Deptimaya - the Reawakened

[Frostwander]

The quill tip scratched busily across the parchment. No letters or symbols decorated the wide roll, but sweeping lines and intersecting patterns covered it in a language of their own. Words could convey thoughts and ideas, but what this author wrote would become solid, build by skilled hands, lived and worked in.

The pen abruptly stopped as it encountered an obstacle. The writer moved the top quickly away from the page to prevent any drips from staining his work, and looked at the chubby little hand that hovered over the top of the parchment, pointing.

"You should put in more windows here."

Sunda Stasreid sighed and put the quill back in its stand, adjusted his spectacles, and then let his gaze travel up from the hand to its owner. The other gnome, her blond hair woven into fancy cascading loops, took his silence as encouragement to continue, and pointed to a few more places. "See, if you let more light in here and here, it'll give it a more cheerful mood. People will be happier to be in there!" She smiled widely, pleased with her helpfulness.

Sunda folded his arms into the sleeves of his robe, leaning back with a long-suffering expression, and spoke with deliberate patience. "Miss Snowligh, do I tell you how to paint?"

"Sure you do, all the time! You say, 'Miss Snowligh...' even though I've told you to just call me Pyza, 'the foundation of those arches isn't nearly wide enough to support such a structure. They need wider bases.'" Her voice deepened slightly as she mimicked Sunda's speech.

Sunda pursed his lips slightly in annoyance at the imitation, but nodded. "I suppose I do." He was always willing to concede a valid point. "Do you know why I point out such flaws?"

"Well you're trying to help, of course! So that's why I'm trying to help back. If this Grand Temple is going to be as spectacular as we're both planning, it's going to need more natural light in the nave."

"I point them out because I have a great deal more experience in practical architecture than you do, and it's important that all aspects of a plan are properly related. If there were windows added here, or here," the architect unfolded his arms and pointed where Pyza had a moment ago, careful not to touch the still-drying ink, "then the roof stability would be insufficient, and a significant precipitation could compromise the ceiling. If it collapsed, it could kill hundreds."

Pyza looked at the plans, and then back at Sunda's stern expression. Her own faded from it's usual exuberance to a subdued disappointment, and her bottom lip quivered slightly. "Oh." She glanced at the parchment again, and then at her feet. She mumbled an excuse, and then turned and left through the doorway in the direction of her own office.

Sunda sighed again, looking after the deflated girl as she left. He wasn't sure if he should have said something else. He automatically picked up the quill again, and dipped it lightly into the inkwell to busy himself again. After finishing the lines of the structure where he'd been interrupted, he began to study the ceiling and high walls. There certainly should be somewhere else that windows could be placed safely, and the girl was right about the lighting. He was always willing to concede a valid point.

[Admin]

The Great Tree

Pyza was guided, there was no question of that. She walked without purpose, but every step felt as if it was meant to be there. Usually guidance was a vague thing - a few visions, an eventual "when I get there." But not today. Today the Creators seemed to be leading her straight for something. She marched over hills and through groves, drawn to continue even when she saw good spots she usually would have wished to check. And then suddenly she saw it.

Standing in the middle of what would have been a sun-lit meadow, the tree rose majestically into the air. Its trunk was fully thirty hand-spans across and soft white, with bark not unlike that of a birch. It rose hundreds of feet into the air, overshadowing the surrounding trees as if they had been mild shrubs, and its leaves.... Each leaf was made of pure, untarnished gold, foil-thin but large as a platter. As she stared up a breeze blew by and one of them snapped and fluttered down, landing at Pyza's feet.

This was clearly a place of magic and power. They could build a shrine here, harvest the falling leaves and worship the creators. Or... there were a lot of leaves on that tree, and a lot of wood in its trunk. If they harvested the tree they could take it all at once, rather than waiting for whatever pickings fell from the boughs.

-----------------------------------
Shrine or Resource
Pyza has found The Golden Tree, a magical tree of great size with leaves of gold. Building a shrine here could be greatly advantageous, but harvesting the tree would provide an immediate boost to the Deptimaya's resources.

Build a Shrine
This tree is too beautiful to destroy. We will build a shrine here and worship the Creators who led us to it.
-- You find The Golden Tree, a UNIQUE resource that provides +4 Gold/turn and +2 Divinity/turn. The tree counts as a Gold Mine for the Mint and Goldsmith constructs and as a Sacred Site for the Relic Shrine construct.

