The Storm King

Chapter 663: Tourist II

“Welcome! Welcome!” one of the people waiting for Leon’s group outside of the museum shouted exuberantly.

The woman who shouted stood at the front of the group, exuded a fourth-tier aura, and was dressed quite finely. She was an older woman, with a gracefully lined face, long silver hair, and a pair of deep brown eyes that promised nothing but warmth and cheer. Given the way the other people stood behind her, respectfully maintaining their silence, Leon assumed that this woman was the person in charge of this group, at least, if not the museum as a whole, despite several others behind her being more powerful.

Elise smiled and waved, returning the woman’s welcome, while Valeria politely nodded, and Maia pointed ignored her. Leon, after dismounting Anzu, pried his attention away from the ruins and walked forward, pausing a moment to let Elise take his arm as she got out of the carriage, and made his own greetings.

Once that formality was over, the woman practically jumped toward them in her eagerness to give both Leon and Elise a friendly hug. Despite her seeming over eagerness, Leon noted that she just smiled and nodded at Valeria instead of trying to give her a hug, too, and barely acknowledged Maia—perhaps picking up on both of their desires to not be greeted in this way, though not Leon’s, oddly enough.

“It’s so wonderful to have all of you here!” the woman gushed with the widest and most genuine smile on her face that Leon had ever seen. “My name is Claudia, and I’ll be giving you the tour today!”

Claudia’s smile grew wider somehow, and she beamed her joy to Elise.

“And I’m looking forward to showing it off!” she responded. “This has been my life’s work, and having people like all of you come around to see it just… well, it absolutely makes my day! No! It makes my entire month!”

Claudia continued to rave about how happy she was they were there, and Elise continued to politely engage the enthusiastic woman in conversation. Leon remained a little quieter, content to simply let Elise talk, at least until they got into the ruins themselves. However, he listened closely, and learned that while Claudia wasn’t the person in charge of the museum, she was still their foremost expert on the ruins, and the civilization they belonged to.

That certainly got Leon’s attention, but before Claudia could go into greater detail, bringing up her position seemed to remind her that she hadn’t introduced the men and women behind her. Those gathered were more archaeologists and museum administrators who’d gathered for the arrival of Leon’s group—and, as he quickly found out, another group of important tourists who were due to arrive soon.

About fifteen minutes after Leon and his group arrived, another group of carriages floated in, riding a cushion of air that kept them about a foot off the ground. Surrounding the carriages were armored women on horseback, nearly all of whom Leon recognized. It seemed they were going to be joined by Princess Cristina.

The Princess exited her carriage with all the dignity and grace that her station demanded, and she warmly smiled at everyone as she stepped out onto the ground. However, her smile didn’t truly reach her eyes until her gaze fell upon Valeria, and ignoring everyone else, Cristina went to greet the silver-haired woman first.

What followed was another round of enthusiastic introductions by Claudia, and only after nearly half an hour spent milling about the gatehouse were they finally let into the ruins.

“Oh, I’m just so excited to show all of you around!” Claudia enthused as the gatehouse was opened.

“And we’re excited to see it!” Elise repeated from earlier. “How old did you say this ruins were, again?”

“We’re not entirely sure,” Claudia admitted, her cheery demeanor dimming slightly for just a moment. “However, we know that they’re at least fifty-thousand years old, for they were mentioned in some of our oldest texts!”

“Fifty thousand years?” Cristina murmured. “That’s incredible! It’s hard to imagine something lasting that long, even with magic!”

“It’s truly something, isn’t it?” Claudia agreed. “The city that was built on this spot back then was extraordinarily advanced. Their command over magic was at the very least on par with what we have today, if not greater, but unfortunately, very little of it remains. The site around the gatehouse that we’ve preserved only stands today because of our preservation efforts. We can only guess as to the enchantments that existed here back when their original inhabitants first built this place…”

Leon heard Nestor snort from within his soul realm. The dead man had set aside his work to watch with Leon as Claudia explained what she knew of the old Clan. Obviously, Leon knew that he could just ask Nestor about the specifics, but this was a golden opportunity to learn what modern opinions about the Thunderbird Clan were.

[These buildings were only lightly enchanted, it makes sense that they have no trace of magic left,] the dead man said.

Leon glanced around as they walked past the gatehouse. The buildings immediately to his right and left were beautiful, but rather small. Hardly the monolithic structures that he might’ve expected, especially after knowing what the Thunderbird Clan could build with the Cradle, Nestor’s lab, and Xaphan’s prison.

[What were these buildings for?] Leon asked. [I would’ve expected that the capital of even a vassal Clan would have the wherewithal to have many structural and comfort enchantments made standard…]

[That’s true, but such regulations were only for certain groups,] Nestor replied. [Do you see all the gold paint that these buildings have?]

Leon slightly nodded.

[When they were inhabited, these buildings would’ve also been pained with one long red stripe, parallel to the ground and about four feet up the wall. It would’ve identified these buildings as what they were: slave housing.]

