Kile of Zumada

Prologue - The Top of the Mountain

It had taken her three days to reach the summit. It always surprised her how much more difficult it was to travel over the mountains then under them. She knew it would take longer, of course, but a few hours worth of walking underground would take a day when you through in all the climbing, the winding paths, and detours. All of that had complicated her ascent, but she had finally made it to the Great Ruins. The scholars said this was the only one of the Architect's runes to not have been completely destroyed, instead left to the ravages of time.

8,000 years and while the buildings had crumbled, it was clear that a city was once here. Even with the ravages of the top of this mountain peak, the buildings more or less stood, though whatever function they might have served was long lost to time. She reminded herself they were almost certainly older - 8,000 years ago was when they were abandoned, but no one knew for sure when the Architects first arrived. All they knew was that they had left behind.

Good things, bad things. Callan thought it was interesting. The Architects were clearly a very powerful species, they had upturned the entire planet, they had built these vast and amazing cities that modern people couldn't even understand, and they had built the Spires.

Yes, she thought. The greatest achievement of the Architects by far was those Spires. Each one a generator of its own unique magic, 15,000 feet into the air. And they had built eight of the things. She suspected they needed all eight for any one of them to work, but each one on its own was a masterpiece of engineering. Tall as they were, they went even deeper into the ground, and yet remained perfectly stable under their own weight and had remained so for those 8,000 years they'd been left unattended. They were also probably filled with whatever arcane secrets made them work, but only the Architects knew for sure what those were. Perhaps the strange blue glowing lines on them were enough?

She could see the top of the Air Spire from here, even though it was 120 kilometers away. She knew she'd probably be able to see the Chaos Spire as well, if the Spine Mountains weren't in the way. She was about equidistant from the both of them.

The Chaos Spire. That was hers. Each one behaved differently, and the Chaos Spire in particular was known to be the only one who chose its candidates. She remembered waking up one morning as a teenager, and finding the Mark of Chaos over her heart. She decided that her world could be left behind, and she bonded with the tower. The actual process was simple - once the tower chose you, touch your hand to the 50 foot by 50 foot obelisk in just the right place and you'd feel the world around you expand and stretch while your own spilled out into it. Callan remembered it being an indescribably strange sensation, and after 12 years she still wasn't sure if she enjoyed it or found it excruciating.

Either way, it has changed her life. She was originally planning to be a miner, digging out the rare materials her homeland was known for. But now that she was Chaosbound, she decided it was a gift. She could bend the world with her mind, and she insisted that the shape it take be better than how she found it.

The Architects had made this all by themselves. It should have taken lifetimes of lifetimes, an immense undertaking. But evidence had suggested otherwise. The entirety of a civilization, built in a single generation.

And it fell to pieces just as quickly.

No one was sure what the GreatCataclysm was. The only thing they knew for sure is whatever awful thing had happened had touched every part of their world. Flooding, fires, earthquakes, droughts. Evidence for all of them, sometimes in the same place, dotted the record. One of her scholar friends had told her it was like gazing into the face of a monstrous shadow. It was obvious something terrible lurked there, but there was no way to know, and no one had any lights and probably wouldn't for a long time. Maybe not ever.

Whatever happened, it had killed or scared off every Architect, leaving the world to the Ludians.

Perhaps that was the fate of civilization as a whole. To grow, to shine, and then to burn. Or maybe that was her Chaos Magic talking.

It was a commonly held belief that Bound started to act a certain way because they were Bound to a tower, but the reverse was actually true. The Spires choose people who acted a certain way. Though she had to admit, ever since she became the Exemplar of Chaos, she had felt those thoughts creeping into her head more.

She stepped down the hollow streets, looking over the trash of a once mighty empire. Just as each Spire had its own kind of person it'd take, the person it chose to be its best and brightest, its most powerful user, the Exemplar was unique. For the Chaos Spire, it was more or less random every other year or so.

But it had chosen her. Her! Of all people! This was her chance to make a great change for the future. That's what had brought her here. The question that had always nagged her since her daughter went with the Naturebound. Her eyes looked over the empty remnants of the last vestige of the Architects.

The answers to the future could often be found in the remnants of the past. What caused the Architects to fall? That's why she had come all this way. She knew she wasn't smart enough to learn anything the Scholars hadn't, but just being here filled her with a sense of familiarity. She took her gloved hand and dug it into the snow, brushing away some of it from a series of symbols whose meaning had long been forgotten.

What would it take, she wondered, to make sure the people of Ludia - her Mountain Confederates, the Anarchs, the Shenzik, the Evergreen, the Djezzi, the Tenmen, the Artificial City-State, the Rwalians and even the Imperials - survived their own Great Cataclysm when it came?