Monuments of Unageing Intellect

The stairs were only wide enough to go down single-file, and for the most part, the company kept apart, not wanting to bunch up into a single easy target. Lugging that ancient legionary’s shield through the mountains, Rufio had dreaded having to carry it back, but as they descended into the unknown with their left flank exposed to anything that waited down there, he felt naked without it.

Valens took the lead, with Atia several paces behind him, and Ere right behind her, occasionally taking her shoulder for support. The tall northern woman was not so sure-footed today as she usually was. Atia vocally blamed her leg injury and the limitations of Hadrian’s healing magic, though it seemed to Rufio that she was simply exhausted, with a sore stiffness to her gait and bags under her eyes. Her mood, it appeared, was no worse for it. Indeed, none of the company seemed to be sour in their thoughts this morning, though Longinus and Hoy also appeared haggard, and Valens and Hadrian were hard to read on that front.

As they found the bottom of the shaft and were about to step off the stairs, a halt was called. Not by Valens, but Hadrian, calling out from just behind Rufio.

“Valens, let me take the lead. You know your craft, concerning monsters, but you asked for my help because I knew my way around Nephilic architecture. Well, if there are any… active measures in this structure, the bottom of this shaft is where they’d put them. Let me get a good look at the floor before any of you go putting your feet on it.”

The short Lyrian put his back to the curved wall and sidled to the front of the group. On the last step, he stopped, and bent to examine the smooth monolith that made up the floor. He felt the floor with the back of his hand, then prodded lightly first on one side, then the other, then finally took a ginger step.

He swept back and forth across the room, always watching his footfalls, always staying as close as he could to the bottom stair while still covering new ground, occasionally tracing a finger along some line or fissure Rufio could not make out or pressing a hand to the wall as he quietly incanted a Solar spell. The Celestial Disciplines were esoteric things, not widely practiced even outside the Empire due to their complexity, and Rufio was was still unaccustomed to seeing magic performed without an extremely specific handsign. The spoken incantation in the Nephilic tongue, it seemed, served the same purpose as a Sign did in the Elemental Disciplines.

With each spellcast, a pulse of light shown in every tiny flaw in the surface, and he stared as though looking through it at some structure or mechanism beyond.

Finally, one such pulse revealed a large carved-stone grate a little above head-high, and two seams in the stone running across the length of the floor. Between them, a glassy ornament or knob set into the wall gave off of a blue glow. Hadrian touched the glass lightly, and a sharp crack sounded through the shaft walls. He looked with a start at the grate, holding still as a monument for a few tense seconds.

Thick mud dripped out of the grate in chunks, and Hadrian leaped back out of its way as it fell to the ground, spattering his boots.

He laughed.

“That was a trap meant to drown us. There was a pressure plate set into the floor, probably on enough of a delay to let us explore this level further without suspecting the danger, before it was suddenly and completely flooded. Trouble is, this Motive Stone here was only powerful enough to create a little water, start the mechanism turning; it probably drew most of its water for it from the river we crossed to get here, or the larger one it joined downstream. But by building this structure in this valley, they changed the very landscape they meant to harness. Probably, those two rivers originally joined at some different point, but as this place caused sediment to pile up and bury its upper levels over countless years, their flows were redirected enough that this pipe now connects only to dry earth.”

“Motive Stone?”

“Trinkets the Nephiloi made using the Elemental Disciplines. On their own, they only make a little puff of their corresponding element– a gust of air, a spray of water, what have you– but they can serve as power sources for more complex magical artifacts. It’s a whole artform that’s been lost for millenia.”

Rufio caught his mouth hanging open dumbly. “Millenia? And his place has been here long enough for the rivers to change their courses… how long would that take?”

“The Rhatian Empire, by that name or another, has stood for nearly a millennium and a half. While its nascent form, a republic based in a city we now call Urba Rhatia, was still trying to unite the Rhatian Peninsula, a handful of successor kingdoms from about this land eastward had, for centuries, been fighting over the remnants of another empire, that of the Temonids, who had in their short tenure supplanted the Haxamanids further east, who ruled for half a millennium after throwing off the yoke of the Madai. The Madai were a hill-people, who ruled much of the east for somewhere between eight and eleven hundred years, largely by restoring and preserving the institutions of the several ancient, dying kingdoms whose pieces they had picked up. The Madai had haunted these kingdoms as barbarians on their periphery long before building an empire of their own, but fragments of their original foundation-myth survive, tracing their lineage to the Iamnae. They say little about who the Iamnae were, exactly, but that name appears also in the oldest tales of the Lyrian people, from long, long before our conquest by the Rhatians or even the Temonids, also as a progenitor-race. They had lived in isolation for countless generations north of the Vintner’s Sea, before sweeping across much of the world in a wave of conquest. In our oldest stories, they were half-breeds, in nearly equal part the children of humans and Nephiloi, a lingering, degenerated pocket of that civilization long after its fall. So, Rufio, the count of years grows very imprecise as we go back, but the shared cultural memory of all the peoples of Man would suggest that, for all the depths of time I’ve just talked back through to even hint at the Nephilic Empire’s fall, all humanity was ruled by it for a period at least as long again. That should give you a range of possible ages for this structure.”

