Connects to: 00.06, 09.09, 10.09, 23.23 and the Grey Mountains.
Overview
Nestled in the walls of a crevasse in a wide valley surrounded by the steep mountains known as the Devil’s Fingers, there abides a lost pueblo-like city that seems to stretch for miles deep into the bedrock.
The buildings are incredibly ancient, but seem mostly untouched by time. Runic script, like that adorning the haunted statue (10.09) can be found scrawled across doorways of many of the buildings. The remains of alabaster statues can be found throughout the city, and the wind through the deserted streets seem to sometimes sound like the mournful dirge of a lady singer singing in an unknown tongue.
In some of the more elaborate pueblos, murals depict distorted images of long-limbed humanoids performing various magical rituals over everyday activities. Of note, in what seems to be some sort of throne room a mural shows the odd humanoids sculpting human figures from clay. Likewise, spread throughout the city are perfect piles of clay that seem to indicate that a clay golem once stood at the spot. At the very least, the piles radiate a faint magical signature.
However, those who linger long in the city-state sometimes catch a glimpse of something moving in the shadows, or the glimmer of yellow eyes in the dark alleys of the city. While crumbling structures have taken a few lives of those who have stumbled on the city, something intelligent has surely taken the lives of other visitors in an attempt to keep the city-state’s existence secret.
In the Forgotten City-State statues are not the only thing made out of white alabaster. At the very heart of the city is a great bone-white fountain from which, amazingly enough, still pours four descending cascades of water. Those who have drunk of it say that it is salty and brings forth memories of their greatest guilts and failings, much like the great western ocean (00.06 and points west). But the ocean lies far to the west, it couldn’t possibly be the same water, could it?
The reason that the ancient buildings of the Forgotten City-State are so strangely untouched by the passing of centuries is the strength of the mortar that was used to fortify the clay of its pueblos: the bodies of the elemental creatures known as sandlings. No known substance makes stronger mortar, but not even it can last forever and as the buildings begin to crumble the sandlings are being released one by one.
When the winds blow through the city, drifts of sand claw at the buildings and the tens of thousands of sandlings still trapped in its mortar wake and struggle to be free.
The old masters who collected and imprisoned the sandlings are gone now but they once gathered them from lands far to the south where they lay in a desert that had once been a city old beyond even the imaginings of elves. It was built long ago when the aboleths whose fossilized bones can be found in the Grey Mountains yet swam. It was the capital of a vast empire and its glass tower of living iridescent glass soared higher than any balloon of the Shuttered City. For reasons that no longer matter, this ancient empire fell and the towers fell with it, lying across the desert like the spears of a vanquished army. Slowly, slowly, in the days in which the first dragons broke the world like an egg with their birth, the towers eroded away into swirling sand. But some of the sand still remembered what it had once been and some of the power of its creators yet remained, so the builders of the Forgotten City-State gathered it to reinforce the clay of their homes. Only the sandlings remember what they had once been and they lash out in rage that for every memory of the shining towers they retain, ten thousand has been robbed from them by the hand of time.
Connections
- The nearby desert gnomes (23.23) make pilgrimages to the fountain here.
- The builders of the city once drew elementals from the sea to beautify their realm.
Hooks
- Who built the city and where did they go?
- Are the piles of clay the remains of golems or perhaps the “remains” of the first humans? What happened to them?
- What is the significance of the “haunted” alabaster statues and what relation do they have to the statue at 10.09?
- What is salt water doing in a city that lies far from the coast (note: the Keenng Sea which lies to the east of here is a freshwater sea)?
- What will the sandlings do are more of them are freed?
- Is there any way to learn of the memories of the sandlings? They are not intelligent as human reckon such things, but could they yet retain knowledge of the lost empire of the south?
