the mind wanders

Nights in a desert are not what most people expect. For one, desert nights are never warm, the sands do not save or generate heat the way that trees and animals do, so nights are always frigid, even in the summer, but especially in the time of the year when the sun shines less. Also the air is free of moisture so the stars seem so much more abundant than they do on the ocean, looking up at night you can almost lose sight of the stars that sailors use for navigation. The clouds too are not there to obstruct the dazzling view of the sky.

The moon was waxing, and so each night it got a little more of a slice, and the lunar goddess who blesses the moon elves with their exceptional hunting powers also hunts in the nights when the bow of the moon is visible. Bendis held under her lunar domain powers of both fertility when the moon was full, and **** when her bow was visible.

Alex wondered what his friends in the forests were upto on these nights. Some of them were centuries old and had an obscure sense of time, choosing to count "moon days" rather than "sun days", although the technical difference gets lost on anyone who had never bothered to notice that the times of sunrise to sunset are not the same as the time of moonrise to moonset. Or that there differs a lunar year and a solar year.

But here in the desert where the sky is so clear you can measure the movements in the heavens the city of Tut 'Tal is also the location with the greatest establishment of astronomy and astrology, for when the gods are involved with the heavens there is really negligible difference between the two.

As a matter of fact you could surmise, based on the structure of Tutmanu 'Taliku that astronomy was the reason it was built in the first place. The city was built as a pyramid, over 300 meters in height and twice that in span, it was practically a mountain of brick. The outermost walls enclosed an even larger area, that served as the lowest city tier. There were a total of four tiers to the city, with the lowest tier being that of the slums.

The second tier belonged to businesses and military. With the city being ran by a theocracy merchants and militants were considered essential, albeit still a lower class. And as thus their tier was given as representation that they were only one step above the dregs of the society. Perhaps when the city was originally founded it was for a more practical reason, being that proximity to the gates and walls made sense for the merchants and city guards to not need to run down the entire length of the city to do their business, that reason was lost beneath the classism that now dictated the city dynamics.

The third tier was probably originally for noble families, but since those were now the clerics who were forbidden to have families they were populated by various religious schools who taught from the same texts, but argued over interpretations. How "learned" scholars could invent so many ways to read the same sentence was far beyond Alex's understanding as well as his patience.

Which then made the forth and final tier even more ridiculous, because it was reserved for the elite sages who had somehow managed to impress the supercilious scholars enough to get elected to the highest ranks of a society that ranked itself based on how smart someone could make pretentious piety appear.

However, besides the egotistical banter, and the boring self-rightousness the true pentacle of this society was at the very peak of the city. It was known as the Temple of Time, and only those with actual real knowledge were permitted to enter. Inside the dome of this building was a room, the exact construction and dimensions of which were not fully known. The inner sanctum was a sphere that rotated in alignment with the sky and showed an exact location for all the stars, the sun and the moon at all times of day and year. In the very center of the room was a large cushion, and if you sat on it you could look in any direction and see the heavens like the gods did, without the limitations of human eyes, or the obstructions of day, clouds, not even the shadow of a dragon could impair your ability to read the maps of the sky. The room was also filled with water up to the point correlating with the horizon, and entrance was achieved through a staircase that rose through the lower axis.

Earning the right to enter was known as the Trial of Heavens because of the view one received when they entered the room. Alex had been inside that room just the once when he completed the Trials of Heavens himself.

It was a memory that remained very clearly in his mind, had changed so much about how much of the world he took for granted without admiration, and had given him a curiosity about the rest of the city he didn't have before.

The Temple of Time was very obviously the reason for building the city of Tutmanu 'Taliku. The central core of the pyramid was full of machinery that turned the sphere and moved the other lights that were not fixed in place like the stars were. How the machinery operated was a complete mystery even to the scholars who dedicated their life to learning the secrets of the temple. The main reason was that all of this machinery was completely submerged in the water that was being pushed upwards to the temple and could only be seen in parts through clear crystal walls where the machinery was illuminated by glowing orbs that were part of the machine itself.

