See now, if someone ever reads these here memories of mine I so diligently put to paper, I pray they have the decency of mentioning that the great Caldor of Anderon was the one to compile such marvels as what I’ve witnessed, and dealt with, and to which I almost died… If I ever am to escape the predicament I’ve fallen into, I’d like to publish these writings myself. As it stands though, I seem to find myself stranded in a peculiar trap room, wearing what appears to be an ancient artifact that has taken quite a liking to me Indeed.

You might ask, imaginary reader, how a member of the Lenses with esteem so high such as I managed to get stuck in ruins built so many millennia ago by a people who are long dead by now. I would answer then that said ruins seem to be filled with unfathomable mechanical creations that I’m sure would be great study material for my colleagues if they managed to escape one of them with their lives; so, despite my qualities as a scholar and a researcher, I am neither much of an athlete, nor a warrior, in fact, that’s what my good friend Fiannah is paid to be. Everything which I lack, she has in spades; not only has she quite the fortitude, she is also eerily comfortable wielding her demi-magical doo-hickeys. All I know about them personally is that they’re weapons with very specific runic infusions. Such runic infusions prove rather effective when it comes to transmogrifying physical matter. I’m sorry, in simpler terms, they’re good for blowing stuff up.

So that’s that! Fiannah, with her frightening apparatuses should be able to free me from my orichalcum cage, correct? Well… that’s just it, she has disappeared, and I don’t seem to be able to contact her. In fact, I apologize again, with how quickly but disorderly my mind processes information, I am prone to mixing up the order of events in the telling of stories; let me rectify that by telling the full story in the next few pages.

As you might not know if you’re not too familiar with the guild system employed by our Exgrunnish people, whenever an exploration team is sent to one of the Larawe ruins, a search group usually comprised of at least one member of the Lenses guild and one member of the Cleavers guild is chosen for the task. Sometimes though, a member of the Wands is included, especially when the ruins hold the possibility of harboring magical paraphernalia that could be useful for their arcane research - these parties are always composed of higher ranking members of each guild. Fiannah didn’t get along well with most Wands, she saw them as, and I quote, “Smelly, sweaty and snobby smartasses.” That is quite a descriptor, even more if you consider that I have been also called some variation of that by our peers.

I believe it was nearing the time for supper when me and Fiannah left the Cleavers’ office with our exploration permit, I remember that because as we stepped out of the premises her belly let out a mighty growl. “Caldor, look man I’m gonna need a snack before we leave. You called me seconds before I asked the helper boy to bring me something”, she said; in the interest of fairness and accuracy I will try to retell the phrases spoken by her as she spoke them, informal mannerisms and all.

I then answered: “That is just as well, I might not have your frame but I also do feel hunger, would you like to visit a specific establishment or should we buy some more rations for the excursion?”

She said: “We’re already estimating an ‘excursion’ of like, 4 weeks right? We’ll get our fill on rations pretty quickly down there, let’s just go grab some wings please”.

Wings in this context could have meant a multitude of things, harpy wings, chicken wings, imp wings, and of course, the most costly and also Fiannah’s favorites: giant storm carrier wings. I knew those were what she wanted but, for the sake of my coins, and, admittedly being rather coy, I asked anyway. “You’ll need to be a bit more specific I believe.”

She responded as she usually did, with a deadly glare and a sentence that would put me to laugh if her face was not so horrifying when she said it: “Caldor, don’t fuck with me, you know what I meant. I swear to…” She stopped as her stomach let out another fearsome gurgle. “Look, let’s just go?”

I answered: “of course, lead the way.”

Typically I wouldn’t bore the readers of the world’s next biggest archeological discovery with dull quests for spicy bird meat. That being said, my conversation with Fiannah inside of the watering hole that served said delicacies was rather interesting and I think worthy of being registered here. After we made our order, we both sat down to wait for our meal. I was quite quiet, ever more anxiously contemplating the expedition ahead of us. Silence isn’t common for me, Fiannah noticed this. “Hey, I’ll give ya two coins for what’s brewing in that noggin right now.”

That startled me. “Oh, keep your coins, I believe my mind’s current meanderings aren’t worthy of that, I was merely getting a bit nervous about our trip. The facility we’re entering hasn’t been explored at all yet. We might find something never seen or heard of before!” I said, trying not to sound too nervous.

