Appendix • Ancient Murals

While traversing the ruins beneath Creuser, the group comes to a sealed gate built in the same hexagonal architecture of this place. Upon breaking the first seal, the hexagonal bricks reform themselves into a number of murals laid out at the points of a hexagon of golden metal, that depict six seemingly sequential scenes in a loop.

## Transcript

The first mural, at the very centre top of the door, is a familiar one. You see a circular depiction of a strange landscape: towering rock formations of stacked, circular pillars, waterfalls pouring between the gaps, and a city of spires in the backdrop, with architecture akin to the ruins you've been traversing, hanging unchained in the sky. Around it, congregating towards it, are thousands of miniscule figures flying through the sky. Birds you think at first, but closer inspection shows them to be more vaguely humanoid shapes, with multitudes of pairs of wings.

Down and to its right, the second mural shows the same sight, a city of spires, but now zoomed in and in focus. The winged figures gather instead towards a central figure, much larger than the rest, hovering in the air with an array of wings spread around it. At its feet, a figure of similar size to it falls away, with what seems to be a lance or a spear or some nature of weapon through its chest, wings wrapped around it, tumbling away, clearly having been defeated and cast down by the figure that hangs triumphant above it in the air.

Right below the previous mural, the third is much more subdued. It shows only two figures. One larger, lance through its chest, lying broken and motionless, chains around its hands and legs binding it to the ground, where a swathe of flowers seems to be sprouting around it, and nearby, one hand reaching tentatively out, a second, smaller, feminine figure with wings spread behind her, and a veil half-formed about her head and shoulders.

Down and to the left, at the centre bottom of the door, the fourth mural is once again grand. It shows war, a sweeping conflict, two armies of those same winged figures, clashing in the sky. On the right, under the triumphant grandeur of the large figure that was shown in the second mural, an unstoppable tide of spears, and on the left, being swept away, slaughtered, and defeated, a much lesser number of winged figures, all with veils over their heads and shoulders. Further to the left, escaping into the sky, that same feminine figure from the previous mural, leading a small band of survivors away towards the stars.

Up now, and to the left, the fifth mural shows a different sight, a landscape of familiar trees and mountains, beneath two suns. And descending beneath those two circles in the sky, a group of winged figures, all veiled, led by that same feminine figure, who is shown here with arms spread, held low, akin to the statues and murals you’ve seen elsewhere, as though gesturing to this new world. A new start.

And finally, above the previous mural, down and to the left from the first one, the sixth mural shows the beginnings of a new city, the bases of spires that would rise to touch the sky, winged figures in veils working together, to build something new, something greater. And rising from the construction, three obelisks, spread equally apart, from which rise beams of light that form a bubble, a sphere, that encircles the world, shielding it from the stars beyond and what they might hold.