RYE Turn 14 - An Architect's Vision

Stewardship Actions:

--[X] Construct Sacred Sites (Hexoatl, Tlaxtlan, Yenehectua, Chalkaro, Aztlan, Kimilik, Tekuanzi) - 14 Actions

--[X] Raise the Domes (Hexoatl, Tlaxtlan, Xlanhuapec) - 6 Actions

--[X] Improve Cities (Chalkaro L3, Aztlan L3) - 6 Actions

--[X] Found New Cities (total: 5 City Actions)

---[X] East of Itza, Level 2 - Awanabil'tat, 2 Actions

---[X] East of Qotlpetl, Level 2 - 3 Actions

--[X] Repair City (Itza) - 1 Action

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The last orkish warcry had scarcely faded from the air before the lizardmen returned to the work of repairing, improving, and expanding their network of temple-cities. The struggle against the Uax had necessitated a great deal of hurried growth in order to catalyze the Geomantic Web into a higher level of complexity and power. Awanabil’tat, who now stood by virtue of his efforts as the most influential skink alive save for the direct attendants of the slann - and even then, his words carried substantial weight - had used his authority to facilitate this rapid expansion, building city after city in the knowledge that the sooner the Web was restored to its peak, the greater the likelihood of victory over the greenskins.

Victory had come, and yet the road of progress stretched ever longer. Awanabil’tat’s vision and drive expanded as his authoritative capabilities did, and those now stretched far indeed. The swathes of new temple-cities made during the war had to be shored up, and those older examples that had grown to capacity were due to be expanded into complexes equal to any save great Itza. The ancient architect wiped away the damage to the First City with a few swipes on an abacus and some barked orders, sending thousands of workers marching with dismissive ease. He had spent decades reverently studying Itza’s architecture only a short time ago, marvelling at the intricacies therein and pondering the intent of its builders, and what their thoughts must have been. He had no time for such things now - the lizardmen empire was a living thing, each city an organ and its people their blood, and over painstaking years of taking more and more of its management in hand, Awanabil’tat had begun to comprehend a faint image of what it might grow into, given time. To bring that eventuality about was nothing less than his reason for being, and to make it happen would require the commitment of everything that he was.

There was, of course, no question of him doing anything less - his life had been pledged to the work from the moment of his creation. So he issued reams of commands, organizing logistics for two more new temple-cities and expediting the matter so both would be completed within the decade. He arranged audiences with slann mage-priests of the Fifth Spawning in order to extract as much information about the Metropolis Barriers as he could, impressing the ancient toads with his knowledge of magical principles, which he comprehended astoundingly well for a skink who could not even perceive the energies he spoke of. He used the information from these discussions to determine the practical realities of how much obsinite would have to be crafted, and how many kroxigors sent, and where to source the skinks to coordinate the work crews, and how to fit the installation of more of the shields into the schedule of magical exertion in a temple-city - to properly calibrate the layering of the required spell matrices, the magical environment of a temple-city had to be relatively placid, with little to no draw on its geomantic nexus. With all the activity the lizardmen were set to undertake, such periods were few and far between, and so Awanabil’tat was forced to string together work orders of demolition, construction, and refurbishing in such a way as to leave everything running smoothly during the erratic periods when work would have to cease.

For him, however, there were no such pauses - even as he juggled directing the construction of a new settlement and the complicated task of ensuring the Metropolis Barriers went up in Hexoatl, Xlanhuapec, and Tlaxtlan by day, by night he sorted through stacks of tablets detailing potential designs for Sacred Sites that were meant to go up in a plethora of cities, drinking liters of Hexoatl-sourced stimulant cocktails as he did so. His offices became a nexus of rivers, reports coming in and going out from thousands of kilometers away, and as the ancient architect tirelessly swept his eyes across more bureaucratic information than any other skink was likely to come across in the entirety of their lives, he felt the faint pulse of the gestating lizardmen empire grow ever so slightly stronger under his guiding touch.

