Echoes of Power, Part XIV: A Second Sun
As the Curator toiled to recapture his exhibit’s souls and the Heartwood hastened to restore the Aureliana, the Hammer of Dawn wasted no time fulfilling their own agenda.
Shortly after recovering the Dawn’s Promise, the city turned to Captain Jebediah and his witchhunters to ensure that the landmark was guarded correctly and refurbished. Led by the trio of mages known as Tweak, Grain, and Lint, the soldiers formulated a plan to drain the artefact’s bulbs of corruptive sea silt and oceanic grime, as well as restore its mysterious magics through prayer and hefty infusions of elemental essence. Carried out over several months, the Hammer’s preparations involved a curious combination of manual labour, pilgrimage, and the utilisation of esoteric sorcery diagrams provided by the on-duty pyromancer guiding their every step.
As Tweak directed the city’s efforts with the landmark, Vanguard Inthirath Karthi and his trusted council joined together to devise a ritual to beseech the object’s vast powers in the name of the sun. According to those Ascendril who had examined the Dawn’s Promise, the horologe possessed an enigmatic strain of magic capable of controlling time. However, the enchantment’s very foundations made direct manipulation or travel virtually impossible, limiting its influence to a local area or other phenomena that would not risk destabilising Aetolia’s meticulously wrought timeline and its constituent fabric. Settling upon a grand ritual, the Hammer of Dawn prepared a complex series of stances and interpretative poses representative of the sun’s passage throughout the sky and set about practising their performance to ensure absolute perfection.
When the fateful day arrived, the Light’s chosen assembled in Arurer Haven – where the Dawn’s Promise had been covertly transported by Prowl, Pebble, and several other burly witchhunters.
Throughout the rest of the day, Enorian’s faithful performed a highly complex ritual to beseech the sun for its blessings and notice. Form by form, step by step, the landmark began to respond to their grand work and exultant prayers. Its brilliant, pristine sands shone with an aureate glow akin to the sun’s majestic rays, and the evocation of dawnlight and noon’s effulgent rays mustered holy light within the artefact’s chambers. As one, the entwined forces of fire and spirit joined with this pious belief, creating an enchanted amalgam that pulsed and roiled in anticipation as the city’s ceremony neared its climax. A swirling ember coalesced within the landmark long before they reached the interpretative forms for dawn, mid-morning, or noon, its size and shape defined by every spoken word and shifted stance. It swiftly moulded itself into the shape of a nascent sun, burning with all the promised glory of Sol Eos, and its silhouette seemed to shimmer for every Esmari syllable uttered in its presence.
As Enorian issued one final cry, their golden child burst free upon a column of burning, aureate energy, eager to illuminate the world with its sanctified rays. Streaks of golden fire erupted across the Vashnar Mountains, its highest peaks buckling as the Hammer’s grand pyromancy took the region into its fiery grasp. Gilded whorls swirled throughout the air over Arurer Haven, their ceaseless contortions transfiguring them into an endless, archaic script that laid the groundwork for an unfathomable incantation woven into the sky as if it were a thread through welkin silk.
Light soon chased the dark into an endless spiral that compressed upon itself, dragging the township’s position on the timeline through a rapid, pulsating flux of myriad dawns, high noons, and fiery sunsets that became a smear of heliacal hues dragged across time’s fraught canvas. A shaft of gilded brilliance pierced through the scintillating din, its core housing the darkened silhouette of a towering hourglass, and the subtle sigh of falling sand whispered throughout the realm as the Dawn’s Promise exerted its cosmic wellspring.
Soon, the landmark’s chronomacy was as a knife, its faith-honed edge excising night’s reach from that single mountain within the Vashnars.
Noontide’s fury and Rahielan’s purifying incandescence entwined together, ordered by a vast influx of Rewh’van energies drawn from some ancient place unknown. An anointed inferno swept across the mountainside, rendering it pristine, polished marble, even as the blazing might surged inward, toward the town itself. Consecrated by a collective plea to the sun and anointed by the unfettered power of Fire and Spirit, the land soon awakened to holy brilliance eternal, its rays as unyielding and majestic as the Age Promised by sacred books and the suffering of true believers.
A single spark, that which was nurtured by the loving hand of eternal daylight and the Hammer’s prayers, swiftly roared to life. It devoured the air and conscripted it to the purposes of expansion until it towered as an inferno foretold in ominous scripture, its furious breadth lit as a blazing beacon decrying injustice and tyranny. Wheresoever that nascent giant’s light fell, its heat now served as an implacable aegis, staving off blackest night and driving away those evils that lurked behind its dark veil. Fervent praise and zealous battle-hymns arose from Arurer Haven as the priesthoods celebrated the coming of the Daystar’s child: a flame to one day rival Enorian’s beloved Grand Flame, stoked to roaring fires by faith.
Bereft of its sustaining energies, the Dawn’s Promise bequeathed its constituent light to the burning beacon that now dominated the tiny prayer garden and then dimmed in turn. Its grains paused mid-flow, enraptured by the final enchantment that now wreathed Arurer Haven within eternal light. The landmark’s magic drained away, its purpose complete… for now.
As holy light washed over Arurer Haven, the darkling hexlight of theocratic purpose illuminated an oft-overlooked dig site…
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Summary: After carefully restoring the Dawn’s Promise to working order, Enorian transported it to Arurer Haven and conducted a prayer ceremony to enact grand pyromancy and chronomancy. The landmark’s energies surged outwards to empower the ritual, forging a new flame that now permanently illuminates the area with consecrated sunlight.
Penned by my hand on Tisday, the 12th of Ios, in the year 12 AC.
