The City of Shifting Stones

Part 1

Thrak grunted and swung his pick into the pale gray stone again, dislodging a small chunk that tumbled to the ground. His meaty hands were calloused and strong from years of pounding rocks into submission. But despite his brawn, Thrak's back ached from hours spent bent over, chipping away at the massive foundation stones that formed the base of the Manycliffs District.

All around him, other stonemasons toiled away under the blistering midday sun. The clanging of metal tools against rock echoed through the canyons between the colossal stone pillars that supported the weight of the upper city levels far overhead. Thrak straightened up and wiped the sweat from his brow with a grimy forearm, squinting up at the underside of the district looming above.

The heights made him dizzy just looking at them. A vast network of homes, businesses, and twisting roadways had been laboriously constructed atop the broad backs and upturned faces of a convoy of ancient giants who had wandered into the valley untold ages ago and mysteriously rooted themselves to the spot, frozen like petrified monuments. 

Over countless generations, the tiny ancestors of Thrak's people had slowly built outwards and upwards, expanding their rudimentary cliff dwellings on the napping titans into an entire multi-tiered metropolis supported on a forest of gigantic arching necks, slouching torsos and extended arms locked in eternal poses. 

Now known as the Hunchback City, it was a dizzying, gravity-defying maze of teetering architecture unlike any other in the known world. Thrak was damn proud to be one of the skilled craftsmen maintaining and expanding the foundations that supported the spiraling, vertigo-inducing upper levels.

He retrieved his waterskin and took a long draw of the tepid fluid, then turned back to find the drill-sergeant figure of his boss Kubelka looming over him like an ominous storm cloud.

"Oi! You lazy lump!" The short, wiry woman's voice was a nasal whiplash. "This ain't break time! My grandmam could make better progress peckin' at that stone!"

Thrak hung his head, suitably chastised as always by Kubelka's acidic tongue. "Yes, boss."

The diminutive taskmaster narrowed her beady eyes at him. "You need to put some real muscle into it, ya lummox! I need this section prepped for the valley-menders by next week or we'll be behind schedule!"

Thrak grunted again and obediently returned to chipping away at the stubborn foundation rock with renewed effort. The valley-menders were an elite sect of shapers and rune-scribes capable of magically re-forming and fusing the stone itself as though it were soft clay. Their arcane abilities were instrumental in reinforcing and expanding the lower levels to support the ever-increasing weight of the upper districts as the city slowly grew taller and more densely populated over time.

But their services didn't come cheap, and as a lowly grunt Thrak knew his own job depended on getting flat, smooth surfaces properly prepared beforehand to allow the valley-menders to work their stonemagic unimpeded. He increased his cadence, sweat soon drenching his coarse work clothes as he pounded away.

Kubelka nodded in satisfaction and waddled off to harass some other poor bastard working the quarry face. At least he knew the hot-tempered little shrew of a woman pushed them all equally hard. Thrak sighed and shifted his grip on the rock pick, resigning himself to several more grueling hours of mindless labor.

But suddenly a hairline fracture in the partially-cleared stone face caught his eye. He paused and leaned in closer, brushing away the scattering of stone shards and grit to better see...yes, there did indeed seem to be some sort of geometric pattern inscribed beneath the outer layer of rock. How peculiar. 

Intrigued despite himself, Thrak inserted the chisel end of his pick into the crack and gave it a solid whack with the sledge end, flaking off a larger slab. More angular lines and shapes were revealed, clearly not natural fracture marks at all, but deliberately carved...

Glyphs of some kind? Could it be the fabled script of the Ancients rumored to have first shaped the valley floor and its slumbering titans? Thrak frowned and struck the stone again, taking care not to obliterate whatever secret lay hidden within as more and more of the strange inscriptions were exposed.

Before long, he had carefully cleared away a large patch of the rock face to reveal what appeared to be a ornate but weathered mural of symbols and pictograms etched deep into the foundation itself. He whistled low through his teeth. This was no mere natural rock formation, that was for damn sure.

"What're you gawkin at over there?" Kubelka's gruff voice made Thrak start, and he quickly stood aside, pointing with his pick.

"Bit of a mystery, boss. Seems these foundations got some kind of...well, see for yourself."

Kubelka's already beady eyes narrowed to slits as she waddled over and ran a grimy hand over the strange glyphs, muttering under her breath. After a long, tense moment, she straightened up and jabbed a finger into Thrak's chest.

"This...this could be big, you nitz! Bigger than both of us put together! I want you to stop whatever other fool job you're doin' right the hells now and concentrate on exposin' the rest of..." She waved her hands vaguely at the inexplicable stone carvings. "The whatever-this-is. The whole blastin' thing, ya hear?"

She turned and cupped her hands around her mouth. "KORSK! VELIT! GIT OVER HERE, YA DUFF GITS! Got some real work for ya louts!"

Bemused, Thrak complied and began carefully chipping away at the remaining stone encasing the glyphs and shapes while a couple of the burlier masons joined him, taking direction from the increasingly excited Kubelka.

What in the hells had he uncovered? What did it all mean? Countless questions spun through Thrak's thick skull as he toiled to unearth the rest of the bizarre stone inscriptions, bigger section by massive section sloughing away to reveal more of the intricate, alien designs.

By the time the long shadows of early evening began creeping across the quarry, Thrak and his crew had stripped away enough rock from a broad swath of the foundation's base to expose a breathtaking mural that stretched on as far as the eye could see. 