[b]The lizardmen’s cities grow ever stronger and more fortified, and two new settlements have been founded! Optional aesthetic vote below.[/b]

[][Name]: Write in names for the cities

[][Theme]: Write in themes and aesthetics for the cities

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Around the lizardmen’s oldest holdings, a series of edifices arose, channeling old power into new form. Hexoatl and Tlaxtlan held records deep in the recesses of their most ancient pyramids of what their Sacred Sites had been in the days before the Catastrophe, but the newer cities that had been born upon Mochantia held no such past. New designs would have to be made, to safeguard the investment of the Children of the Old Ones.

To that end, great conclaves of chattering lizardmen formed in each city, organized and brought together by one of Awanabil’tat’s many understudies. Skink archivists presented intricate blueprints of the layout of their metropolis to the rest of the group, tracing the outlines of the flow of geomantic energy within the cities that would inform the design of each Site. Octarine Cabals chattered quietly to each other, giving their input on how the throughput of the Arcane Winds would have to be managed. Saurus commanders were called in to outline the defensive layout of each city, detailing how terrain, weather, and each city’s position relative to its neighbors influenced what enemies it would face. Lastly, a great many kroxigors were consulted to ensure that the actual design of each Sacred Site would be both logistically and physically possible to construct. The planning process was an intricate and meticulous one that carried on for months on end, ensuring the lizardmen’s efforts were accounted for down to the last grain of rock.

A place was found northeast of Hexoatl, where the land rose in a perilous slope to form a spire of rock that stretched towards the heavens. It trailed creepers and vines and a species of tall, wide-petaled flowers the size of a skink that twisted and spun in the sunlight, letting off clouds of pollen laced with a neurotoxin that would induce any creature that inhaled it to stumble towards the flower’s roots and die in its shade, where their body would swiftly be overgrown and absorbed. All of these were summarily removed, and the spire itself scoured clean of the resulting carnage, leaving only bare rock.

With the use of kroxigor-operated pulleys, the lizardmen hoisted an immense circular mirror crafted from burnished gold and electrum up to the peak of the spire, and affixed it within a gyroscopic frame of obsinite that pivoted and shifted independently to track the sunlight overhead. For many days, it did only that, the surface of the mirror tracking the sun even during the night, absorbing its rays until the sigil of a blazing eye inscribed within the surface of the metal began to glow with an inner light. This was Chotec’s Burning Eye, an artifact that observed the entirety of Hexoatl and its surroundings with the fiery gaze of the Old One, and could at will bring the wrath of the sun down upon its enemies. Beams of blinding sunfire lanced down from the heavens wherever its internal mechanisms deemed necessary, some lasting mere microseconds and spanning no wider than a hair’s breadth, others blazing down for minutes at a time as tree-trunk pillars of plasma, boiling the very air around them and melting the ground into glass where they struck.

In a similar fashion to its sister city, Tlaxtlan also placed its Sacred Site, the Orbital Clinometer, up high, situating it upon an inverted pyramid that the lizardmen embedded, point-first, into the earth, the massive edifice looming over the surrounding jungle balanced upon a point no wider than a skink’s palm. Despite this precarious setup, the structure never wavered, and it remained untouched by any creature of the jungles, its bare stone wrought with sigils that shone silver when moonlight fell upon them.

Upon the wide peak of the structure there was a reservoir of water, black as night and cold as the void, cold enough that any liquid removed from its confines swiftly hardened into ice. The stars shone with absolute clarity in this pool, and the magic infused into the water illuminated the outlines of various constellations, each painstakingly catalogued by Tlaxtlan’s astronomers over the years they had spent on Mochantia. At the center of the pool there was a pedestal of rock, and above that pedestal hovered the centerpiece of the Sacred Site, a chunk of rock from Mochantia’s lunar companion that Gall’a’lel, the slann that had been given stewardship of Tlaxtlan, had pulled down from the sky and shaped into a miniature replica of the moon. When enemies of the lizardmen drew near to the City of the Moon, the Astronomic Catalogue would replicate the gravitational pull of Mochantia’s moon and use it to pull a chunk of orbital debris down from the heavens and onto the heads of the lizardmen’s foes, swathing the on-demand meteorite with a corona of magical energy on the way down.

If one were to travel some distance to the north of Yenehectua, they would come across a section of jungle where the ambient noise that comes from the chattering and rustling and moving of uncounted varieties of creature seemed to die away, leaving only a faint hum, barely perceptible at the edge of hearing. The air in this region carried a peculiar variety of static charge that grew more powerful as one went further in, a charge that didn’t only infuse objects with latent electric charge but also seemed to cause them to glow.

