A lone figure stood in the cold blue illumination of a roughly hewn granite room. It stood on two insectoid legs, a flat tail lay flush with the ground, and orange chitinous plates ran down the length of its back to the tip of its tail. He stood to the right of a long table of dark gray wood, covered in papers, stone tablets, and numerous crystals and empty vials. The center of the circular room was covered in an intricately painted pattern of concentric circles and symbols. At the pattern's center, a small irregularly ovoid crystal hung suspended in the air at roughly waist height above the floor. It gave off the cold blue light that illuminated the room far more than the ordinarily faint red glow of the crystals embedded into the walls.
Althil'e'Phuren walked gingerly over to the suspended crystal. He moved carefully, lifting his tail and gingerly stepping over the painted lines to not mar the detailed workings. As he reached the central ritual circle of the pattern, he stopped before crossing its bounds. One multi jointed arm reached out over the pattern's boundary. Three long whip-like tentacles reverently entwined themselves around the suspended crystal.
As Althil's hand enclosed the crystal, the blue illumination dimmed, and the room fell into uniform red-tinted darkness once more. Althil retreated from the magical circle, no longer taking the care needed to preserve the inert pattern's integrity. He approached the long table, and with a simple gesture, called on one of his more practical skills, Unseen Grasp(III). A small leather pouch rose from the table and swiftly floated to Althil's waiting grasp. He placed the crystal into the pouch, and a great weight seemed to lift from his shoulders.
Althil gently set the pouch back onto the table, before moving toward a small alcove that was crudely carved into the wall of the room. His limbs subtly shook now that his trials were complete, and Althil let himself sag into the alcove, his shell pleasantly grinding into the stone. His tail wrapped itself around his legs, a comforting habit he carried over from his days as a juvenile.
After taking a moment to fully appreciate the success his efforts had wrought, he took stock of his well-used laboratory. Shattered gems used to power the ritual lay scattered around the edges of the painted pattern. Vials of various pigments and unusual solutions sat opened and half used on the desk. He rested in his alcove, utterly spent from the weeks-long exertion.
His ambition was costly, that much was inevitable. Still, as his gaze landed once more on the simple leather pouch, he felt hopeful that his efforts would finally bear fruit. He had spent decades gathering everything here, researching every step of the ritual, and acquiring the materials needed to see his ambition through. This was his fourth attempted ritual and his third success. Each undertaking had cost more than the last. The successful rituals had yielded the most essential materials needed for his experiments, and yet total success had eluded him. Each one of the previous samples had proven incompatible with his designs.
With each setback and costly ritual, his ability to acquire the necessary materials diminished. The supporting opinions of the Phuren hive had always been few. They had fallen quieter and quieter as each year ticked by without viable success. In recent years his goals had grown far enough removed from the hive's own that Althil was forced to move his abode out of the central colony to alleviate the empathic pressure of the hive. It's not a pleasant feeling to have your own will slowly be subsumed by the collective.
But Althil had persevered through the stress of his work and had scrounged, politic'd, and cajoled as many minds as he could to acquire the resources needed for this last iteration of the ritual. Even with his efforts, however, the only reason he had been able to attain the final materials was due to his own impeccable timing. He had waited for Phulthem'e'Phuren's most recent expedition before he undertook his own recent trip to the Phuren colony. Phulthem was by a wide margin the most vehement opponent of his research; instead, he supported the biological and psychological studies of drones that most of the hive adhered to. His recent absence relaxed the hive's opinion enough to where Althil was able to briefly weather the empathic pressure. But, Phulthem's triumphant return three days ago with a veritable cornucopia of prospective drones sealed the fate of Althil's research if this most recent essence proved incompatible.
The unattuned essences the ritual was designed to capture needed to be compatible with the lone example of precursor runesmithing he had acquired at the inception of his research. The previous two successfully harvested unattuned essences had proven wholly incompatible, resulting in inconsistent and perplexing results. With an identical hand gesture as before, he used Unseen Grasp(III). The notepad resting on the table floated over to Althil. Reading over his previous ritual notes, he compared the past rituals to the oddities of this most recent endeavor. Truly this experience had drained him more than the last two combined.
Finding no forthcoming answers from his notes as to what had occurred in this ritual, Althil went about recording his most recent results.
He had been monitoring the lure, and its attraction processes, for weeks without success or activity. But, there was no help for it; once an arcane ritual began, you couldn't stop it without sacrificing the components. Since the ritual had continued to operate within acceptable bounds on its provided power supply, Althil allowed it to continue.
