RYE - Metropolis Preservation Barriers, Pt. 1

Metropolis Preservation Barriers (400 Slannpower)

It was a well-known fact by the Slann that the lizardmen’s cities had been designed around their capabilities, or perhaps it was they who had been shaped for the use of their cities. Opinions differed on the matter within the Sublime Communion, and the official stance of most Slann of the Third or earlier spawnings was that it made little difference, for both were products of the Old Ones, and were each meant to support the other. The debate had thus been relegated to the younger mage-priests, who had the mental energy to expend on such relative trivialities.

Regardless of what side one took on that particular debate, none denied that the root access to a city’s geomantic nexus a Slann provided when they were able to properly calibrate themselves to the individual peculiarities of a metropolis was invaluable, both in labor and in war. Where the allocation of a city’s energy reserves was ordinarily governed by semi-automated mystic protocols built into the Geomantic Web itself, a Slann was able to act as a local administrator, allowing a city to focus on specific areas of activity to the exclusion of others. Yagoqua, for instance, had largely automated its farming processes. Crops grew in predictable plots at regular intervals, hardly needing more than occasional oversight by skink administrators, and all were ready for harvest at the same time - thick bundles of grain and fruit that were easily picked, were resistant to spoilage, had been magically infused to make them both calorie and nutrient-rich without the need for further preparation or cooking, and were even shaped so as to easily stack on top of themselves. The labor thus saved was put towards further training the city’s legions to be ready for war. Similar processes took place in every temple-city with a Slann installed at its center, allowing each metropolis to specialize and bring its own unique strength to the lizardmen.

Beyond simply soothing administrative burdens, the Slann were also capable of using a city’s geomantic reserves in its defense. The massive stores of energy that resided within a stronghold’s temples and pylons could be used to bolster the strength of its fortifications, gift its warriors with more vigor and potency, or even be tapped into directly to cast spells of massive, campaign-altering scale. The most famous example of this phenomenon was, of course, the impervious shields of astral energy that the ancient wizards of the First Spawning had thrown up against the infinite hordes of daemons that had besieged the lizardmen’s domains during the Great Catastrophe. The power the Web provided had been sufficient to allow the Communion’s most ancient of ancients to hold such shields up for subjective centuries, only to be broken by sheer attrition or daemonic trickery and subversion of the highest order.

Many among the Slann had attempted to replicate this feat over the millennia, but all failed, even with the usage of Tepoq’xlata. Maintaining a barrier of sufficient size for any practical length of time was outside the scope of any mage-priest save for those few of the Second Generation who remained alive, and even they could not match the stamina of their elders. Where a Fifth Generation Slann could throw up a weak city-spanning barrier for a handful of minutes, Itza’s steward Zaqunda was capable of conjuring a far stronger example for a span of days, at the cost of utter concentration and such great expenditure of his magic that the feat had left him exhausted for years afterward.

Stymied by lack of power divested to them at the time of their making, the younger generations of Slann had largely turned their attentions to other avenues of study, with only a few circling back to ponder it from time to time. Largely those whose tutelage descended from the lectures of Zaqunda and Huintenuchli, these stragglers raised the point that perhaps an automated method of generating such city-encompassing shields was needed, for although the puissance and complexity of the First Spawning’s spellcraft had allowed them to outstrip their juniors almost without trying, the strain of sustaining such a shield could also only be borne by them, causing them to become singular points of failure in defense of a city. Indeed, during the Great Catastrophe, it had more often than not been the demise or incapacitation of a city’s eldest Slann that had spelled the fall of another lizardmen bastion.

To that end, the Slann who made this argument experimented with a variety of forms of magical automation and attempted to streamline the shielding spell. While they succeeded at augmenting their own defensive capabilities, they made no significant progress toward their ultimate goal, and so the matter largely lay undisturbed until Zaadi-Qarno’s discovery of emplaced void arrays that could be used to augment and stabilize ordinary spellcraft. Utilizing this technique, the required input of focus and magical energy that had previously bottlenecked more complex forms of enchantment were greatly ameliorated. It was now possible to rest a good amount of the burden of sustaining a spell’s metaphysical architecture on the spell itself, rather than having to concentrate on and reinforce each individual component of an enchantment by oneself while simultaneously continuing the standard spellcasting process. The throughput of arcane energy that a Slann could call forth at any one time was no longer so much of a limiting factor in their magic, and the potential complexity of the spells they could weave suddenly ballooned in complexity.

