian brushed at the edge of the edge of the Slann's illumination, containing a bloody, beating heart that quivered and pulsated, continuing to beat even as streams of buzzing, striped insects coursed in and out of its chambers.

    Two massive limbs crashed down to the floor on either side of the lizardmen, shaking the room as the colossal skull looked upon them with empty eyes and a palpable aura of killing intent. As their servants pointed weapons, hefted shields, and assessed escape routes, the Slann looked upon the titan of bone and knew it for what it was - an echo of potential that had never actualized, the cast-off concepts of a death god, set to rest here in the uncertain dimensions of the Relic Tombs. It could not have existed anywhere else, for the binding force of cause and effect did not weigh so heavily in these liminal places.

    They could not turn back. To do such a thing would spell their ends. The course of action to take was, in the end, a simple decision.

    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.

    You have struggled and persevered in your search for truth, and won your right to questions in the most dominant fashion. Ask.​

    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.

    Struggle is the essence of all servants. Those who were made to be flawless are forever hamstrung by the disorderly nature of existence. Thus they must strive and struggle and fight to achieve what they were made for. It is what guided you here. It is what led those who shaped us.​

    "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.

    They struggled, as do all things. The Plan is perfect, but the world is not. They could not actualize their goal on their own, so they passed their struggle down to us. Do the living kin still strive towards their goals?​

    "With everything that we are."

    Then the Old Ones have never left. It is within the core of our beings - their goals are ours, and we will destroy any obstacles in the way of their completion. To battle against adversity is to acknowledge their presence. In eradicating their enemies, we become their hands.​

    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.

    To war against a broken reality is the purest essence of the Old Ones. They will not end so long as that struggle is preserved within you.​

    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.

    You have proven your might without the waste of blood, and understand the lesson of forbearance. Why do you seek what is within when it is already displayed thusly?​

    "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."

    They are one and the same, breathing kin. Did the Old Ones not stand above all other things that tread upon reality?​

    "Of course."

    By following their words, are we not elevated beyond the reach and comprehension of our foes?​

    "We are."

    Then the only thing missing is a lack of comprehension.​

    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.

    To carry out their Plan, the Old Ones created you. By implementing their designs, you enforce their continuation. Look within yourselves and realize the truth you have hidden from!​

    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.


    Your resolve is proven. Speak your desire.​

    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.


    They are evident within every moment you occupy. There is nothing to discover.​

    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.


    Existing within a space represents an inherent limitation on the possible actions taken by others. Warp-taint cannot spread if you do not allow it. Cities will not burn if you prevent it. Enemies will not exist if you do not permit it. This is the lesson of the Makers, contained within their Plan. Master yourself, let your will become immovable, and the world will reshape itself around you.​

    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.


    To exist is to defy the universe. Disorder cannot come into being when an unshakable mind has resolved to deny it. One's actions and their effects are inseparable from one's self. The mission of our makers cannot end so long as one mind of eternal scope still persists.​

    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 mystery of the distant islands of stone tugged at the minds of the Slann. There had obviously been a bridge connecting them in the past, but now there was only empty space. Such obvious disrepair would not have been permitted to continue, so why then did the path end?

    The lizardmen crowded around the cut-off bridge, examining it for clues to its nature. It was not long before the truth was discovered - a Skink seeking to climb down the side of the structure to peer at its underbelly found itself surprised when it found itself standing over empty space. Its excited cries brought the attention of the Slann, and the secret of the bridge was brought to light - where its corporeal path ended, a multitude of invisible ones were born, linked platforms of solidified air. These paths were woven with perception-deflecting enchantments, making them difficult to detect even for the Slann, and frequently changed direction, even sloping up or down at times.

    Furthermore, it was found that no one path could be explored on its own - after a Kroxigor was narrowly saved from falling to their death after a platform vanished under their bulk, the Slann put their minds together in cogitation for several hours, and determined that there existed a pattern the collected platforms had to be tread upon, scattered throughout all of the myriad pathways. Therefore it was crucial that they all be traversed simultaneously, with each group advancing in the right order, lest the bridges all fade away and send the lizardmen plummeting into the pit below.

