RYE Turn 14 - Relic Priest Consultation

Relic Priest Consultation, Equipment Research

Above Huilcatlan, the sky was bubbling.

The Sky City was never subject to completely normal atmospheric conditions, of course - the metropolis’ spawning pools had a propensity for producing Azyr and Aqshy skink priests with far greater frequency than usual, and the magical layout of the city attracted the mages like a lodestone, the vast currents of the red and blue magics that pulsed through the brickwork enabling the skink priests to exercise their powers to their fullest. The air currents above the city were a convoluted maze as a result, a tangled mix of up and downdrafts that frequently ensnared unwary Terradon riders in almost-inescapable pockets of air. A neverending series of experiments was constantly being conducted on the effects of every sort of imaginable weather, resulting in miniature monsoons pouring down over one city block while the next was beset by an intense blizzard, and a third section blistering under a windless, baking sun. Whatever effect needed to be tested, the weather-sages of Huilcatlan could conjure up, resulting in the city becoming an overlapping tapestry of conflicting environmental conditions.

What was happening now was no ordinary pattern of weather alteration that affected a mere subsection. The entire city felt the atmospheric pressure over their heads shift, and looked to the skies as they began to darken and rumble. Something of unprecedented magnitude was taking place, and as the city’s veteran meteorologists looked up, they displayed one of two reactions to what they saw. Most experienced a sudden recollection that they had been neglecting to properly document their studies and would, unfortunately, need to spend the day - or perhaps the next few days - within the depths of a pyramid. A smaller fraction, those gifted by the Old Ones with bravery or merely a lack of concern for occupational hazards, gathered what observational equipment they could and made their way to the tallest temples in the city, often struggling to carry everything they would need to properly conduct data collection.

Above the City of the Sky, a storm was birthed, and it dwarfed all that had come before it like a kroxigor dwarfed a skink. Every smaller pocket of weather in the city found itself engulfed, the magical currents sustaining their existence unwound, spun into a new configuration within the brewing maelstrom’s depths. Clouds that were thicker than soil and darker than night expanded across Huilcatlan’s skyscape, bulging at the seams as the suppressed howls of whirling wind and crackling lighting seeped out from within them. The air seemed to empty itself as the growing maelstrom sucked in all the air that it could, creating an atmosphere that was almost suspensefully dry. The clouds pulled apart in places as they swallowed the last of the light above the city, revealing boulder-sized chunks of ice whirling like grains of sand, veins of lightning as thick as trees pulsing between them in a wild, erratic, flickering rhythm. The heartbeat of the storm quickened as it swelled to its fullest extent, and the city below held its breath.

A pulse of geomancy warped out from atop Huilcatlan’s central pyramid, where the slann lord Itzahuindide watched over the proceedings with a serene expression. As the underbelly of the clouds parted and the full wrath of the storm began to descend, every drop of rain and ice, skein of wind, and bolt of lighting was drawn with an inexorable grip towards that pyramid’s peak, where something gleamed with a radiance intense enough to be seen from across the city. A funnel that was hundreds of meters high, of dark clouds striated with streaks of light and rippling patterns of erratic wind, formed as the essence of the storm was siphoned in, concentrated and pulled into the source of the gleaming brilliance atop Itzahuindide’s pyramid. It was over within an hour, a storm that ought to have flattened kilometers of jungle conjured and dismissed by the will of the slann. The meteologists who had been braced for the impact of the tempest found themselves frantically noting down every detail of the weather event, filling stacks upon stacks of temporary limestone tablets for later review, for there was no telling whether anything like this would happen again, at least in any reasonable timeframe.

As the day’s light crept back in, and the city’s ordinary weather patterns began to slowly, almost tentatively, reassert themselves in the wake of the behemoth stone’s departure, Itzahuindide gazed with contentment upon what he had been able to craft. He had commanded the manufacture of one hundred crystals of the purest quartz, each one standing as tall as a skink and shaped into a perfect sphere with a specific pattern of jagged fault lines radiating out from the exact center. He had then brought the spheres up onto the peak of his ziggurat and called upon the memory impressed into him during his visit to the Relic Tombs earlier that decade. His long-dead mentor Weeraj’akkit had whispered to him from bones flecked with rainwater of the secret ways by which he might call up a storm from the ether, and then condense all its fury and might down to a pinprick, to be contained within an appropriate vessel and called upon to scour the skies. Long ago, the Tempest Prisms had ensured that even the massive dragonflights of ancient history had thought twice before approaching a lizardman stronghold upon the wing, lest they be brought low by sheets of icy lightning and cruel, cutting winds. The means of their making had been lost in the Catastrophe, and now the time had come for their rebirth.

The rows of crystals had been turned a rich, deep blue by the skeins of magic layered into them. Sparks of bright energy crackled along the fault lines, illuminating the core of the spheres as they glowed with an ominous white luminescence. The light reflected off of Itzahuindide’s eyes as he gazed into them, seeing glimpses of the fury that they would unleash.

The Relic Priests have granted the secrets of reconstructing the long-lost Tempest Prisms! These brilliant blue crystals are a counterpart to the Solar Engine, specialized for ground vs air defence, and will be used in similar capacities by the lizardmen military - mounted upon warbeasts, bunkers, and fortifications, ensuring that the skies above the lizardmen are safeguarded, particularly from smaller numbers of more powerful airborne enemies.

Additional secrets have drifted from the Relic Tombs into the minds of the Sublime Communion, whispering truths that are, as of yet, only partly realized. Spellscale Sigils has gained 173 progress.