She looked perplexed, “Wait, that’s great isn’t it? Shouldn’t you be excited? I know I am, even though I’m just a pointy thing preventing your untimely demise.”

Fiannah liked reminding me that she was responsible for keeping me alive on our excursions. I can’t say I blame her, given my current circumstances. “Well you see, as you know, if I don’t publish anything of note from my findings, I may be liable to be suspended and maybe even expelled from the guild. That doesn’t sound fun. As much as I believe we might find something spectacular, we could also find… nothing at all.”

She chuckled and slapped my back, “hey, don’t worry. Be rational about this, what has always been found in every single new ruin site?”

I didn’t quite know what she meant. “More deadly automatons?”

I noticed her brow furrow. “Well sure, but no, new runes man! Every time someone found a new underground tunnel entrance, more of the old conjurations were discovered, and both my guild and those uppity Wands got some new toys. You’ll be fine.”

I looked at the steel tool strapped to Fiannah’s belt. She was right, all signs did point towards us discovering at the very least, new magical scripts that would absolutely guarantee my stay with the Lenses. That didn’t quite ease my mind, I couldn’t tell why, but I just smiled and agreed with her.

After we finished eating she paid for both our meals, despite my protests. We then took a quick ride out of town, she paid for that too. We hopped onto a float-skiff. The conjurer driver was quite talkative, conversing with him eased my mind a bit; even more as the high speed of the vehicle generated wind that ruffled my messy hair. Once we stepped onto the wild grass, we set out towards the excavation site of the newfound ruins.

As we approached him, the man in charge of all the drills and shovels and what not greeted us by tilting his bulbous rune covered hat up and down, Fiannah waved with her left hand and started talking. “Hey, what’s in for us down there?”

The supervisor, whose name as I recall was Pickett, coughed and spit a glob of soot after choking on it for a few seconds. I remember thinking that didn’t seem like a good sign, but waited for him to talk before voicing my concern. “Lady Cleaver Fiannah, Master Lens Caldor, good evening. As you can see here my boys have been digging some really impressive structures all week long. From our guesses, it’s probably a few dozen kilometers deep downward and probably two, three times that much heading further south.” This wasn’t the largest site the guilds had found, not by any margin, but it certainly was the largest I’d ever seen. You probably know how I felt then, but before I could talk, Fiannah piped up again.

“Pickett, it's cool, just call me Fiannah. Alright, our provisions will probably last for long enough before we finish this, but just to be sure, I’ll eat a little less of my share. Pickett, what’d the translator tell you? Do we know what exactly this was?” That was a very good question. In the past 15 years, the guilds had been working together to explore the odd foundations of the ancient Larawe people, hiding right beneath our feet. So far, we had found things such as large buildings where vehicles seemed to have been stored, plenty of temples, and labs. All of them rife with dangerous subterranean life and living dolls of orichalchum, animated by magic and bent on destroying anyone who dared explore their dwellings.

That is why I was surprised and at the same time enthused when Pickett said that apparently, from what our translators could gather, this seemed to have been some form of base for weapons or research projects. This could mean many things, first that these ancient beings probably had to do battle with more than dangerous wildlife, but also their intelligent peers; second, that venturing down there had the potential of being much more dangerous than many other excursions from the past. I swallowed my anxiety as best as I could, and turned to Fiannah, as if to ask for the go ahead. Her response was a very sobering “what?”

Snapping out of my stupor: “Uh, sorry, sorry, nothing, I’m ready to go, anything else we should know, mister Pickett?”

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He wiped his brow of sweat and shook his head. "No, you’re good, I’ll tell the boys to pack it up. We’ll be out of your hair in a turn or two.” Fiannah grabbed her heavy bags and tossed the straps over her shoulders, she said an incantation and the bag was secured to her suit. This might be a good time to mention that me and magic never really saw eye to eye. I did study the arcane for my papers and for the further discovery of the life of the Laraweians underground.

But while most people applied the runes found there as well as our own incantations for convenience and many other practicalities, I never quite developed the eye nor the skill for it. This is all to say that unlike Fiannah, I just fastened the buckles of my suit and pushed a button on my bracelet. A 1000 lumen light shot from my chestpiece, and a few critters, flying or otherwise, seemed to shimmy into the shadows, away from us. Fiannah chuckled.