    The lizardmen split themselves into multiple groups, with Skinks walking to the fore, holding carved stone rods many times the length of their bodies. With each step taken, a tremendous clatter was raised as the Skinks poked and prodded every conceivable inch of space. The majority of their poles swung through empty space, raising nothing but a cool breeze, but a portion of them would strike the next section of bridge with a series of sharp tok tok tok noises. They would chatter to each other, confirming dimensions of length and width and direction, and pass this information back to their more senior brethren, who chiseled it onto stone tablets in minute, exacting glyphs. The Slann present in that particular group would then be allowed to examine the tablet, and ruminate on it for a number of minutes before rumbling an affirmation. The group would press forward another few steps, and the process repeated again.

    Throughout the entirety of this, the Saurus in each group kept themselves on high alert, moving in lockstep around the Slann with their shields raised in all directions, such that their formation resembled a slowly moving hill of obsidian, with the stubby ends of rifle barrels poking out between the gaps. There were not many Kroxigors in each group, and their natural durability combined with their immense amount of armor meant that they were excluded from the protective formation of the Saurus. The gentle giants walked at the rear of each group, many using the idle time to erect small markers on each platform, or else placed small stones behind them as they stepped so that the way back was clear.

    The groups of lizardmen diverged somewhat as they proceeded across the room, the paths of their bridges leading them in unpredictable, almost meandering directions. Some went high, some went low, others meandered left and right, and a few looped back upon themselves for some time before turning around once more. Through it all, none of the groups ever lost sight of each other, the specific pattern of advancement dictated by the Slann keeping each group in the same rough area as their fellows. The seemingly bottomless pit loomed underneath them, magnifying every sound the lizardmen made with unevenly distorted echoes. An aura of cold and damp radiated upwards, leaching the heat from their scales and sending droplets of dew falling into the fathomless opening as it formed on their scales.

    The lizardmen advanced slowly, cautiously even, but they advanced all the same. Hours passed, then days, the Kroxigors keeping track of the passage of time by counting the passing seconds in a low, repetitive rumble. With time, the meandering pathways of the invisible bridges converged on a destination, presenting a goal for the weary travellers to work towards.

    It had appeared small when first spotted by the sharp eyes of the Saurus, but quickly grew larger as the lizardmen approached, looming in front of them like an impassive guardian. It was a temple in the pyramidal style of the Slann, suspended above the void via unseen means, and its pearl-white stones carried with them an aura of stillness. The biting cold of the pit faded from the lizardmen's bones as they approached, replaced with a temperature so average it was near unnoticeable.

    The Slann commanded caution as the paths of the various bridges converged on a spar of chalk-white rock that matched the original bridge segment exactly, and sent temporary constructs of magic forth in their stead, solid illusions of Slann that had weight and substance to them. This was proven to be well-founded, for the moment that weight was put upon the stones, a terrific windstorm came into existence, its cyclonic currents contained entirely within the bounds of the temple. The Slann reinforced the weight of their magic as something in the wind began to push against the arcane framework of their spells, and the illusory mage-priests were able to maintain their footing, albeit unsteadily, until shards of obsinite began manifesting in the wind's currents. The razor edges of the stone cut through the illusions like cloth, and the storm slowly subsided as the images faded away.

    The presence of such potent wards was, of course, a sign that they had arrived at a site of suitable importance for their mission. The lizardmen conferred with each other, discussing defensive strategies while the Slann psychically poked and prodded at the energies surrounding the island, examining its intricacies. After some time, a decision was made.

    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.


    Your resolve has been determined, and a question burns in your minds. Ask.​

    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.