Leon immediately grimaced in disgust. [The housing for the natives of this plane, am I right?]

[Yes,] Nestor replied without a shred of remorse or embarrassment.

“Now,” Claudia loudly said as their entire entourage filed past the gatehouse, “to your right and left, you’ll see homes. We can’t say for certain, but we believe that the average citizen would’ve resided in places like these. While they seem small, we can extrapolate from the magical remnants found in other similar ruins that those people who lived here would’ve still been quite comfortable.”

“How many would’ve lived in these places?” Cristina asked as her head practically spun around, her eyes wide as she took everything in.

“In these buildings, we believe that only one or two people at most would’ve lived in them,” Claudia said.

[More like half a dozen or more…] Nestor whispered.

“As for the city itself,” Claudia continued, “our estimates fall anywhere from a quarter million to half a million.”

“How are these estimates made?” Cristina asked as she turned toward the archaeologists.

“Mostly by measuring the footprint of the old city as best we can, making educated guesses as to where the residential neighborhoods lay, digging through any bits of garbage that may miraculously still be around, things like that,” Claudia replied. “Unfortunately, though, we know that our estimates are probably far off. Ancon has never been fully abandoned, but it has experienced long periods of depopulation. When people moved back in, oftentimes they would demolish the old, dilapidated buildings that had been left behind and build upon their foundations, and sometimes those buildings would’ve collapsed or been buried, leaving the new residents to build on top of them.”

“Surely there’d still be some remains even if those buildings were demolished?” Cristina asked. “They don’t destroy all the way down to the foundations, do they?”

“No, they don’t,” Claudia admitted, and for the first time, Leon saw her smile truly slip a bit. It was back in but a moment, but when Claudia continued, he detected a few notes of bitterness in her tone. “It’s unfortunate, but we don’t often get licenses or funding to conduct digs in inhabited places of the city. I’m sure that we’d find quite a bit even if were to demolish just a few city blocks and start digging, but…”

“No one in charge thinks that’s worth doing?” Cristina asked.

Claudia nodded sadly. “What we have here is essentially all that we have to work with. What we might be able to learn about the past inhabitants of this city isn’t worth the minor inconveniences to the people who live here—or so many government suits like to claim.”

“That’s too bad…” Cristina commiserated.

“Oh! It truly is!” Claudia loudly and rather dramatically bemoaned. “There’s so much we could learn about those who came before us, so much that they could illuminate for us, but our short-sighted politicians simply won’t allow us to find out! Ugh, what lost wisdom might be lost to us because of that decision? Our path to utopia could lie beneath our own feet, and we’re forbidden from finding out!”

Leon heard Nestor quietly cackle a few times, and say, [I appreciate this woman’s enthusiasm for the old Clan, but I don’t think she’d appreciate what she would find. Already, the things she’s shown awareness of would fit inside of a thimble.]

[Do you think I ought to let you out so you can educate her?] Leon asked, though not a trace of seriousness could be heard in his voice.

[Heh, that would be fun, wouldn’t it?] Nestor said. [If I thought you were actually willing to do so, I might’ve considered it.]

“Oh, forgive me,” Claudia said in embarrassment as Nestor was talking. She gave Cristina an extremely apologetic look and continued, “This is my life’s work, my passion. I can get a little… worked up over it…”

“Don’t think anything of it,” Cristina replied with a huge smile on her face. “I, for one, share your enthusiasm for these things. To see new things and have new experiences is what I crave, and to see how other people lived, even if they’re long dead, is part of that.”

“Wonderful,” Claudia responded, switching back into her cheery demeanor with seeming ease. “Anyway, we ought to look around, shouldn’t we?”

For the next few minutes, Claudia showed them the inside of these houses and explained what little they knew about them. It had been so long since they’d been inhabited, after all, that there wasn’t much evidence left behind of how those who lived here spent their days. Leon had Nestor to consult, but the dead man could only give him some surface-level details; he’d never paid too much attention to how slaves lived, so he couldn’t fill in the more mundane bits of how they lived.

He did share that the slaves who lived in these small homes were most likely unskilled laborers, used when even the Thunderbird Clan’s legions of golems were insufficient for the work that had to be done.

That left Leon with the question of where the skilled laborers went, and Nestor shared that they were given better accommodations, but only the most valuable natives had been given the legal status of freemen.

Only those of the Thunderbird Clan, its vassals, and its direct followers were citizens.

“… and unfortunately, we can’t say much more than that,” Claudia finished as she led them out of the small house she’d shown them through, echoing Nestor from only a moment before. “Are there any questions so far?”

Cristina was the first, enthusiastically replying, “Yes! Do we know why Ancon was depopulated?”

“It’s lost many citizens several times in its history,” Claudia explained. “There was a devastating plague about twelve thousand years ago that healing magic couldn’t do much to aid, and there have been a few wars and other armed conflicts that have left sizable parts of the city abandoned.”

