I don't know if you figure this out on your own, but I wanted to be clear on something your character would have figured out. I can't remember if we ever discussed this, but the game ended shortly after that point (and I was super busy at the time).
GM:
The crafting: It it as though you have just glared directly into the eclipse, bright, glorious and terrible.
Not one, not dozens, not even hundreds, but hundreds, of sorcerers poured their lives into this. A thousands of skills craftsmen and skilled artificers assembled the pieces of this vast work, carefully assembling endless tiny pieces. And perhaps a million labourers quarried the stone and metal from all across the desert and assembled the work.
It was not done quickly, it was the work of lifetimes, generations, over a century of building.... not what sits infront of you, but what it represents, the larger whole. And it was probably done centuries ago. Their clothes, and the scale of their work are unknown to you. No nation you know could have possibly put this together. Perhaps they are some culture from far away, maybe beyond the reaches.. or maybe something from the past.
Getting the picture to what the bits DOES is is difficult: you have a clear (almost blinding) vision of the bits, a jutting piece of a vast stone tower, but away from the tower, the stone becomes increasingly shadowy and phantasmal, dark to your vision, as this was not directly linked to the component you are now carrying. The sheer weight of the task, the monumental resources is utterly staggering.
It's like something out of a holy book... only you are not reading some prosaic nonsensical tome, you are EXPERIENCING this, you see it before you. Then you see the lives that went into this. Literal lives and souls. You witness the sick, the ill, the infirm and others laying, throwing their souls into this machine. Once again, the visions beyond, what the souls did, are not clear. You wonder why this is so unclear compared to the other vision, and it comes to you: this was not for the construction of the artifact, this was it's PURPOSE. This device collected souls. Though what it did with them is unknown, it is too far from the piece of the component you carry. Perhaps with more pieces of the great work, or study, you can divine more about what the WHOLE artifact did.]
Scholar's eyes light up as infinity pours into him. His pupils momentarily glow with a bright light.
Now that you have have time to reflect on this, and you've had time to think about it (and have just mentally reviewed the universities texts on the subject with omniscient scholar), something would have occured to you.
1) Gaja said that the items in the area were old bits of tech and clothes were from her people's older legends. She's a Howler. That means that stuff was from the old magitech empire that was destroyed when the Great Mandala blew up.
2) The item in question was the peice of an absurdly powerful artifct that would have taken an absurd level of resources/manpower to create: easily the single most imperssive feat of artifact engineering you've ever heard of.
3) It was unstable and was about to detonate with enough force to concern Godbound.
The bits were probably part of the Great Mandala.
This message was last edited by the GM at 16:33, Wed 03 June 2020.