Then, much to Althil's delight, earlier this day, the lure's primary function activated. This indicated that a suitable target had been acquired. The lure's enchantments and traps drained almost all of its reserve energy before the target had finally fallen close enough to be snared. Althil theorized this may indicate a stronger will or higher intellect than the previous two successful samples, he hoped that was a positive sign. But the drained power reserves meant that the ritual was unable to fully draw the sample into this realm proper. Althil had had to personally step up to power the final steps of the ritual. Puppeteering the ritual to completion, and fighting the sample's resistance every step of the way through the ether. It had dangerously drained Althil. But once it had been drawn into the home ritual circle, the isolating crystal sealing process completed successfully.
Althil's gaze fell to the unassuming pouch that rested on his materials table. He untangled his tail from his legs and extricated himself from his resting alcove. His chiton scraped against the hewn stone as he rose to stand. He moved over to the table and gingerly picked up the pouch that carried the current culmination of years of effort. He walked through the dimly lit ritual chamber, stepping through the spent patterns and remnants to the opposite wall. Pressing the flats of his tentacles that held the notebook against the wrought iron door, a necessity for any ritual room, he opened it into his main hallway.
The door swung open noiselessly to reveal the entry chamber of his abode. Constructed of similarly roughly hewn granite to the ritual chamber, a long hallway stretched out 20 feet in front of Althil. On the opposite wall of the rectangular room, the dark wood entrance doorway sat bolted shut. To his immediate left, a similar wooden door was set into the wall. It led to his resting chamber and personal library, a sad necessity due to his alienation from the central Phuren hive repository. The final door of the room was a wrought iron door similar to, if not as hardy, as his ritual chamber door to Althil's right halfway down the hall. Althil walked to the lighter duty wrought iron door and swung it inward into his workshop.
His workshop was a glorified large closet, with a single table set into a carved alcove in the far side of the wall and a myriad of tools and materials strewn over the room's floor and haphazardly hooked onto its walls. The primary difference to this room and the rest of his home was the prodigious yellow glowing stone set into the ceiling. Compared to the dim red lighting of the rest of his house, the workshop was clearly illuminated in bright yellow light.
Sitting on the work table was the inspiration for Althil's research. A humanoid figure of white stone with a disproportionately large head rested in the fetal position. This unassuming two and a half foot tall golem was the lone example of precursor runesmithing the Phuren hive had ever found. Aside from its head, it was built to the proportions of a humanoid. It has simple shoe-like feet, three-fingered hands, large smooth black gem-like eyes that were set into either side of its head, and a featureless beak-like face. The white stone material it was constructed of was surprisingly resilient, and on closer inspection showed faint patterns of silvery runes and mana lines.
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This magnificent relic was discovered thanks to the continued effort of the Phuren hive to excavate the exterior of the Nexus gate. The same gate the Pherun colony was initially founded around. Over 60 years ago, an ogre drone had improperly removed a boulder within the rubble that remained of the blockage around the Nexus gate. The resulting landslide of rubble and cave wall buried approximately 24 drones. Sadly the controller Extao'e'Phuren was permanently wounded as his carapace was cracked in the accident. But the slide fortuitously revealed a small cache of materials hidden in a compartment within the wall.
Althil had been working with Extao at the time and had been able to take partial credit for the chamber's discovery. Extao claimed the majority of the cache, and Althil did not contest that as he plainly needed the resources more after his disability. Althil graciously laid claim only one section of the cache, which was filled with scrap and remnants of failed experiments. Much to Althil's delight, that pile of scrap and trash housed what was the only viable example of precursor workings.
That good fortune was only partial, however. The golem was structurally perfect, the runes had kept the golem pristine. But, whatever directed or controlled the golem was critically malfunctioning. After two years of effort, Althil had mastered the necessary arcane communications needed to control the golem. Still, when he finally awakened the relic, it stood mostly inert. It was only able to follow the most basic of commands. Even then, many commands as simple as carrying an object, or shifting a particular direction would be ignored or result in the golem doing the opposite of what it was supposed to.
Althil theorized that a compatible mind may be able to fill in the gaps in the controlling force's communication. Sadly runeworkings remained attuned to the rune worker's specific signature of alignments. This meant any addition that was already aligned to any of the elemental forces would not sync up with the existing infrastructure. So he would not be able to artificially implant a mind, as he found out after spending five of his drones on the effort.
But what if he could find an unaligned beings' mind? Then there was a chance he could unlock the secrets of runeworking this relic contained. Or, he could only hope, even find a way to allow his kin access to the Nexus they were so callously denied. After decades of research, blind luck, and trial and error, the ritual of drawing a mind from worlds beyond the outer realms and their primordial influence came into being. Truthfully though, even Althil didn't fully understand the workings. The rituals relied on the natural attraction of unaligned energies and the manipulations of vacuums of power in the outer realms. They were based on rare precursor texts held in the central colony, texts most of his kin deemed ramblings of a mad being. But they worked!