Even the most ancient scrolls in the vaults of forbidden knowledge didn't explain how the Temple of Time worked, although they did give explanation that the name Tutmanu 'Taliku was an ancient title that translated as "Tomb of Time" rather than Temple of Time, but that was kept from being common knowledge because the connotations were deemed "too dark" for the average citizen of the city.

It was something that Alex thought of quite often when he looked at a clear night sky now, Tomb of Time could be interpreted a few ways. More than the dead were laid to rest in a tomb, and in this case the vaults of the city were filled with knowledge that was lost because the languages they were written in were dead. Perhaps whoever build the city thought of it as a metaphor for the civilizations who died, leaving only their writings and art behind for people to try and understand without the context of common knowledge that the societies that made them would have possessed.

Spending the last few years sharing some thoughts with Demon he'd come to realize how small his knowledge of history actually was. He thought the memories of the old elves were amazing, some of them had been alive when the Dwarves lived above ground, but Demon, she was incarcerated before the Dwarven kingdom came to the surface in the first place. And if her constant ranting about being older than the gods was true then she had probably forgotten or buried more memories than those elves ever had. If she saw the inner workings of Tut 'Tal would she understand it better than the priests who lived there?

These thought made Alex feel small, painfully aware of how little real knowledge he actually had. In fact once when he had been complaining to Demon about it she had explained that it was normal that people who thought they were knowledgeable most often are not, and that in a twist of irony the more you actually knew the more you realized how much more you don't. Apparently Alex knew much more now than he did, but knowing more only made him feel less knowledgeable. In a similar way seeing so many people in his travels gave him a great respect for how dissimilar people could be, and more interested in learning about all the people he met.

As a child he only knew his village, the coldness of his family, and the way that no one questioned the way life was. His father was lord of the small estate, that barely had enough houses to work the fields around the manor house. The family castle wasn't built until his older brother married the daughter of a richer neighbor and used that as leverage to expand their holdings. An "increase" in wealth that made Alex laugh the one and only time that he had returned, partly to rub his success in his family's face for their mistreatment of him, but also because he was invited by the priest who'd educated him as a boy when he was dying to be present at his funeral.

From the small size of the world that his family knew compared to his own experiences Alex had a replaced his contempt for his family with an odd sort of pity. They were so utterly clueless of just how big the world was, and the world Alex knew was so much smaller than the sky Alex saw.

Alex gazed thoughtfully at the moon. Only the elves who were called "people of the moon", and those who read the ceiling in the Temple of Time cared about the cycles of the moon. But the moon was there all the same, and anyone who watched it could learn about it.

Alex had come to learn that was how all knowledge was, right there, but only people who were looking for it would notice it.

"Well aren't you the philosopher?"

Alex was pulled back to reality for a moment, "How do you mean?"

Raven laughed, "I asked you what you thought was the most impressive part of Tut 'Tal and you just drifted off looking mostly at the sky. Good way to trip walking in the dark."

A fair point Alex resigned himself to paying attention to his feet again. With the growing of the moon they were now able to travel as well while the moon was in the sky high enough to shed light on their way.

The only risk of this was attracting the eyes of the desert dragons who roamed the skies in the dark looking for the heat of living creatures to feed upon. Raven assured Julian that dragons wouldn't attack a caravan of their size unless they were ****, and this time of the year they are normally well fed and happy.

"So back to my question. What do you think is the most impressive part of Tut 'Tal?"

Alex shook his head, "Probably it's secrets."

Raven stared for a long minute before erupting in laughter that could probably be heard for miles in the crisp night air. "You are a philosopher. That was much deeper an answer than I was expecting."

Alex didn't follow the logic. "How is that deep?"

"Because," cackled Raven, "There is no end to the secrets of the city that the people there don't even know. It really is the Tomb of Time, but also the tomb of secrets."

A few silent minutes later Raven again spoke up. "The city is a paradox, at the very peak is a chamber that lets you see what the gods see, but underneath is an unexplored labyrinth where you can learn what only the gods know. The city itself draws the eyes away from knowledge by tempting you with vision. That's the most impressive part of the city to me."

"Rather frightening when you say it like that."

"Oh yes," Raven grinned savagely, "very frightening indeed."