During exams season, up till 12:00.. it IS half term though, I have two weeks... and its a Sunday... But I digress: made this for the Lets write a story Forum Game. Didn't post there before, just needed to let off steam and WRITE for a bit, which I should have done earlier X)
Still a stroy in itself, not at all just part of a larger whole, so fairly readable: not unintelligible stats or anything.
In the Grand Capital City of Bonnlean, low in the newbuilt, tall Northern slums, a crumbling building stands, worm eaten over and over, held up by so many struts and supports and pillars hastily constructed and intertwined by so many ivies and mosses grown old and vicious that they form a venerable yet freshly expansive woodland somehow expanding inwards anachronistically in the shining urban tenements - but more on that, the Tomewood, later.
Over the Tomewood, the university proper looms, dead and newly growing struts unwillingly reliquishing their grip on the cracked masonry, as mighty monkstone and bizarrely cogniscent enthanolimonite firmly supporting and drunkenly, twistingly decorating the eccentric and mighty Construction that is - Grunberg University Proper.
Grunberg University squirrels away as many awkward and ailing secrets as the Tomewood hugs quaint and curious volumes to its leafy bosom. The most complex of these is largely considered, by the alehouse wits and dandies that debate such matter while watching their profits from the tuber-mine slaver companies grow, is the matter of the goodly University's age. The building, and indeed institution, as of around fifty years back, quite simply did not exist. It was originally founded by one Marcus Grunberg, a man steeped in artifice alchemical and political, who recognised the absence of any major intellectual fellowship or power in the expanding and innovating nation of Bonnlean. Nature abhors a vacuum, and Marcus felt himself quite the man to oblige it. Thus, with a not inexcessive grant from their majesty, he proceeded to set up a centre for the arts and learning as quite unseen before in that country, with an attached organisation for the accquiring and renting of patents, research facilities medical and magical, and a library collection, housed in the direct centre of the university shaped in that most magical of shapes: the pentagon, the last of which attacted a curious new breed of scholar of yet unfound: the librarian.
Said Grunhelm librarians were not only well acquitted in healing, pyromancy, moon-watching and all the other numerous disciplines of the professors Grunhelm hired to teach the flocks of monied and willing students from all corners of Bonnlean, but were also expert fighters, as they were sworn to protect the paramilitary wealth of knowledge stored in the first common Bonnlean library, bought, seized or copied from private vaults. For in the first ten years of the University's existence, when it stood grand and untouched by time or leafy tendril, the library began to matter more as a military resource for the royals and people of Bonnlean, and the development of new technologies and concepts was watched over jealously by the generals and empire-builders of the court. Though forbidden from squabbling over, and thus endangering this precious resource, with indeed a swift and hefty punishment from the martial and unforgiving librarians for those that did so, these men and women soon fretted over the accquisition of designs and scrolls from the Threigan Caverns and the other floating island-states.
Soon, when the danger of being left behind on the ever-more-indispensable techno-military level was felt too great, a strange machine was commissioned by the state, for construction by the scholars under the hopeful spires of Grunhelm. Watched over by the ever-vigilant librarians, the many artificiers and academics began to make a giant machine, closer to a living being than any before it, yet stranger and further from the earthy professions of the clockmaker and mechanic than any other, blending arcane arts such as geomancy, calculus, electronomy and even metallo-thaumaturgy to this one strange purpose. For the machine was to prevent the furtherment of any nation save Bonnlean in intellectual matters, by realising any major idea or theory as it came into being, using a glowing amethyst of observation dug from a place startlingly near the geometric heart of the ring of civilised nations, surrounded by many whirring pistons, bubbling vials and computational mechanisms. The major ideas would be printed out in a secret sanctum of the library, reputedly a place where not even Grunhelm himself dared to ask to venture, then carried off to the public eye by the sombrest and tightest lipped librarians.
Upon the completion of this grand project, in around the twentieth year of the University's existence, Professor Marcus received a major boon from the King, to the tune of a month of Kingdom taxes, in return for securing the safety of Bonnlean. It was this, however, that proved to be the root of the warping of the University and the growth of the Tomewood, as it inspired Marcus to begin his most ambitious alchemical project yet: the trapping of a single moment in time.
While many artificiers had easily managed to preserve a short and repeating finite space of time, in a bottle or snow-globe as adorned the homes of the wealthy and frivolous, it was unheard of to trap the smallest possible amount. This was partially because to do so would be to get ahold of a causal yet stillborn universe, the totality of all things, with all that could come from them implied. No mere section of the world would suffice, as that would merely be a collection of objects, the transmutation of energy into which being a simple matter. To this end, Marcus obtained, at greatest expense, this time from the highest solid matter found by observation ballons above the floating islands themselves, a crystal that flowed when touched around the fingers, yet retained its shape of a perfect sphere, and could only be held up without changing shape by powerful magnets. This was believed to be because it was formed from atoms of indescribably small stature, containing as many as the rest of the universe did in total, and thus an acceptable starting point for the rendering of said universe. Through sepulchre incantations and irreversible summonings, Marcus managed to get ahold of said moment, though not without swapping much of his treasured human warmth and compassion for cold calculation and insight with the unspeakable demons of the ego, that which torments us in the late hours before the witching one, becoming what may be the greatest alchemist to have ever lived in the process.
