“What does this word have to do with shipments and cargo?” Caldor was inquisitively scratching his chin and staring at the word “God” on the first page of this tome. It was followed by several hundred pages of the same thing as the other lists, a relation of cargo and quantities. But Caldor couldn’t stop thinking about one thing: This is one of the first times anyone’s seen a Laraweian deity mentioned, right? Also, why would it be called God, as if it was a proper name? How do you distinguish them from the others?.
To make sure he wasn’t missing anything, the man flipped through one page at a time, carefully examining each page and comparing it against his dictionary. Surely he would find something that explained such an odd place for that word to be. This process took several turns.
Caldor woke up in a jolt, to realize he had fallen asleep briefly while studying the manifest. He tried to wipe the drool from the corner of his mouth …right, evil armor. Glancing down at the book, Caldor noticed there were about 10 pages left, so he took a deep breath and dove back in. At some point his tired eyes glossed over the word “weapon” not far before the word “tool”. However, he checked his dictionary again and the ideograms for “tool” were the same, but they were ordered incorrectly. This could be an error but I have to check.
Flipping through his dictionary with newfound energy, he eventually stopped at the entry he needed. It was just the word “catalyst”. In the past, researchers had seen this word used to imply some energy source of some kind, like the automaton’s core… Wait… Caldor got up and started frantically looking through books in the same section as the “God” manifest, and started flipping through them, looking for more “errors”. By the end of this endeavor, Caldor was sitting down with legs crossed, an array of dozens of tomes arranged in front of him. He had lightly marked each of the wrongly arranged words with his graphite stick. After yet another hour of this astounding waste of time, As Caldor’s inner voice made sure to tell him, The Lens was left with the following words, including the ones he had found already: “God, catalyst, siphon, runic, channeler, clasps. How in the Torrents do these words go together? We really ought to bring all of this to the Lenses, have the linguists analyze it all.” The words really made little sense for him, especially in contrast with “God”. All of those he felt feasible to be present in a shipping manifest for Larawe, so he saw no reason for them to be hidden among other, unrelated materials. Most of them were pieces of automatons, and some of traps or scrapped runic artifacts, none of which had gone back to functioning conditions since Exgrunn had started the excursions.
Caldor kept wondering if he was missing some connection between the terms. At this point he was extremely tired, and could feel himself falling asleep. It must be getting late outside.
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Caldor’s internal clock was very precise, which was really inconvenient at times, mostly for Fiannah. He noted that the armor had not only been silent for many turns, it had also not saved him from tiredness as it did for hunger. The scholar wondered idly about that before falling asleep on the amber floor, deeply this time.
– – – –
He woke up a few turns later feeling a powerful migraine, and slowly rose to a sit, groaning painfully. He could hear the hoarse voice of the suit again: Fight.
“Fight what?!” Caldor shouted, immediately clutching his head in regret. The suit lifted his left arm and pointed towards an open door on the far end of the archive.
Then the voice whispered: Creator…
If his temples were uncovered, Caldor would be pressing them, as it stands, he just pushed against the side of his headpiece. “Fine, creator of what?” Caldor fully got up, reluctantly, and very slowly walked towards the door.
Us… RUN!
“I don’t think I will, I have a splitting migraine right now. Furthermore, apologies for being the bearer of bad news. You 'creator' is likely a pile of dusty bones at this point, so, as my friend says: ‘that’s how the cookie crumbles motherfudger.’” He could feel the voice sighing, in frustration. The armor itself shuddered in resonance to its growl.
When he finally finished his leisurely walk, he found himself entering an absurdly large amphitheater. It had hundreds of rows of benches angled downwards, supposedly sat on by ancient Laraweian students. In a weapons and research facility? The door had left him precisely in this upper portion of the room. Close to him was a staircase that cut in between two sets of benches. Panning his vision downward, Caldor finally noticed something that made him tremble. It also astonished him that it hadn’t been the first thing to catch his eye.
It was a gigantic corpse, lying in the fetal position. Its body carved from head to toe with runes and it had its back turned to Caldor. On that back, it had a huge scar that reached down from the creature’s shoulder, all the way to the hip on the opposite side. From the widest part of the gash, emerald-green light shone through, but it behaved almost like a very light gas. It drifted upwards, looking like it could be affected by a small breeze. Finally, Caldor noticed that the runes also shone intermittently with the same color. He started climbing down the stairs thinking that I guess the armor wasn’t lying, that’s the same hue it emits…
The suit responded with: That is not the creator. The scholar didn’t say anything else, and avoided thinking as well. He was starting to get anxious again.
When he reached the bottom of the staircase, he noticed that an arm of the fluid light was actually moving sideways and down. He followed it and found a person by the head of the titanic dead thing. His skin was gray, he had long, slick, black hair. He had runes scarred on both his forearms, one of which seemed to be absorbing the green light. His name was Durkhann. Durkhann noticed the armor and grimaced.