Harvest the Golden Tree
Cut down the tree and we will have the resources to greatly expand our nation.
-- The Golden Tree is destroyed. You gain 20 Gold, 5 Wood harvesting its leaves and trunk.
-- The meadow around the tree is now exposed to sunlight, and becomes a Good Ground resource.

[Frostwander]

The rising slap of running feet and breathless panting was all the warning Sunda had before the slightly parted doors of his office slammed open from Pyza's momentum. Fortunately, this time was no interruption of his careful design work - the plans for the Twins' Temple of the Arts were completed, and carefully laid out on the great drafting table instead of his desk. The builders had already begun marking out the space for the foundations to be dug, and the details of the stonework had already been sent to Tabenn Heights for the masons.

"Sunda, Sunda, Sunda! Are you here?"

"Yes, Miss Snowligh," he replied, standing from his chair by the window where, until a moment earlier, he'd been about to nod off in the warmth of the sun. He noted the excitement and urgency in her voice, and mentally shooed away the annoyance that normally accompanied the arrival of his counterpart. He studied her face a moment as she stopped at his desk and leaned on it, gasping breaths from her run. Her hair was frazzling out of its normally elegant appearance, and while her manner expressed urgency, the girl was also smiling too widely to be any sort of bad news. "What is it?"

"Tree!" Pyza took another deep breath, and in place of more words thrust a rumpled parchment at his hands. She had run nearly the whole way once the city center was in sight, unable to keep the discovery quiet any longer.

Sunda raised an eyebrow and took the parchment gently. A one-word answer from Pyza was a rarity on par with snow in summer. He carefully smoothed out the windblown page on his desk, revealing the image of a grand tree, white and towering, its leaves the color of sunlight. Her paints did not come close to the true majesty of the Golden Tree, but her skill was still enough to give Sunda a vivid impression. He looked back up at where she stood, gulping water from the glass he'd left on his desk, his pitcher in her other hand.

"You found ... this?"

Pyza nodded, almost forgetting to swallow before she started talking. "Ye ... *gulp* ...yes!" She wiped the trickle of water from the corner of her mouth with her sleeve. "The Creators led me to it, I know it! I just start walking one morning while I was out in the woods, and I walked all day, and then it was there! I've never seen anything so breathtakingly amazing, we have to share this with everyone! I bet we could get a huge caravan of people to go there ... live there, even!"

Sunda looked from Pyza's face to the painting, and then back. Arrangements for a massive expedition, and possibly a settlement, would be a large enough undertaking to delay the start of the grand temple. Normally he would argue Pyza back to her senses and instill practicality into the conversation, but this time ...

Something about this possibility grew on him rapidly. Maybe it was the fact that the image of the Golden Tree was burned in his mind more thoroughly than on the parchment. Perhaps he, too, had felt a touch of inspiration from the Creators. Maybe it was Pyza's boundless enthusiasm and hopeful smile.

[Frostwander]

Meg and Ymi watched as the wagon group started out from Cardel, the human woman riding alongside. One of the wagoners had already struck up a conversation with her, and the small caravan slowly rolled up the road and out of sight. The sisters turned their mounts together and began walking them back toward the jungle on the east side of the village.

After several minutes in silence, Ymi spoke, "How many more kingdoms of giants do you think are out there? This is the third we've encountered in as many seasons, and we've heard rumors of several more."

Another quiet minute passed before Meg answered. "This one wasn't nearly as tall as the tree-folk."

"No, but she also had that horse creature. It looked pretty strong, and I bet it could cover a lot of ground."

"I'm sure," Meg replied after a moments thought. "But it definitely wasn't a predator. Did you see the way it acted around Tallow and Rieve?"

Ymi smirked. The horse, for all its bulk, had definitely recognized the hunter instincts of their servals, even if the human had overlooked it. And judging from its nervous reaction, her sister was right. Horses would not be one of the creatures of this world that might threaten Deptimaya.

"Her armor, though," Meg mused, "she was definitely a warrior. No-one would wear metal like that unless they expected to get hit, and hard."

Ymi thought of the armor, and laughed a little. "Such a big target, no wonder. Of course it'd be easy to hit a mark that big!"

The cats paced along while their owners conversed, still alert as they padded silently through the jungle growth. They continued in a sweep eastward, following an unmarked perimeter around Cardel. There was still a lot about their own territory yet to be discovered, and the Shepherds were determined to safeguard the others.

Deptimaya was yet a small space in a very large world.

[Sponsored content]