“But what about the one that happened to the people who built all of this?” Cristina asked.

Cristina almost responded immediately, but Leon beat her to the punch. He asked with a slightly strained voice, “What are those myths, then?” As he spoke, he even felt Nestor’s attention sharpen; the dead man was just as interested in this as he was.

But instead of answering right away, Claudia just smiled. “We were going to work our way over there later in the tour, but I don’t see why we can’t just skip to it now…”

She led them down the long, perfectly-formed street. Much like the civil engineering present in the Bull Kingdom, the street appeared to Leon to be one solid block of stone, likely melted and shaped with fire and earth magic. It wasn’t particularly fancy, but Leon wasn’t expecting much from the areas where slaves were quartered.

Things changed as they proceeded a few blocks down, though. They approached the largest preserved building, just on the edge of the maintained area; beyond the building was a large expanse of grass, broken up by a few clumps of trees and some lonely piles of broken marble.

The building itself was quite familiar to Leon, at least in architecture. It was the only preserved building taller than four stories, though not by much. Its front façade was beautiful, being gleaming white marble interspersed with gold covering enchanted concrete. Columns of black granite were pressed into the building’s face, forming a blind arcade that encircled the entire building, joining a pair of stoa on either side of the building’s rectangular footprint—while the stoa were covered by a gently sloping roof, most of the rest of the building was open to the sky. The space on the façade between each columns was taken up by incredibly detailed and well-preserved marble reliefs depicting what seemed to be legendary events of all sorts. Great battles, for the most part.

Leon’s eyes were drawn to the massive relief above the enormous, two-story-tall double doors, though. There, he saw perched above the door frame, a life-sized carving of the Thunderbird, her plumage covered in stylized lightning. However, her head was missing.

With a scowl, Leon let his eyes wander a bit, and he saw the Thunderbird was depicted numerous times in the reliefs, but each and every one had been decapitated—what was now clear to be deliberate defacement.

But his instinctive anger was lessened greatly when he heard Nestor mutter, [Savages.]

With a deep breath, he calmed himself down. He felt insulted by the defacement of this building, but he didn’t like Nestor’s response. He’d been called savage enough times that he hardly even blinked when he heard it, but hearing it applied to people who’d been fighting off extraplanar conquerors—even if those conquerors had been his own Ancestors—had him pausing to consider the situation.

Nestor scoffed, but before he could start an argument with Leon, Claudia began to speak.

“This appeared to be a library or a place of some other similar function,” she explained after giving everyone time to take in the sight. “These reliefs we believe show the conquest that the civilization who built these ruins conducted. By all the evidence we’ve managed to gather, they managed to unite all the human territory on this plane under their banner—or at least got so close to doing so that they’d effectively done so, even if there were a few pockets of resistance remaining.”

“That doesn’t even seem possible!” Asiya added just beside her. “Not by humans, at least.”

“Maybe something divine, then?” Valeria whispered as she nonchalantly slid in to Leon’s left and casually wrapped one of her arms around his. Leon glanced at her and was met with her glittering sapphire eyes staring back at him for a moment before turning back to the façade.

“It’s certainly a feat that’s never been repeated,” Claudia said. “Various powers have waxed and waned, but none have come even slightly close to the strength of this civilization—if you notice the bird figure covered in lightning above the door, you’ll also notice that same being represented in art all over the ruins that these people left behind. As a result, we’ve taken to calling them the Storm Bird people. We can’t say much of their own history, especially since so many records have been lost. But there’s enough evidence that we’ve been able to piece together at least a partial narrative.

“As far as we can tell, these Storm Bird people conquered vast swathes of the plane and conducted great building projects all across their Empire. However, their methods of ruling were overbearing, and the peoples they conquered rose in rebellion. They were too many to handle, resources were stretched thin, and this great Empire collapsed only a century or two after its founding. Given the brutality that we can see depicted on these reliefs, I think we can see why the conquered peoples wanted to rise up…”

She proceeded to point out several places where the ‘Storm Bird’ people violently subjugated Aeternan natives, enslaving, slaughtering, and dominating. They lorded over the natives, showing any who might pass by exactly where their place was: beneath their boot.

For the most part, Nestor remained quiet, but occasionally giving a few words concurring with some of the larger elements of Claudia’s narration, plus a few snide remarks about how inaccurate the smaller details were.

“It’s still fascinating,” Elise remarked as she took Leon’s other arm. “For all their power, so little of them remain with us that we barely know who or what they were.”

Valeria added, “These people built so much and with such grandeur, but they did so in a way that was completely unsustainable.”

“Precisely,” Claudia sadly agreed, but she seemed to be missing what Valeria and Elise were getting at. When Leon glanced to either side of him, though, he found both of his lovers giving him the occasional complex look.

He had to admit that he was feeling rather complex about all of this, too. But as he contemplated what had been revealed, his antipathy and disgust at his Ancestors’ heavy-handed methods aside, he started to wonder about something else that Claudia had mentioned on several occasions.