Breathing Orrery

"It is always possible the records are incomplete."

- Proverb of the Azurejays, Scholar-Knights of San Sylvester

This article is incomplete and will require additional work.

The Breathing Orrery is the contemporary name of a Pre-Baghar Culture ruin that was constructed deep beneath Star Rock and Green Knoll, in what is now the Lordless Lands of Western Wisteria. Knowledge of its exact location and the mechanism for accessing the dungeon was lost to Wisterian scholarship, and even knowledge of its existence was lost outside of the city of Baghar, though the record of the Archives of Baghar is thin at best and it is probable that only a few curious Archivists are aware of its existence. Where rumours of the Orrery itself existed, the location of it is often misattributed to Baghar itself or sometimes to Herroka, though of course the inhabited nature of those cities meant such rumours were always considered wrong. In the limited surviving records, the structure is usually called the Child of Heaven.

Contents

The dungeon proper is entirely contained underground, with any surface signs of its position having been long abandoned, though we know from the Baghar Testiments that there used to be designated waystones or milestone markers leading to the location of its entrance in what is known now as the Groaning Cave. This small cave near Green Knoll is and was considered a profane location by the Orcish Nation and was usually avoided. Though rumoured to be haunted, it was mostly just abandoned, though the airflow of the breathing orrery through fissures in the earth in nearby chambers of the cave system was responsible for the eponymous groaning. When Green Knoll was annexed by Sudmarch, Baron Greenknoll assigned a small detachment of his forces to guard the entrance to the cave and called for clerical reinforcements to examine the cave for evidence of this profanity.

The back wall of this cave relative to the entrance was actually formed of a weak earthslide and, once cleared, revealed a passageway that lead to the Starry Gate.

The Throat of Stars

Considered the upper level of the dungeon, the Throat of Stars is the collective name for a series of chambers beginning at the Starry Gate and progressing through the Bronchial Maze, the chasm known as the Terran Gizzard, and the Ventral Lift. Many of these areas displayed the monolithic basalt construction typical of the Pre-Baghar Culture.

Starry Gate

The Starry Gate marks the threshold of the dungeon proper, and consisted of a large, circular stone seal which was rolled into place along a track just behind a stone wall, and then pushed foward, in such a way as to make the disk appear inlaid among the broader stone wall. By the time of the dungeon's rediscovery, the external means to control this gate (if there ever was one) had been lost, and the seal was quite good - airflow into the dungeon was by means of other passages entirely and was largely self-contained. An internal mechanism permitted the operator to open the gate more or less at will. The gate itself showed no graven features by 16c ASM, having been worn away by the ravages of time if they were ever present, though the seam between the wall and the gate itself was clearly visible.

The gateway took its name from its inner side, which was studded with white gems of hasty cut, perhaps a centimetre in diameter, which were inlayed inextricably into the stone surface and glowed faintly with starlight. Vents along either side of the chamber this opened into - a passage leading down to the Bronchial Maze, provided airflow to the unreachable Breathing Chambers supposed to exist by later scholars.

Bronchial Maze

The Bronchial Maze was a large chamber just down the sloping passage from the Starry Gate which apparently served as a sort of air intake and exhaust manifold for the structure, as part of its broader system of ventilation. Angled floor-to-ceiling columns along the central passage acted as baffles, helping to direct airflow down side-corridors, which themselves were louvred or ducted off into smaller and smaller branches, each hosting fine ducts through which air was routinely taken in or expelled.

By the time of the broader and full explanation of this chamber, the mechanism controlling this airflow had ceased to function. Later scholars working from observation without the benefit of access to the Archives of Baghar concluded that this chamber's architecture would have been responsible for the groaning that had given the Groaning Cave its name, and that this had likely come about as the natural wear and tear of the structure over time caused most if not all of these passageways to partially or completely collapse, impeding the airflow. This is corroborated by the Archives themselves, which contain an obscure reference to the Bronchial Maze as "a place with hintings of the Truest Hymnal", implying that perhaps originally the affect was more musical.

Unintuitively for those entering the chamber for the first time, it is actually possible to navigate up and down the main passage way directly by weaving around the baffles. For inexperienced dungeoneers the principal peril of the maze is only to be found when entering the side-passages and navigating down them, where it is possible to become lost among the branching paths, especially if no light source is available.

Terran Gizzard

The Terran Gizzard is a section just behind (or downward) of the Bronchial Maze, where a 20-foot diameter pit some 100 feet deep is crossed by a narrow passageway, which over time has become slick with algae and lacks appropriate guard rails or other facility to pass it safely. Exploration of the bottom of the pit affected by those with the benefit of magical levitation revealed that the pit's bottom funnels down conically until it opens onto a yard-wide shaft straight down for an indeterminate distance. It is believed that this passage feeds directly down into the Sump, as part of an effort to prevent the structure overall from becoming innundated.