As we entered the tunnels, my light bounced off the orichalcum walls and a mantle of dust kicked up from our movement’s disturbance of the chamber’s still air. Fiannah pulled up her dark red scarf over her mouth and I just shut my lips very tightly as I clearly didn’t prepare for the now obvious conclusion that an ancient and abandoned place would be dusty! “Oh well, it seems the entrance splits here, to our left, do you see that pathway?” I said. She squinted and walked towards the direction I pointed at. I did my all to keep my light directed in a way that would best help her examine the premises. She slid her hand across the runes carved before the entry of the hall and pulled out a little tablet, which lit her face with bright but localized cyan light.

“Okay, so these are pretty mundane enchantments. Nothing we haven’t seen before though, I just need to get what purpose exactly they serve in this context, give me a minute.” As she parsed the markings, not moving my light, I tried to stretch my vision out across the other path available to us. And, unlike what I predicted, I could actually notice something rather odd. I caught a glimpse of a sharp emerald shimmer in what should be a sea of amber. “Excuse me Fiannah, I just noticed something down this path, I’ll be right back if you don’t mind.”

Still looking at her tablet then at the runes and back at the tablet again, she waved her hand at me and answered, “Sure, just don’t go too far into this place alone yeah? I’ll come over there if I’m done before you.”

I let out a disgruntled puff of air. “I may not be as strong as you, but I’m quite capable of getting around on my own for a few dozen meters!” And walked off into the corridor with the green shine. I heard Fiannah chuckle and conjure an incantation as she left my line of sight. We’ve been on enough expeditions together for me to know that she was just setting up her own light source, magical in nature, of course.

As I approached the glow I spotted back in the previous chamber, I noticed that the distance between it and myself never seemed to shorten, as if walking on top of some fiendish treadmill. I brushed it off as some Laraweian runic trickery and kept marching forward. After walking for what felt like no more than five minutes, I looked back at the path behind me, and was shocked to realize that the previous room, even with my powerful light pointing at it, was nowhere to be seen. Instead, all I could see was the corridor, sealed off to the north - which was where I had entered from.

I called out to Fiannah, and was responded only by the high pitched sound of my own voice bouncing off the metallic walls. “Fiannah?” I called out again. No response. At this point, you’re probably urging me to come back instantly, as am I in my retelling of the sordid tale. But as we both know, me and Fiannah aren’t together presently. Meaning that I truly took the most foolish of the two choices.

Thinking this phenomenon to be merely a part of the trick I mentioned but a few moments ago, I simply kept walking. In a lapse of judgment, admittedly. Sometimes my curiosity is truly more powerful and alluring than the thoughts of logic and rational thinking I’m usually so proud of. That being so, eventually the source of my amusement was reached. With the powerful light that was now available, I found myself in a closed off room. No exits other than the path I took to get there. It was rather claustrophobic as well, barely large enough to fit maybe three of myself, and I’m a very lean, and not particularly tall individual. Either way, my attention was called to the source of the green shimmer, an astonishingly bulky suit of armor.

The suit in question was actually quite different from most examples of Laraweian armor we had seen prior to this very moment. First of all, it wasn’t made from the material the ancient people seemed to love so much, orichalcum that is. We couldn’t replicate it no matter how hard we tried. And our forges, even magical ones, seemed to be unable to heat it up enough to reach its melting point. So my shock when I found a protective suit made from something else should come as no surprise. Additionally, the helmet and other parts of it didn’t seem to align with the rest of the armors found. The helmet had an appearance that was bestial in nature, feral. It didn’t resemble any exact animal I could describe, rather it evoked images of many in my mind, like some primitive beast that was not around anymore much like the Laraweian people, had been used as the basis for the design. The armor was positively covered in runic markings; even with my lesser knowledge of Runic Magic, I can still identify known runes somewhat confidently. I recognized barely any of the ones carved to the green alloy.

For a moment a thought crossed my mind that perhaps this wasn’t actually a suit of armor, but a dormant automaton that had merely not been documented yet. “Perhaps something exclusive to this facility." I uttered to no one in particular. So, in the interest of investigating further, I grasped and attempted to remove what appeared to be the headpiece. It came loose, but a back panel of the helm seemed to be actually part of the chestpiece, and the bestial caricature in my hands was simply an absurdly heavy metal mask. So heavy in fact that I almost dropped it. After recovering, I examined it. I could find no visible orifices for breathing or looking through; further encouraging my hypothesis that this was once able to move on its own. Then, I peered into the body itself. What I saw through it was not the insides of some intricate machine, but a sudden flash of the same emerald light I had seen before, except much stronger; covering the entire room with its striking color. I was momentarily blinded and could feel myself falling, at the same time as something warm and comforting enveloped me. Despite the increasing speed of the plummet, all I felt was reassurance and calm.

