“Even the effort from the weakest could move mountains, given time.” - Saying attributed to Aphelie, Lichdom Necromancer and one of the earliest recorded disciple of the Bone Lord.
“Why the aqueducts?” asked Áine to the local guide who led the group of six up on a tour through Mount Aphelia. The young girl’s question was prompted by her curiosity at the sight of a marvelous and visibly ancient network of aqueducts that led from a spring on the other side of the mountain, bringing clean water to the inhabited side of the same. “I mean, why not just dig canals instead?”
“Not the first time someone asked that! Won’t be the last time either, I bet!” replied the local guide all too cheerfully. The chipper way in which he replied was a clear indication how the question Áine asked must have been asked time and again by visitors to Aphelia, it seemed. Then again, it was a perfectly logical question to ask as well.
“The answer to the young lady’s question is mostly thanks to a peculiarity of Mount Aphelia itself,” explained the local guide, reciting a clearly practiced answer that he seemed to delight telling to guests. “The condition of the soil on the habitable side of the mountain is rather weak. It is very prone to landslides in ages past, especially in wintertime where avalanches were practically a yearly occurrence.”
“So the aqueducts are built to prevent the running waters of a canal from eroding the soil and making the situation worse?” asked Rhys as he quickly latched on to the logic behind the words said by the local guide.
“That is one reason. The other is because the ground layer on this side of the mountain used to be much thinner in the past. In order to properly build canals at that time, it would have required them to dig into the solid granite of the mountain, and I believe you kids are aware how hard that would be, no?” replied the guide as he continued his explanation. “With the manpower available back then, it was deemed more effective to just dig in holes for the foundation of the aqueducts to stand on rather than try to carve a canal into the mountain.”
“At that time?” questioned Eilonwy. “When would that be?”
“That was roughly… two thousand years ago? That was during the time when refugees that escaped to the Lichdom were assigned land on this mountain to live on, because there was no other suitable place left. The Lichdom was far, far smaller in those days,” said the man. “Back then, the necromancer who supervised those people was Miss Aphelie, for whom we named this mountain and city today.”
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“She’s one of the Bone Lord’s earliest recorded personal disciples,” explained Aideen to the others who were not aware of the significance of that name. “That’s from ages long before I was born and most anything I know about her were snippets from old books, though. I think only the Bone Lord himself would have a clear idea about her life.”
“That is likely true, miss,” admitted the local guide. “That said, those of us whose ancestors were born and lived in this mountain would never forget her grace in the ten years that she spent as supervisor over our distant ancestors of her day,” he added with evident pride. “Miss Aphelie was the one who constructed the aqueducts for us, which allowed us to actually grow crops on the mountain itself. We wouldn’t have survived past our second year without her help.”
“If the soil layer was so thin, though, how did you all manage to build so many fields on the mountain now?” asked Áine with some doubts. The terraced fields she saw were full of abundance and growth, which ran contrary to the guide’s narration.
“Ah, the terraced fields weren’t there back then. In fact, we built them slowly and gradually over the past few centuries or so. Each of the fields couldn’t be built at random. We needed to hire earth mages to properly reinforce the foundation of the area first, then to shape the terraces properly. That gave us more room to use and greatly reduced the risk of damaging the mountain’s integrity.”
“After all, our ancestors had to deal with landslides on a pretty regular basis. As such it had pretty much been ingrained in our minds to avoid anything that could damage the mountain’s integrity,” continued the man. “It’s also one reason we never bothered with canals. The aqueducts were enough for our needs, and have proven to be safe and stable over millennia.”
“Pretty reasonable, I guess,” noted Celia after the man’s explanation. It also answered why both the mountain and the town had shared the same name. Apparently the residents’ ancestors had been so grateful for the aid they received during their early years that they had named them after their benefactor, and the name had stuck since.
When Aideen considered that the Bone Lord definitely wasn’t someone who would care what people called a mountain, that made even more sense. She doubted Grandpa Aarin ever cared about the name of a mountain in his territory unless it was important for some reason. If anything, he probably found it amusing that they named the mountain and later their city after his disciple.
The prosperity of Aphelia – the city – was in many ways a showcase of how in the Lichdom success was often something that was gradually built up over time, often many generations of the shorter-lived races at that. That long-term mindset was prevalent all over the lichdom due to the locals’ familiarity with the local clergy. Most of the Lichdom worshiped Tohrmut, the Deity of Death, after all.
For them, to look at things past their own deaths came as a tradition. Even those from races with shorter lives were taught from a young age to never sacrifice the long term for benefits in the short term. Over many generations, that sort of short-sightedness which was common elsewhere in the world ended up nearly nonexistent in the Lichdom.