Ventral Lift

The Ventral Lift is effectively one enormous chamber extending deep into the earth, but may be better thought of as two rooms of similar architectural design linked by a central shaft. A central disk of a purple, stone-like or horn-like material is located in the middle room and can be lifted up and down the passage by the force of magic, or perhaps an unseen mechanism. In this way, it functions as a pressure-activated lift, beginning its motion a few seconds after it has registered sufficient force to move it. Set into the wall of either chamber is a complaint mechanism of the same unusual purple material with a glowing orange stone in its center. When force is applied to the mechanism, the platform of the lift will move into the ready position in that chamber.

The mechanism powering this lift remained in operation for some time after the initial exploration of the ruins in 16c ASM, before mysteriously failing a fortnight or so after its discovery, causing the platform to permanently lower to its lower position. Given the depth of the shaft, traversing it through ordinary mechanical means is beyond the technical skill of most contemporary Wisterian cultures. The Azurejays who were exploring the ruins after their rediscovery instead established a base camp in the upper chamber and used magical levitation to move personnel and materiel up and down the shaft as needed, communicating through the use of musical whistles or arcane messages.

The Breathing Orrery

The lower portion of the Ventral Lift opened into a small antechamber onto the Cereberal Planeterium, which itself connected via passages to the Cardiac Chamber, the Laryngeal Chasm, and the Hall of Memory. Additionally, various gutters within these chambers ran down into The Sumps, one of which had become distended wide enough that it could be traversed comfortably by even a large human.

Cerebral Planetarium

The Cereberal Planetarium was thought by many to be the primary chamber of the entire structure. It is larger than any of the explored sections save for the Bronchial Maze (though much of the Sump remains unexplored). It is also the area where the greatest difference is found between the descriptions given in the Archives of Baghar and the observations of the Azurejays who fully catalogued the site, though in the latter case it is to be noted that the Azurejays were not the first contemporary Wisterians to gain access to the chamber.

The main area the chamber was a small central pit around which a walkway of stone extended. The pit was semispherical, no more than 10 feet deep at its center, though it was perhaps 50 or 60 feet wide, and concentric to the greater sphere which made up the chamber itself (more or less). Stairways cut into the sides of this pit every quarter-way around its circumference allowed easy access to it.

This pit was useful because it allowed one to pass under the central feature of the chamber itself - a 20-foot diameter sphere of a translucent, membranous material, just high enough to be out of easy reach. Inside the geodesic structure of this outer sphere were 17 smaller spheres; one central and unmoving point and several others which moved around the inside of the sphere on stalky structures, at least according to the Archives. These spheres had supposedly glowed with the light of the planes of Cosmology and when certain cosmological conditions were met, were even linked together by beams of colored light. This shared a correspondence with the motion of the cosmological planes in the same way that more mundane orreries measured the passage of celestial objects, which could then be interpreted through the Litany of the Heavens into the cosmological indications.

In his journal, Sir Arthur Goodyne, the Azurejay in charge of the cataloging of the site, wrote that the apparent loss of function of the Orrery was "one of the great tragedies" and "a betrayal of mankind by the Constant of Entropy". By this, he was alluding to the fact that the loss of function of the orrery, Ars Magica had been prevented from examining whether the Pre-Baghar Culture had the same understanding of cosmological motion as the modern scholars did.

Membranous doors prevented passage out of this chamber into any of the others, though by the time of the cataloging of the structure, all three of the doors had been damaged beyond repair alongside nearby machinery that was presumably involved in the function of the orrery.

Cardiac Chamber

The Cardiac Chamber was not alluded to in the records of the structure which are to be found in the Baghar Archives, and the only mention of it by scholarship prior to the ruin's re-discovery comes from Gul Spell-Speaker through his Baghar Testiments, in which he writes:

Came I then to the beating heart of the structure, which by some Secret Source drove all the ancient thinking of the ones who came before, and I wept, for even before I tried, I knew the dream would come away beneath me before I could turn my back and attempt to enter the Secret Eye behind.

By the time the structure was catalogued, it was unimpressive - a relatively small, round chamber containing a large mass, perhaps a full ton, of rot. This material rotted away extremely quickly, and by the time the Azurejays decided to burn the remaining portion of it (after weighing their options for several days), less than half of the original volume remained. Working from testimony of the original explorers, Ser Goodyne concluded that the mass had come from a reported "engine" that had been present in the room as some kind of pumping system. This is consistent with other accounts from the Deeps of apparent Pre-Baghar Cultural artefacts which used magically reshaped flesh for industrial or artificial purposes.

Laryngeal Chasm

A platform roughly the size of the cardiac chamber extended over a large void, which unlit extended further than the eye could see in any direction. As with other functions of the facility, this one was no longer operational when catalogued by the Azurejays, though in this case there was an apparent reason, based on commentaries from the Baghar Archival texts which had survived in Herroka and were available to the scholars documenting the keep.

By ancient testimony, it was supposed that this room housed some means of either controlling or interpreting the orrery. Pre-Baghari operators (scholarship differs on if they should have been considered priests, oracles, sages, scholars, or any of a number of similar titles) could use something literally translated as a "crystal organ" to "sing with" the orrery, and the chamber itself "alive with the breath of the stars" would produce its own music in harmony or discord to the player.