Marcus, having proclaimed his success to all and sundry, and freely organised a national festival with the innumerable funds of his personal vault and the university treasury, then stole throught the shady courtyards and embossed balconies of Grunhelm university, to the machine itself, the thinker, the fisherman of ideas and dreams. Replacing the amethyst of observation with the sphere, now containing a complete and profound moment in time, itself implying all other moments, at the heart of the machine, he unwittingly wrought a great and terrible change in the nature of the university.
For rather than drift around the current cosmos sniffing out the really good thinkers, this semi-sentient device was left to search one and all moments in an unchanging, self contained model universe. Alone the two devices were thaumaturgical baubles, playthings.
But together, they spelled madness.
Strange scripts were vomited out of the protesting innards of the machine, as it sifted through every moment possible, as every idea was concieved, and none were, the terrible neither-nor void of possiblity imprinting itself on the circuits and beakers. Great diagrams of the minds of plankton were sketched, in the start, as the machine had not yet fully fallen to insanity, plays were written about mudflats that lived and coupled passionately on stars, designs for extracting time from emeralds were created, sonnets written in colours of ink that did not exist, while essays were printed about the creatures that inhabit the northern regions of the human conception of loneliness.
This sudden and terrible influx of ideas that should not have been into the world had an immediate effect. While many rushed to burn the scrolls, parchments tortured by their own understanding screaming with release in the flames, the passage of time and growth in the university grew warped and fickle, as courtyards crumbled in days, food spoiled in minutes and students, perhaps the only ones who really benefitted, finished essays in seconds. While it was pretended that all was well by the scholars, and the library machine was concealed permenantly, all it made destroyed, though the librarians refused to let such a unique device be smashed, conditions inside the university worsened. Twenty-five years after it was built, it seemed two hundred years old, moss, ivy and rot creeping up from it's foundations faster than some living creatures could move. A man might age 50 years, love, lose and master an ancient art there, then leave to meet a childhood friend 50 years younger than him.
This was how much of Tomewood, though the still fairly organised collection of growing struts and wood was not called that then, was built, by working men to preserve the habitation of the thinkers from decay, those felt useless and expendable to time's ravages by their employers, many collapsed shelves of books being used as foundations and struts by the ignorant and uncaring, having fallen through the floors into the cellars below, groaning sympathetically with the weight of unpermitted knowlegde the machine still churned out, nobody able to bear the madman's knowledge long enough to change the gem at the centre. Thus Tomewood grew to be filled with tomes, even as a forest grew around them, and the ecology adapted to academia in new and frightening manners.
The nadir of the crumbling university came thirty-five years after it was built, as a revolution spread among the librarians. Long despised for their attachment to the satanic writing machine, they grew bitter, and a humble yet intelligent shelf-stacker named Silas Mariner asked why they should not save some of the less despicable volumes from the flames, as knowledge coming from every and no portion of the universe might prove useful in the speedy development of wondrous and arcane artifacts. When this was made known, however, the librarians, soon labelled as "Mariner's Heretics" were forced to take refuge in the barricaded library, where their martial prowess and superior knowledge made them impossible to dislodge.
These revolutionaries soon began to read the less instantly repulsive scrolls, maybe one in every thousand made, and to upon occassion carry out the ideas therein. This was a frustrating and dangerous process, and many works the schizophrenic machine produced were now fully unintelligible, while certain others sent the librarians that read them mad, one in fact exploding. However, a goodly quantity of manaical weapons, trinkets, devices and arts were recovered from the void of madness and saved by these Mariner's Heretics, with one slipping out every so often to secure the profane knowledge in the world beyond. Finally, with their numbers falling slower and slower as they came to know the machine, and their power growing as their artifacts of madness were produced, Marcus himself, the greatest of all alchemists, was called upon to take action. Stepping though now archaic-seeming lanes over crumbled bits of masonry and thick Poppyfield vines, he raised his arms as he came to the sealed library. Drawing power from the two alchemical marvels working as one that he had wrought, exposing his mind to that pathological energy, he performed an act of brutal telekinesis, increasing gravity massively with the power of the objects, and driving the library, killing any unescaped Heretics, deep into the reverberating heart of Tomewood and the ground beneath, lifting most of the temporal effects of the device from the library, and weakening but not destroying it. He then retired to the highest room of Grunhelm, far from his monstrosities as he could get, and has not been seen since in public.
Grunhelm has a new, less puissant, saner chancellor now, and droves of students still enter and leave it. For fifteen years it has stood untoubled... yet Tomewood, driven upward by the malignant energy of the Allwriter of Bonnlean, still waits hungrily beneath it, while Mariner's heretics and their otherworldly artifacts lie scattered and hidden throughout the cosmos.
Wow. I'm editing my posts really carefully now... must just be in that mindset.
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Topic: Random Things you drew/shopped/made/etc. (Read 1356649 times)