Rising from the chaotic spiral of symbols and alien pictograms, a series of larger carvings seemed to depict beings of immense stature striding across vast expanses of land and water, scenes of what Thrak could only describe as...continent-spanning giants? Surrounded by even more mysterious glyphs and ideograms, whatever message the mural was intended to convey was utterly lost on the exhausted but captivated stonemasons.

To be continued...

Part 2

Kubelka, dripping with sweat herself, stood back with her hands on her wide hips, shaking her head slowly back and forth.

"You duffers maybe just uncovered the greatest stonecunning secret since the first spire was raised. Don't any of ya damps even think of scarrin' this up with so much as a single chisel mark!" 

She spun around with an intense gleam in her eye and addressed the gathering crowd that had begun forming on the quarry's edge. First just a few onlookers, then more and more quarry workers drifting over, dropping their tools to gawk at the jaw-dropping display of forgotten artwork adorning the foundation stones.

"Droogs! This here's more important than anythin' your tiny gearboxes could grind out in three lifetimes combined! I want all quarry operations ceased immediately until I can raise the proper mucky-mucks to sign their gills to this blastin' thing! Hazlitt! Get on that breed-horn and summon every goggler, sage and scribe-snot in the Upper Districts who can tell earth from arse! We got a proper mystery on our hands!"

Kubelka whirled back to her stunned masons as the wiry man called Hazlitt hurried off to send out the call for as many learned experts and lore keepers to be summoned to the site with all haste.

"As for the rest of ya duffs," Kubelka jabbed a finger at Thrak and the others, "you lot are stayin' put and monkeyin' over every handsbreadth of this crazy cryptograffiti until I get some runeys down here to squinterpret the whole shanboozie! Don't need you jugmugs loppin' off some key bit by mistake!"

She turned and cupped her hands around her mouth again. "VORDELL! Get that fat fornikker runnin' with some foo foo lous and any other squishwits what can stoke this gang of mine while we're babyfeedin' this mess! Gonna be a long night!"

 

With that, Kubelka spun on her heel and stormed off, bellowing at gawkers and stragglers to clear the way, leaving Thrak and the rest looking bewildered but dutifully standing guard over their startling discovery. 

Soon, laborers were ferrying in bundles of torches which were distributed and lit as darkness fell, the flickering firelight casting the uncovered mural in an eerie, dancing glow. Foodstuffs and waterskins were also brought forth to allow the stonemasons to fortify themselves for the long vigil ahead.

Perched on an outcropping of rock, taking occasional bites from a hunk of travel bread, Thrak found himself unable to tear his eyes away from the mystifying pictographs and etchings. What incredible craftsmanship! What unfathomable skill had been required to carve this intricate, sprawling mural into the very bedrock of the valley? And what did it all mean? His calloused fingers idly traced the outline of one of the towering giant figures as he pondered its significance.

"Pretty wildwundr, ain't it?" The amicable voice came from the slight figure of Jinda, one of the younger masons gifted with an artistic sensitivity that allowed her to shape and polish stone with a deft, delicate touch.

Thrak grunted an affirmative as the waifish woman settled herself cross-legged beside him, a chunk of flatbread in one hand. Her other reached out to reverently run along the edge of an elaborately realized border of geometric knotwork encircling a particularly detailed scene.

"Amazing that anything like this could've lain hidden and undiscovered for..." Her voice trailed off as her eyes danced along the winding, precise patterns. "Well, for who even knows how long? You did a real bangvine job uncoverin' this, Thrak."

He shrugged his broad shoulders, keeping his eyes on the cyclopean figures. "Just doin' me job, loike always. Just so happened I was the one to catch a glimpse of the first crack, is all."

Jinda nodded slowly. "Aye, and what an eye you must've had to spot it at all." She squinted at an intricate motif of three interlocked rings, each one containing more rings within, like an endless recursive knot. "Just look at the level of detail! And such inventive, otherworldly designs. I could spend years just tryin' to perfectly recreate that one pattern alone."

"You think you'd be able to make sense of it all?" Thrak asked. "I mean, I know you appreciate that artwhatsit stuff a lot more than the likes of me."

The younger woman was quiet for a long moment, clearly studying the ancient stonework as intently as she could. "Well...I can try to offer my thoughts at least, if the real scholars can't slide their brains around it."

She pointed at a particularly ornate border segment. "Like, I'd wager my jewel-punchers that these triangular pictorials represent some sorta ritual or spiritual practice. Notice how they keeps gettin' folded back in on themselves in an endless cycle, right? Could maybe be the sacred geometric language of some kinda...analmatic or somesuch."

Jinda rose up on her knees, using the bread in her hand to gesture at the central images of the towering giants striding across vast expanses. "And those ones there, well...I'd say there's little quarrel that they depict some sort of fabled race of...what, primordial titans? Godbeings? There's certainly no denyin' the sheer scale they're meant to convey!"

She glanced back at Thrak with gleaming eyes. "Just imagine if this is, in fact, some lingerin' testament from the quasi-mythical Ancients everyone's on about? Their language of runes and picture-scripts that were somehow imbued with actual energized properties for working all manner of magic and stunners! Oh, to be able to decipher even a fraction of the buried wisdom here..." Jinda trailed off in an awed hush, gently running her fingers across the intricate carvings again.

Thrak had to admit, when the dreamy young artistan put it that way, it did make his chance discovery seem all the more monumental and thrilling. The possibility that this could be an honest-to-burl relic of the ancient world-shapers themselves! His own part in exposing this archeological wonder filled the normally humble and unassuming miner with a sense of pride and amazement.

Lost in thought, he barely registered the clamor of voices and shuffling footsteps signaling the first arrivals summoned to examine the unexplained mural...

To be Continued...