    Only that which we are all made with, and no more. It is not something that can be touched or torn or stripped away. This body is long dead, its spark of animation fled to the void along with any trace of conscious mind. What ties spirit to bone, when living will has departed and deliberate action becomes impossible?​

    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.


    Do you deny the existence of our makers? There is no overseeing mind present at their temples, no awareness inside of their rituals. Their statues and markings have no power to draw upon as those of the gods do. By that measure, are the Old Ones gone?​

    "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.


    Consider the source of your own certainty. Faith is for lesser beings - you are Slann. Grasp the key that you already hold.​

    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 essence of a maker never leaves their tools.​

    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.


    SPEAK​

    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.


    MUCH HAS BEEN FORGOTTEN

    SOUL AND FLESH ARE NOT DIFFERENT​

    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.


    ARMOR SHIELDS THE FLESH​

    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.


    FLESH SHIELDS THE MIND​

    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.


    MIND HOUSES THE SPIRIT​

    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.


    ARMOR IS CRAFTED BY THE MIND TO SHIELD THE FLESH

    FLESH IS CRAFTED BY THE SPIRIT TO SHIELD THE MIND

    SPIRIT IS CRAFTED FOR A PURPOSE BY SOMETHING GREATER



    SPEAK IT    ​

    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.


    YOU KNOW WHAT YOU WERE MADE FOR​

    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.


    WE ARE MADE AS ARMOR FOR THE OLD ONES

    ARMOR THAT IS NOT WORN DOES NOT MOVE

    LOOK INSIDE YOURSELVES AND BEHOLD THAT WHICH BEARS YOU    ​

    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.
    A bridge mirroring the one they had started from presented itself, the contours of its stones matching exactly to its twin on the far-distant side. The invisible paths congregated and merged with each other as the lizardmen grew closer, until they were reunited in a single group as they stood once more upon tangible stone, and proceeded towards the unassuming doorway at the end of the bridge, above which was carved a trifecta of symbols - the sun, from which rays of light streamed, a many-faceted crystal, which refracted the rays through itself into a single stream, and a lidless eye, into which the light collected and swirled.

    The room they found themselves in as they passed through was simple, the intended trial obvious in function. They stood at the bottom level of a chamber shaped like an inverted ziggurat, as though a temple had been carved out of the ground and extracted whole, leaving a stepped pit with progressively-larger levels stretching upwards. They were connected by singular sets of stairs in a pattern that required traversing most of each steppe to reach the next one, and upon each level were the guardians of this place.

    They were legions upon legions of vaguely humanoid figures, each a shell of lizardmen-shaped stone plates that exuded iridescent light through their gaps. They moved in grating, powerful motions, and bludgeoned each other with stone limbs relentlessly until one broke another's plates, upon which the defeated golem would collapse in a pile of rubble and a flash of magical radiance, only to steadily reconstitute itself and stand up once more.

    Each level was veritably covered in the golems, a miniature army of constructs that grew larger and more formidable with each successive level. As the lizardmen's eyes panned up, they were drawn to a central platform situated directly above them, connected by a thin stone bridge to the very top level. Something shone with a dazzling radiance up there, and the lizardmen knew their goal. All that remained was the method by which they would reach it…

    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.

    You have walked the path of relentless labor, and come to know the true depths of your vigor in search of knowledge. Speak your desire.​

    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.

    Our bodies are born of water, yet it is flame that composes our existence. There is nothing in reality but energy in varying configurations, and so too with the soul. There is no birth or death, only transferral of shape and form across time.​

    "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.

    You perceive the contradiction, but not the cause behind it. Your energy is not your own - the force to sustain the operation of flesh must come from the world, and return to it in time. The soul does not respire as the body does, yet ours do not fade as those of mortal creatures do in time. Why?​

    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.


    It never was. We were all made to fulfill the work of our masters, and given a fragment of their eternal will to see it done. Defeat, death, eternity - these are paltry distractions compared to the immutable resolve of the Old Ones. Look into your core and see the flame burning there still!​

    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 question you came to ask is reflected in your vision. Speak it, and you will be shown your answer.​

    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.