Unfortunately, by the time the Azurejays arrived to document the ruin there was no noticeable airflow within the chamber and no sign of any such instrument.

Hall of Memory

Much larger than either the Cardiac Chamber or the Largyngeal Chasm, the Hall of Memory was linked to the far end of a narrow passageway, where the architectural style immediately changes. Gone are the organic curves of the other chambers of this level of the dungeon, and returned is the monolithic stonework of areas like the Broncheal Maze or other, better-known Pre-Baghari ruins (such as the city of Baghar itself). This room is somewhat outsize, taller than it would have been under comparable architectural design principals from Bastonia or the Atarlie Empire, which is, again, in keeping with the Baghari style.

Evidentially this room once served as a library. Rows of stone shelving thoroughly carve it up into sections demarked by engravings in Pre-Baghari script. Unfortunately, due to the infiltration of moisture into the structure over time, much of this written material is lost to time, existing as the mouldering remnants of organic materials. Despite this, a limited number of fragmentary texts remain and are under active study by the Azurejays, who are working to create copies of the surviving works in preparation for later translation and interpretation.

One thing that did survive is a series of bas-reliefs along one wall of the chamber that appear to show a plan view - from the side and from above - of the three major sections of the facility. It is by these carvings that we know the full extent of the sumps, as only the Barrow Sump is actually accessible.

The Sumps

The sumps comprise many small and interconnected passages, mostly unreachable from one another by normal, human-sized individuals, as they are chiefly joined to one another by means of narrow and twisting passages, sometimes no more than a few inches in diameter. The layout of the sumps is therefore mostly known by the plan diagram found in the Hall of Memory, as they are also not heavily attested in any of the ancient scholarship on the ruin.

The prevailing theory, supported by the company of Azurejays under the command of Sir Arthur Goodyne, is that the sumps served as some manner and mechanism of drainage or processing for the greater facility of the entire orrery. This is supported by the finding of the Barrow-Sump, the only sump reached by direct exploration, which contained several inches of water and a significant buildup of algae suggesting it was often, if not always, at least partially inundated.

History

Purpose of Construction

By an analysis of the surviving texts conducted by scholars with the Church of Anghara, the original purpose of the Orrery was to act as a cosmological observatory, similar to how structures like the Sages' Observatory above it on Star Rock are used as celestial observatories. Through a means now obscured by time, the Pre-Baghar Culture created the Orrery and designed or enchanted it to move in lockstep with the motion of the planes relative to the position of Ahren in the greater Cosmos; in a sense, recreating the entire celestial sphere, albeit on a much smaller scale, and removing some abstractions; it is apparent from the texts that the Orrery measured the motions of the plains in direct terms, while using the planets to measure the same motions requires some abstract calculations and the use of ephemeral texts like the Litany of Heaven.

The original purpose of the structure appears to have been purely scholarly (though religion and scholarship are hard to separate in the PBC writings); simply to model the cosmos and then, by experiment, confirm if the models were true. Over some period of time, however, it becomes clear from more recent works that the Pre-Baghari began to use the structure for predictive aspects. Indeed, the original Pre-Baghari name of the structure as the "Child of Heaven" is suggestive of a religious or, at the very least, tributary purpose.

Gul Spell-Speaker, an orcish thaumaturgist who wrote the Baghar Testiments and briefly ruled the city, thus having access to its archives, hints in his writings at an additional purpose, and suggests that a crude sympathetic link existed between the orrery and the actual cosmos. Without proof and saying as much, he conjects that the Pre-Baghar Culture may have been able to use the orrery to attempt to "nudge" the cosmic order in desirable directions. This is among the many reasons that the text is considered heretical by the Church of Bastonians, and even the more liberal eastern school of Ars Magica or the scholars of the Way of the Elements in the extreme south dismiss this possibility as ridiculous.

Reason for Abandonment

There is no reason to suggest that the Breathing Orrery was abandoned by the Pre-Baghar Culture any more than any of their other ruins; what few writings have survived never mention the position as being assailed, abandoned, or in any way jeopardized. It is far more likely that whatever event - including the simple ravages of the long passages of time - resulted in the disappearance of the culture as a whole also caused the abandonment of the site.

State as of 17th Century ASM

For the most part, the ruin is best thought of as exactly that - a ruin. Its famed orrery is no longer in any kind of operating condition and is of a type of artifice unusual enough to those in control of the site - Bastonia - that it is effectively irreparable. The Azurejays who catalogued the site will readily admit that they didn't find it un-spoiled, and that by the testament of the original explorers of the site the orrery was "briefly" functional, but ceased functioning shortly after they moved through the ruin.

The site remains in control of the company of Azurejays under the command of Sir Arthur Goodyne. As with much of the so-called Frontier Counties, this is contested by the Orcish Nation. Where the main body of the site is directly beneath Star Rock, there is also an argument to a Confederacy of Sages territorial claim.