Indeed, around the edges of the plants that had not been mobile enough to move themselves out of the area, a white aura could be visibly perceived, the glow of a subtle radiance that gently seeped even through closed eyes and impressed dizzying patterns and traceries upon one’s vision. This grew more intense by degrees as one approached the epicenter of the effect, until it was almost impossible to see properly without some form of vision protection.

If one’s eyes were shielded, however, they would eventually find an intricate network of standing stones crafted out of an especially refractive variety of quartz. These stones were embedded into the ground in concentric circles, with the outward layer consisting of fragments no larger than a finger, and increasing in size with each successive layer, until one reached the centerpiece, a colossal crystalline monument thrice as tall as a kroxigor. This central piece shone with a luminosity surpassing that of the sun at full glare, and its undifferentiated light was picked up and refracted into all of its component colors and frequencies by each of the slightly smaller crystals surrounding it. Those beams of light were in turn caught and expressed as slightly smaller varieties of sub-frequency by the next layer, an expanding fan of colors that grew exponentially more complex until the outer layer could hardly be distinguished from each other at all.

As the stones caught, redirected, and split the beams of light, the amount of light that traveled through them was magnified rather than diminished, and the increased radiance fed back into the central obelisk, which was known by the lizardmen as the Radiant Prism. In this manner, the artifact charged itself, its luminosity ever increasing until it was called upon to protect Yenehectua, whereupon angular beams of light intense enough to saw through bone would erupt from the central prism, darting around any obstacles in their path until they struck and vaporized whatever foe had the temerity to approach the City of Light.

Some distance south and east of Chalkaro, a sphere of burnished bronze the size of a small building, composed of thousands of small, interlocking panels, hovered above a pedestal of gold that held a blackened, soot-streaked patina. Upon the pedestal was depicted an intricate map of Chalkaro, the etched lines gleaming brightly through the heat-blackened haze. This was the Forge Matrix, and its function was to harness the unique energies of creation and artifice that ran through Chalkaro, so that the city would become the instrument of its own defense.

Each and every component panel of the bronze orb was metaphysically tied to a part of Chalkaro - a lodestone, a building, a wall. Their structure and makeup had been meticulously planned out, each part placed with delicate care to ensure the uncountable pieces of the Geomantic Web all slotted into place. In many ways it was the network of the Web that was the true soul of the city, not its physical shell, and this is what the Forge Matrix exploited to perform its function - if the lattices of magic that invisibly mirrored the structure of each part of Chalkaro in the Immaterium were made to alter themselves, to shift their forms, and enough energy were provided for the change, the same would happen to their physical counterparts. As within, so without. What the Forge Matrix provided was threefold - first, it would transmit encoded instructions along Chalkaro’s rivers of invisible energy when a change was needed. Secondly, it would provide the schematics for the needed change, pulled from the vast databanks that had been hand-chiseled into the millions of folded bronze wafers inside the artifact’s vast floating sphere. Third, and last, it would supply the energy needed for the city to induce the required changes, glowing white-hot as it did so, for the energy throughput required to sustain its defensive adaptations were considerable.

All of this was necessary because the job of the Forge Matrix was nothing less than to spontaneously generate and mold self-operating weapons from Chalkaro’s very stones when the city was under threat. Walls would split apart with no warning, hidden guns unfolding from improbably small crevices. The paving stones of the streets could unleash jabbing spikes at a moment’s notice. Snarling statues depicting Sotek or the Old Ones could spontaneously animate, seizing gargantuan weapons and marching into the fray. In times of great need, the buildings themselves would reshape themselves into rumbling statues of interlocking brick and grinding gears, former barracks unfolding slabs of stone from their arms to shield groups of lizardmen while the mighty forms of temple-constructs strode forth to smash the enemies of the city.

