Quoted By:
TURN TEN
3rd Chains, 2nd PAC
>AE
The new neighbours however do not wait for the High Lord to greet them, for they stream from their city at night into the jungles about the holy pool which had distracted him. They arrive with cart and ass laden with their worldly possessions with much weeping. They cross into the empire in search of sanctuary.
Geode and crystal are brought up from the mines and much adored for their lustre, at once they are brought to the dark halls of the newly finished Passage Temple. They the shadow dances like smoke, the spirits of the dead roam, and the priests chant day & night to Tuvolos. It is there and not the rim of Tu Aket that they also work their next magics, an attempt to allow the soldier's body to take firm hold of his soul that he should carry on past death. Condemned prisoners are the chosen subjects, forced into gladiatorial combat to test the efficacy of the spell. With the anointing of lake water, prayers, and much music they are sent into a makeshift arena watched over by holy men and guards. The fighting is brutal becoming ever more so when a thigh is cut, great torrents of blood pouring onto the sands, enough that a man should die, but so anointed he continues to fight even after an arm is severed. However the further away from this sacred place (and it is found the same to be true of the volcano, and it is foreseen from any place where Tuvolos reigneth) the shorter the spell lasts. In the fields around the old port it barely lasts long enough for the dead to take two paces.
>AH
History is rewritten, achievements are chiselled from stelae, the building of a formidable fleet becomes the laying of many stone roads.
Sparring, both with each other at the Colosseum and the one-eyed Unoku in the pastures, is taken up as an integral part of military training. Pharakhan Amenhotep deems that it is necessary not only that the body be strong through the divine blood & will, but that the working of that strength be practised lest they be found wanting. Still, it is still mandated that the innate strength be bred into the next generation by those who are selected to breed. Here however the bodily limit is reached, a man can only be so muscled after all, even one who claims divine lineage.
Having met with some men in the south and finding them most pathetically boring, the army returns to tell of their findings.
>AU
Gold, silver, copper, and lead, these the legendary ages of mankind, now mined and smelted and ingots stored in warehouses across Uru-Anu. The wives of many a scholar are seen in the market places so heavily weighed down by their baubles that they stoop a little.
The vast mass of stone & metal is left under guard in a location outside the borders of the country kept secret to all except the highest ranks within the orders, but a large fraction is carved off and shaped into a mimicry of the greater whole for the public to gawk at.