I hit the floor, quite hard. So hard in fact that the ping of the metal rang through my ears like a pesky nightfly. I went to rub them but noticed that something stood in the way of me and my own skin, something rigid. I quickly realized that my hands were donned in the green armor I had found, in fact, my whole body was. I even felt the fearsome features of the mask as I reached for my face, despite my vision being completely unobstructed. The suit surprisingly also seemed to be a perfect fit, having looked slightly taller than me beforehand.

As I got up, I was panicking ever so lightly. Even though I felt no pain from the fall, it clearly took several seconds - if not close to a minute - for me to reach the surface I stand upon now. I looked up, and indeed, an imponent tunnel stretched above me, perfectly shaped to fit an average sized person. When I glanced at it, I also noticed that, though my flashlight had been turned off, I could see inside the ruins with no issue. Actually, I could see much better than I would with my light.

I tried to make sense of this while pacing through the room. I could see no obvious light sources and logically, no outside light made its way inside here. I then attempted to remove the armor, starting with the mask. It didn’t come off, it didn’t even budge. Retracing the moments that led me here I presumed that the armor had somehow enveloped me as I fell, and that was the warmth I had felt. The runes carved all around it possibly reacted to some trigger action I had performed and bonded the suit to me, certainly saving me from my death.

I decided that it was best to look for Fiannah and have her help me with the artifact before anything else. So I started looking for a way out of this room. Curiously enough, no doors seemed to be present. I remembered that the ancient people had used a specific rune to open secret passageways in their buildings, so I grabbed my copy of the runestone that’s issued to every member in every guild, in which exactly that rune had been transcribed. I examined the chamber first. It seemed to stretch out in an area of around fifteen meters squared, and the ceiling was about thirty meters high. Four large equidistant parallelepipedal columns apparently supported the ceiling up. A circle was carved on the floor so that its circumference was tangential to the corners of each of the four pillars. The orichalcum in the circle seemed to have a slightly reddish hue, rather than the usually stark amber it has. Like I said, there were no openings other than the hole above me.

Now that I knew the layout of the chamber I started walking around the inner walls, holding my runestone up to the carvings on the orichalcum, hoping to hear the liberating sound of a door sliding open. I had no luck. Completely dejected, trying (and failing) to remain calm, and for the sake of being thorough, I also approached the stone to the four pillars. I wasn't expecting it to work at all. Until it did. As my stone got warm near the third one, the runes in both started glowing, a sign of their activation, I jumped back, startled.

The bottom of the pillar slid up like these ancient doors usually did, and revealed an alcove. Inside was the last thing I was hoping to find while desperately searching for the person whose job is protecting my rather… squishy self. It was an automaton. A quite large one indeed, double my size. A hulking humanoid figure with blank features built of orichalcum stepped out of the pillar, and I could see the blood red core shining within. As it seemingly noticed me, I stepped back, so desperately that before I could realize my back was against the wall. A booming voice echoed in the chamber, coming from the construct’s core. I could barely understand the common root words that ours and the Larawe language share, but I assure you it didn’t sound friendly. Immediately it leapt into a sprint towards me, as its balled orichalcum fist melted in the fraction of a second and reshaped itself into a large bludgeon, too big for the amount of material that appeared to be transfigured. I prepared to roll away before it struck me, but I was interrupted by the movement of my own body. Against my own volition, my head reeled back and then thrust forward again, pointing at the automaton. A bulb of radiant green energy shot from my mouth, or rather, from the armor’s mask’s mouth. It hit the machine right on the area of the chest the core was stored in, and melted through it like it was made of warm lard, and the projectile was the last bit of heat it required to fully liquify. The automaton stopped instantly, and crumbled before me, nearly crushing my body with its heavy pieces. Adrenaline ran through me and I felt a wave of vigor and excitement replace the fear and despair I had felt. My conversation with Fiannah back in the watering hole flashed through my mind and I threw both fists to the air knowing this armor would surely guarantee my place in my guild with the other Lenses. Now all that’s left to do is escape this blasted place…

End of Caldor of Alderon’s Latest journal entry