Aztlan and Kimilik were cities opposite from and yet inextricably linked to each other. The Steaming Garden was a hotbed of life and vitality, hundreds of species existing in tandem with one another within its walls, plants growing alongside one another where ordinarily they would snarl and strangle and choke each other to death. Kimilik, by contrast, was a graveyard of gargantuan proportions, filled with the desiccated remains of creatures that had come to its hallowed grounds to die. The one exception were the great swathes of fungi that crept over the outskirts of the city, a trailing cloak of mycelium that was diligently tended by the city’s inhabitants as it digested the discarded flesh left out for it. Though founded at different times, the cities were a pair, representing Life and Death, two halves of a great cosmic cycle, each of which contained the other’s essence within themselves. Thus it came to be that their Sacred Sites were also interlinked, with each city’s artifact drawing upon the energy of its opposing twin. The power of death fuelled life, and life lead to death.

Aztlan’s artifact took the form of a honeycombed spire of rock that was twice as thick as a tree and stretched several hundred meters into the air. A heavy cloud of an indistinguishable particulate haze hung around it, choking the air with a cloying, faintly sour smell that somehow conveyed the color violet when inhaled. This was known as the Breath-Stealing Spore, and its function inclined precisely with its name. It passively filled the air around the Garden City with a faint trace of spores, which were magically drawn to those that had been designated enemies of the city. When an attack was discovered, the spire rapidly increased its production of these spores, and thick, bubbling clouds of them would swirl around the city’s foes, gusting into open orifices and unprotected skin. The spores sapped the life force of organisms they came into contact with, with enough exposure withering flesh and extinguishing vital signs like a flame being snuffed out. Once the spores were sufficiently saturated with vital essence, they fell to the ground and deposited their takings into the soil, bringing a new surge of growth in their wake.

Kimilik’s artisans raised a fluted hourglass of vibrant jade and emerald, filling it with a mysterious liquid that glowed with a pale, sickly green light. The hourglass was set with two caps of wrought gold that reversed the effects of gravity upon themselves in opposing order when pressure was taken off of them, resulting in the device hovering above the ground and inverting itself every few hours. Dubbed the Restorative Timepiece, the glowing artifact brought a great boon to the lizardmen that resided in the City of Bones - every time the sacred artifact flipped over, it infused their bodies with a rush of regenerative energies, sealing their wounds shut with such rapidity that in some cases, the wound had hardly finished being inflicted before it was scabbed over. It also bestowed the same effect upon the city’s foes, yet as a curse rather than a blessing. Rather than healing their wounds, the regenerative energy would play havoc with a foe’s body, causing their organs to bloat and boil with tumors and their blood to grow choked with supersized microbes. With enough exposure, the enemy’s very flesh would become possessed of a malevolent sentience, spontaneously erupting into thrashing tentacles of cancerous tissue that throttled and choked their hosts with ravenous strength.

Tekuanzi was the last to have its Sacred Site completed, primarily due to a high level of debate among the slann regarding an appropriate effect for it to bestow. The mage-lords were forced to go into an extended period of meditation, contemplating the mystic nature of the City of Pacts for almost five years before construction proper could begin. Once it commenced, however, the process was completed with exceeding speed, for the process the slann had chosen was as simple as it was devastating.

Tekuanzi’s Discordant Archway was a stone monument resembling a gargantuan empty doorway that had been shattered and then imperfectly pieced back together. It was rail-thin for its size, and many jagged edges jutted out where pieces had slipped apart, seeming to pause just before they would have fallen. In places, the archway was wholly broken, and segments of it simply floated in place, held up only by the invisible [i]thrum[/i] of an energetic field that tingled unpleasantly on the teeth. It was difficult to form coherent thoughts in the presence of the Archway, and the sight of creatures anywhere near it was a rarity. It was an unpleasantness easily borne, however, for the artifact held within it the power to degrade and corrode the concepts of coordination and cooperation from those it cast its twisting aura upon. Those afflicted by the Archway became incapable of recognizing other beings as allies at first, sowing infighting and paranoia among enemy forces. As the effect progressed, those affected became unable to recognize other beings at all, seeing them only as bizarre distortions they were unable to comprehend, forced to either attack or flee from. At the greatest extent of the Archway’s effect, creatures under its spell simply stopped functioning at all, their bodies not able to recognize or act on the neural outputs coming from their minds, their thoughts sliding off each other like oiled glass. The catatonia induced by the Archway was total and final, only causing death when an afflicted creature ceased to breathe.

Sacred Sites constructed across multiple cities! See Technology threadmark for further details.