Now, as Althil pulled the containment crystal from its pouch, the soft blue glow shone as a sign that his alienation and isolation from the hive would be worth it. Reaching out with his other hand, he set the notebook down on one of the few open spaces of his workshop table. Reaching up to the golem, his tentacle found the edges of the hidden panel set into the upper right side of the golem's chest. Pressing the two barely discernible edges of the panel, the panel face popped outward with a faint click. Althil opened the hatch and revealed the cylindrical chamber that sunk five inches into the chest of the golem. In that chamber, where formerly there were residual ashes, and shattered gems now was set a metal amalgamation formed to match the obloid containment crystal. A contraption of Althil's design. Placing the containment crystal into the metal housing, Althil closed the hatch sealing the panel once more.
Althil stepped back and retrieved his notebook. With his free hand raised toward the golem, he began to trace a large circle in the air, setting the boundary used by his most unique skill, Golemic Connection(VI). Focusing on maintaining the faint green border, Althil allowed the ability to guide his hand. His three tentacles began to trace out runes independently from one another. Once seven full runes followed the interior edges of the circular border, he directed the working to reach out to the golem. The power of each rune melted together in the hollow center of the pattern, and a sickly green tendril of arcane energy snaked out and moved to contact the golem.
The tendril touched onto the forehead of the golem. As contact was made, the pattern and circular boundary maintained by Althil glowed a brighter blue-green. It expanded and twisted to wrap itself around Althil’s wrist, before fading from the visible spectrum.
NEW/ Bond(I-temp.): Reliquary Golem Body(V)
Althil took a short note into his notebook and observed as a brief blue flash came over the black eyes of the golem. The golem shifted as it slowly became more active. It moved from a slouched fetal position to sitting upright, head held taller, legs up to its chest, and hands rested on its knees. Now came the moment of truth.
Althil steadied himself and calmed his mind. With determined will and steady thoughts, he directed a single phrase out to the connection the arcane working had made with him. "Awaken"
Althil felt a brief drain on his strained reserves, though it quickly passed. Thankfully this arcane working required far more intricate detail work than raw power to craft and maintain. Althil felt a stirring within his connection to the golem, something different than the last two failures. Excitedly, Althil began to record every sensation and observation into his notebook.
The golem shuddered. Its head briefly sagged forward, before it raised its gaze toward Althil, who stood before it. For a breathless moment, Althil felt both his upper and lower heart skip a beat. It was moving coherently. The hope he held for his ambitions blossomed into beautiful bliss. Then the golem lept back against the wall in a spasming, flailing mess of stone limbs, and clattering tools. Althil's hopes crash into murky ruin.
The golem continued to clatter away, launching any tool or miscellaneous material that touched its wildly whipping limbs. Althil raised its hand once more, before apathetically sending another command to the failure in front of him. "Stop"
But, the golem didn't stop. Instead, the malfunctioning relic seemed to kick itself off of the table, falling to the ground. Bringing with it several tools and metal implements that had rested near it on the table in the process. As the mass of tools and material fell, a particularly heavy metal hook fell directly into Althil's foot. He rocked backward onto his tail and lifted his injured foot away from the violent pile of tools. Frustrated and confused, Althil sent the same command that should have worked, and had worked with every other experiment. "STOP!"
Thankfully the maddening golem stopped flailing about. With a metallic clank, the last of the displaced tools fell from the bench to the pile on the floor. Althil took a brief moment to gather himself in the ensuing silence. Frustrated and dejected, there was nothing else to do but get back to work. Now that Althil's shop wasn't at risk of becoming a disaster zone. He raised his foot up to investigate the damage. He was annoyed at the cracked chitin of his fore claw, but it was just superficial thankfully. Rocking forward off his tail, he gingerly supported himself on his foot again. Looking down at the pile of tools and the priceless golem they were piled over, he slumped forward in exasperation.
With nothing more to do about it, he bent down to begin picking up his tools. It was just another failure, he would fix this and keep moving forward. He had to. Lifting the hook that had pierced his foot to the table, he specifically did not look at the purple stain on the tip. The sight of blood made him feel offset. Setting the hook back into its place, he looked down toward the stationary golem. This was not the reaction he anticipated. His first success had merely twitched erratically. It remained unresponsive to any, but the same commands the "empty" version understood. His second attempt just smashed its head into the floor and didn't respond until he reverted it to normal function. This response was both beyond what he expected and equally disappointing.
As he leaned back toward the pile, still pondering the unexpected results, he reached for a set of small head hammers and a large chisel. He briefly saw the stone sledgehammer that had been set against the wall tilt forward. Althil didn't get a chance to see the hand of the golem near the base of the hammer's handle as the hammer's head fell toward him. Before he realized what was happening, the sledgehammer had smashed into his skull. The last thing he remembered was the sound of chitin cracking, and the distinct sounds of a small golem extricating itself from a loose pile of tools.