Rufio whistled softly.

After prying the Motive Stone from the wall– a black disk, perhaps of onyx or obsidian, a little smaller than his palm– Hadrian led them through another circular portal, the shaft’s only exit onto the lower level, opposite the bottom stair. This level had fewer rooms than the top, and the rooms between the stairs and the furthest reach were largely bare, though here and there a faint dirty impression remained where, they could assume, wooden furniture had rotted or a metal tool rusted until only dust remained.

The only intact object of note they found was a box made of some light metal– tin, perhaps, but it had a rather dull finish to it– full of smooth, lustrous textiles. These vaguely resembled both the soft silk that the Rhatian Empire had only recently begun to produce after long reliance on trade with the Furthest East, and the fireproof amianthus-cloth that they still sent east in bulk whenever higher-quality silk than they could yet make themselves was desired in trade. Valens ordered Longinus to carry it until they could find an interested merchant.

When they were at this maze’s end– and the layout down here was less of a grid and more of a labyrinth than the top level– they found a stone table with more of these boxes, though smaller. They hissed faintly as they were opened, and in them were gauntlets.

Each of these was made from thin metal sheets, attached without rivets or stitching to a pliable glove. Which metal they were made from varied, as did the color of the base glove, though all the gloves were made from a smooth material that seemed an imitation of leather in the same way that the textiles they found earlier were an imitation of silk. Each had a thick, glassy disk set into the plate for the back of the hand, and all fit one of four color schemes: blued-steel with a black disk and glove; the same dull, silvery metal as the boxes, with white; bronze, with a yellow-orange saffron color; and brass, with red.

They were not in pairs, with each box containing a single left glove or a single right, and there being an odd number– seventeen. Although the Nephiloi were usually remembered in legend as larger than humans, the range of hand-sizes seemed to cover human men and women of both large and small builds.

Curiously, Rufio picked out a brass gauntlet that looked to fit his left hand, and slid it on.

As soon as it fully covered it hand, the red disk gave off light, and surface of the metal came to life with a pattern of orange-red flames. On a hunch, he made a simple Sign of Command with that hand, and closed his eyes in focus. Both the hand and the mind had to be arranged just so to perform an Elemental spell, though he found recent events helped the frantic intensity needed for the Fire Discipline come more naturally to him than it once had.

He snapped his fingers, and spray of flame roared from his extended thumb, dancing over the ceiling and illuminating the whole room.

“Rufio,” Atia said, “were you able to do that before?”

He shook his head. “I practiced and practiced that Sign, and could never make more than just enough sparks to start a cookfire. I’m a Rhatian plebian, with the negligible trace of Nephilic blood that implies. Not zero potential for the Elemental Disciplines, but close enough that trying was largely a waste of time.”

Eagerly, Longinus set his load aside and slid a black gauntlet on. It showed a wave pattern, but the Motive Stone on the back gave off only the faintest of blue glows. He frowned, and tried instead a white gauntlet. This one glowed, still only dimly, with a swirling pattern, and he made an Air Sign, pointed at a wall. A gust blew along his arm and into the surface; he leaned back and forth, gauging the force between him and the wall. “I think it helps me, too, but the effect is much less.” He stared at Rufio thoughtfully. “Hoy, there’s even less Nephilic blood in Kamut than in Rhatia, right? You try it.”

The Kamutos put a bronze glove on, which glowed brightly and showed a detailed pattern of jagged lines and flecks, like layers of rock in a cliff-face. He then awkwardly imitated an Earth Sign he had seen before, the same one Valens routinely used to sense for vibrations in the ground. It was not quite correct; it was apparent he had no formal training with the Elemental Disciplines.

The ground shook beneath them, and cracks snaked through the ceiling above.

“Stop!” Valens bellowed.

Hoy flattened his hand and peeled the glove off.

“Nobody is to use these, unless they correspond to a Discipline they have practiced and understood. Rufio, you’re the only non-Nephilic I want touching any of these, for now, keep that Fire gauntlet. But be careful with it! The rest, we’ll sort out later, which to keep and which to sell. Round them up, and move out!”