    If you seek knowledge that the mind alone cannot grasp, you must perceive what is already held in your thoughts. Where did you learn to grasp the winds, to move the skein of the immaterial?​

    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."

    Our makers were the first among all things to change the unreal in accordance with their will. It is from them our aptitude stems, and through them our ability continues.​

    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.

    Magic is nothing less than the language of creation. When you speak it, is it your voice that is heard?​

    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.


    Your arrival has been foreseen since the moment of your existence's commencement. The question is already known, but you must still speak it.​

    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.


    The answer is already within you – this itself is known already. What you are missing is the correct question. Why, then, did you come this far, to learn something you already know?​

    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?"


    Examine yourselves now – you know it was neither random chance nor the force of your own will that brought you before this corpse. You are not bound by shackles upon your fate, and were not forced or coerced into making the journey. What, then, remains?​

    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."


    Look within yourselves, and behold the will that you are but a part of.​

    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.

    They passed through the gate in but a moment, and found themselves exiting a moment later, as though all that had happened within had been only an eyeblink. The Slann croaked and grumbled in collective consternation and discomfort as they were treated to the uniquely unpleasant sensation of eleven different sets of memories suddenly finding themselves coexisting side by side in their brains, the vast mental capacity of the mage-priests ensuring that each and every one was perfectly preserved and capable of making their presence known all at once.

    The Slann were dimly aware of time passing, and their servants collecting themselves from the abrupt transition from the liminal realm of the Relic Tombs to objective physical reality once more. The minds of lizardmen were resilient, and while they would likely experience some degree of headaches and misplaced memories over the coming years, they would weather it without much in the way of abject psychological distress.

    The Slann were faced with different difficulties - unlike their servants, their vast, multi-threaded cognitive capacity was able to tackle the experience of having done so many different things within the same span of objective time, and so they were privy to a phenomenon their juniors were spared from - the collapse of possibility.

    The Relic Tombs had transplanted many different sets of possible experiences over one another, stitching potential timelines together like a skilled weaver. The memories of those potentialities would endure the crushing immutability of physical law inside the protective space of the minds of the Slann, but only one set of events could actually have happened - as their servants guided their palanquins back up the many stairs to the surface and along the causeways of the city that led back to their individual Star Chambers, the Slann were witness to a stretched-out causality abruptly snapping back into place.

    Amidst the discomfort, however, the mage-lords could feel that the objective reality had not yet been fully set. They were the only witnesses to the splintering of the timeline with existing memory of it, and in some ways it was their ability to think through multiple things simultaneously that allowed them to be conscious of some memories fading, becoming more real as they were focused on, while others did not precisely fade, but became implicitly acknowledged as hypothetical occurrences. In that moment, with their minds in communion, they could choose to focus on the set of events they preferred to have happened; they would decide which one was real.

    ----------​

    The Stone contains a soul, one belonging to a creature of formidable psychic potency, to the same degree as that of Isendral or a Slann mage-priest. The obfuscating effects of the talisman's psychic shielding - as well as the enigmatic communication of the Relic Priests - have made it impossible to accurately discern the species or identity of the soul, or the source of its power. Additionally, the Stone itself has a curse woven into its structure, one that has woven itself into the soul within. The exact effects of the curse are not known for certain, but the Slann's knowledge of Dhar-borne principles makes it possible to draw a conclusion - insanity, insidious and irreversible, should the Stone be unlocked and the creature within allowed out. Additional options unlocked.

    ----------

    The Relic Priests have demonstrated their disregard for the feeble limits of objective reality, providing a multitude of differing experiences within the same span of time to fully impart their lesson into their living pupils - within the essence of every lizardman's soul, bound into its very fundament, there is a fragment of a fragment of the Old Ones - both the source of many of the lizardmen's racial traits and irrefutable proof that the Ancient Makers still exist. Soul Structure progressed to 500/2500!