Topics had been infeasible at best now seemed to be well within reach, and the debate on the subject of shield-crafting flared back to life within the Communion, with even the normally-distant members of the Third Spawning deigning to give their input on the suggestions of their juniors. The shared thought-space of the Slann boiled with ideas, and schematics quickly took shape of a shield that utilized thousands of minuscule void bubbles, arrayed in self-reinforcing patterns reminiscent of the astral structure of diamonds, emplaced within the framework of the spell. These served to buoy the vast metaphysical weight of an enchantment sized for an entire city, and even to lighten it somewhat - the networks the bubbles were arrayed in resisted any efforts to displace them by spreading the shock across the whole network, which reduced the need for reinforcement contingencies to be crafted into the spell’s design. The resulting simplification rendered such shields quicker and less mentally taxing to cast, and also meant that once one had been erected, maintaining it was more a matter of sustaining its framework with an input of arcane energy rather than manually keeping each component of the spell balanced. It still took a considerable amount of concentration for a single Slann to hold up this new design of barrier on the scale of a city, but even the Fifth Generation could now magically shield entire army groups of lizardmen if they deigned to take the field, and see only a moderate reduction in their offensive arcane capabilities.

More pertinently to the line of thought that had kept this idea alive for so many centuries, the Slann also devised a method of layering a dormant matrix of the spell into the outer walls of a temple-city, kept folded in on itself and hidden within the joins of the obsinite blocks. When a city came under threat, a portion of the city’s geomantic reserves could then be fed into the spell, causing it to expand and fold out to its fullest extent, and stay that way as long as the spell matrix held up under external force and the power supply was sustained. While this did not render a temple-city proof against enemies who could teleport through the Warp itself, the simple ability to blockade the vast majority of enemy forces without any active effort from the Slann in charge of a city was certain to prove invaluable. Of course, to properly integrate a spell of such scale into an already-active network of geomantic processes would take time and energy, and though the Communion’s designs meant that the work of refurbishing the walls of their cities would take scarcely any effort on their part, it would still take time for their Kroxigor kin to complete such a task, and the work could not possibly be done before the demands of war imposed themselves. Mazdamundi’s Uax extermination ritual was soon to begin, and the Slann would need to rouse themselves from their Star Chambers and ensure that the fungal menace did not disrupt the work of their elder.

One thought, however, remained - a memory carried by the Slann Prakesh’to, who had been tutored for a time by Zaqunda on matters of defense and permanence before he fell into a centuries-long stupor. Even as the elder Slann now delved the distant stars in search of their makers, his words echoed back through time and thought, reverberating in Prakesh’to’s mind with immutable clarity. ”Itza is the only city that stands largely as it was when the Old Ones founded it,” he had rumbled. ”It holds secrets within its walls that are its alone to fathom. Only Venerable Kroak, my mentor, knew all the intricacies contained within its walls, and he has not pushed back the veil of death to inform me of any that ought to be revealed. Until that time, Itza’s mysteries shall slumber, and I will keep watch as I was bid.”

The central pyramid of Itza loomed like a mountain over the city’s skyscape, and Prakesh’to’s thoughts turned to what may lie within. Lord Kroak’s personal chambers were situated near the peak of the ziggurat, and had been sealed for millennia, guarded by an Eternity Warden so old it no longer had a name. Even Hep’hopaati, the Third Generation Slann who now took upon Itza’s guardianship, had not entered that semi-sacred space, instead conducting their duties from a lower level of the pyramid.

As Mazdamundi commenced his fell ritual and the hot breath of war gushed forth once more from the mouths of the Uax, Prakesh’to sent their servant Tik’tokrok (a Kroxigor who, it was speculated, had been touched by a sliver of Ayotzl’s essence centuries before the Mist-Swimmer’s birth, and who possessed a remarkable capacity for going unseen) on a mission to delve into the chambers of the first Slann. What, if anything, Tik’tokrok would uncover was uncertain, but Prakesh’to was driven by a certainty that something was in there to be found. The wheel of ages was turning, and the lizardmen had at last risen to approach their ancient heritage. If there was any time that Itza would divulge a measure of its ancient secrets, it was now.