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- Yazhn Ravhi, the Hierophant
Persistant Towers On The Beast
by Aurelius · Aug 05, 2026 · view history →
Included are several pictures taken of the primary tower from the outside and the surrounding area, as well as the surrounding area from Aurelius’ current perspective, show against the old photos of it found.
Then several more of the inside of the tower, the machine that took up most of its space, and the part samples of whatever it built once upon a time.
Then a few more in depth memories.
ꙮ One of the towers is just a total dud; it was picked over probably generations ago. The one next to it, though? That one had an absurdly complex mechanism locking one of its central doors that only Annarr managed to find the right counterplay to, so that tower was his stomping grounds.
ꙮ It looks like a place where things were built, once. Dominating the space is the wrecked hulk of what was once– it’s difficult to say. Every machine the Beast has is part of something larger - a prime mover, water, steam, or muscle - and every surface bears witness to how it was made: file marks, scraping, casting flash, chatter. The machine in this room is smooth, sleek, and was made to make smooth things; there are unfinished machined parts on a metal shelf that someone – possibly Annarr, or maybe he found them this way – carefully categorized, impossibly intricate, with curves and crenelations even Zaedulf would have struggled to accomplish at scale, rather than bespoke and with the use of gnosis. Core components of it have long since melted together under unimaginable heat and strain, it’s far beyond repair - but you know that this once was a shrine to competent craftsmanship.
inspects the machine for a while, until determining that’s it’s right and proper fucked, then moves over to look at the parts it was producing to look at them in a bit more detail. Weapon work… probably not, maybe for some kind of vehicle or another machine?
ꙮ Infrastructure, it looks like. A bunch of very complicated elaborate mechanisms that you can’t really guess at the purpose of, and in fact, in some handwriting that bears an alarming resemblance to your own, there’s a page full of notes and hypotheses and finally a big, final, scrawled “man, what the fuck?” taking up the bottom fourth to a third of the page. But they look identical - whatever it was, someone needed a whole bunch of ‘em.
glances around the room - does the room take up the entirety of the structure, or were parts of it sectioned off behind doors or floors?
ꙮ This room takes up most of this floor, but not all of it, and specifically there’s a door off to the side that’s being held open with one of the complicated elaborate mechanisms now that whoever - almost certainly Annarr - got it open in the first place. An ignoble purpose for such a mechanism, but at least it found a purpose in the end?
ꙮ It’s– not living quarters, exactly, but there’s a shitty little bed in a corner of the space, so clearly he must have spent some time here. There’s a desk along one wall, with a bunch more of his papers in neat, organised little piles on it. On the walls, there’s a bunch of pictures, in silvered tones – faded, and then clearly processed by some chemical means to bring their image forward again, somehow. The process was not without loss of detail - but a number of the pictures are of what must have been the tower complex, before whatever befell it befell it, gleaming and bright, new-made and proud. There are many others, in the near distance, in the image – and definitely no ruins where those others would be, relative to these towers, now.
ꙮ On the desk is a black sphere with little irregular lines carved into it, curves and right-angles.
: “Wait, pictures? Have we seen anything implying they have photography here? I feel like that would have come up.”
ꙮ They don’t look like alarmingly-detailed, aged beyond belief, and then chemically blurred in the process of restoration sketches, at any rate. And it’s not something you’ve seen on the Beast in the modern day, no.
glances around the room again, then move over towards the desk and runs a hand underneath it.
ꙮ Yeah, it’s right there where you expected it to be. There’s a satisfying ‘click’ and then a false bottom drops out of the surface, and slides out; there’s a bunch of thin stacked black metal plates with silvered etchings.
pulls them out of the hutch, before spreading them out on top of the table.
ꙮ Glancing at the plates, you realise that if you put them together the right way, it’s an elaborately detailed, if definitely incomplete, map of the Deepforge and its major entrances - it’s labyrinthine beyond imagining, but Annarr managed to chart a couple very plausibly-safe paths from the surface to– well, the parts where the map stops, where the various charted paths converge. Some sort of central area, labeled ‘???’ and “there’s more to explore, here”.
: “So, okay. Air tight lock box surrounded by paper degraded past the point of functionality that’s… interesting. Wonder why a visual record of this place was so important. Were they making more than just fancy pipes? … Obviously they were making more than just fancy pipes, there was only one machine.”
: “Oh the papers were inside too - fuck that’s old.”
: “Must have been right after the split, or maybe even presundering… would that even make sense? … Maybe, Samudra had the city under the ice… huh.”
taps at the side of his cheek in thought, then nods to himself and glances around the room. He scoops up the map first, then what’s left of the notes, then the pictures, before picking the fiend up and stowing everything way. He then takes another look around the room, then the larger area and others floors, to make sure nothing else interesting way hiding away.
ꙮ Doesn’t seem like it.
takes a couple samples of whatever it was the machine was built to make on the way back out of the tower, making sure to lock up behind him, then makes for the train station. On the ride back to Queenstown, he spends some time carefully analyzing the handwriting left on the notes he found for a while, before eventually pulling out some of the Beast’s low quality paper and penning a note to Midra. This letter eventually goes into a sealed envelope, backdated roughly four months. Once this train arrives, he immediately makes for the post office to deliver the letter, then makes for Zaedulf’s workshop. Here, the fiend containing the memory of Annarr is left along with a note about how one might go around resupplying it with power, before he leaves to regroup with the rest of his Clan.