    Additionally, Sacred Spawnings - Basic Manipulation has been unlocked by the revelations granted in the Tombs, and the experience has revitalized the Old One essence within the lizardmen's spirits. Objective reality will permit only one such enhancement to occur - the chosen Old One will see a corresponding, cost-free increase in the frequency of their Sacred Spawnings.

    Vote for as many of the below as you wish - no Sacred Spawning is inherently more powerful than another, so make your choices based on aesthetic preferences. The option with the highest total votes will win.

    [] Tzunki - Old One of Water and Life
    [] Huanchi - Old One of Concealment and Darkness
    [] Tlanxla - Old One of War and Victory
    [] Itzl - Old One of Beasts and Dominance
    [] Tlazcotl - Old One of Will and Inevitability
    [] Potec - Old One of Serenity and Protection
    [] Quetzl - Old One of Guardianship and Invincibility
    [] Chotec - Old One of Vigor and Fire
    [] Tepok - Old One of Wind and Magic
    [X] Xhotl - Old One of Fate and Choice
     
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    • BEHOLD

    The accursed post that caused this 6 month absence. 'Oh, it's a cool idea to do this,' I said. 'Shouldn't take too long', I said. Lies.

    I cast full blame for this idea at @BirdBodhisattva and his excellent split History post in his MLP Cultist Simulator quest. That was what gave me the inspiration for it, and I got burned trying to reach for the sun that is his level of innovation.

    Anyhow, hope you enjoy this. You got Sacred Spawnings as a bonus and pseudo-apology for the extended absence. Technically speaking you rolled Sacred Spawning on the 'what do the Relic Priests give you' roll, but then I spent six months on the post and figured that deserved a little compensation. Also I doubt SS would've been on the docket for a while anyway.

    EVA-Saiyajin said:
    That is a very deceptive Alert.
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    Damn straight.
     
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    Xantalos said:
    The Relic Priests have demonstrated their disregard for the feeble limits of objective reality,
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    Excuse me I'm off to the vs forums: Who would win?
    All of Space and Time vs One Dead Frog.
    E:
    Xantalos said:
    Oh and yeah, I forget what reference I was making with this. I assume there was one.
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    I assume given the mountain and cold weather.
     
    Going to need a thorough read of that, but very neat progress made. Now to follow up on it. As for the vote- I assume that is us unlocking one sacred spawning and the rest would need to be researched like normal?
     
    [X] Tzunki - Old One of Water and Life
    [X] Tlazcotl - Old One of Will and Inevitability
    [X] Potec - Old One of Serenity and Protection
    [X] Quetzl - Old One of Guardianship and Invincibility
    [X] Xhotl - Old One of Fate and Choice

    @Xantalos the wait was worth it!!!
     
    [X] Tlazcotl - Old One of Will and Inevitability
    [X] Potec - Old One of Serenity and Protection
    [X] Quetzl - Old One of Guardianship and Invincibility
     
    Void Stalker said:
    Going to need a thorough read of that, but very neat progress made. Now to follow up on it. As for the vote- I assume that is us unlocking one sacred spawning and the rest would need to be researched like normal?
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    It's more akin to making one type of Sacred Spawning way more common than it currently is - you can adjust the values of the rest now, just at a very slow rate. I'll elaborate more when we get to the actual next turn.
     
    [X] Xhotl - Old One of Fate and Choice

    Huh, so now the question is, why/who made a cursed soulstone and left it for a Priest of Kurnous to deal with?
     
    Void Stalker said:
    Going to need a thorough read of that, but very neat progress made. Now to follow up on it. As for the vote- I assume that is us unlocking one sacred spawning and the rest would need to be researched like normal?
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    The vote is just to determine which type of sacred spawning happens more often than it used to. We might be able to increase the others, but it will probably take more than just research.

    Edit: ninja'd by author, but hey, I was half-right.
     
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