Deep beneath the boundless snows of the southern circle, a temple of ice and crystal lay long forgotten. Cycles had come and gone, aeons frozen and melted away. The temple had formed long before fossilised history, before the first beating of life of the current age. There was no entrance to this cave, the path frozen over long ago. The temple itself was elegant in its simplicity, relying only on the natural beauty of the earth and water from which it had been moulded. Light filtered through the countless layers of ice, worshipping at the altar with the softest of glows.
The Watcher sat cross legged, lost in trance before a simple altar of stone. Above the altar, a large globe floated. They had long ago forgotten any of the names they had once held, their identity having merged with the role they had been given over eight hundred million years ago.
In stark contrast to the simplicity of its surroundings, the Watcher’s appearance was preserved in its detail, immune to the erosion of time. Their face was hidden within the shadows of a cowl, their snout the only thing that emerged from the gloom. Light gold and red fur covered their shoulders, travelling down their spine. The rest was bare skin that was a deep burnished gold. They wore a cape to match the cowl, and a pleated leather kilt.
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Nine runes flickered in the air above their head. Upon their chest was a tattoo of nine embedded gates that seemed to fade into the infinite. Nine tails rose behind them, theirs tips tinted with colour, the first white, the last black, and the spectrum of light in between. Two pairs of arms were held frozen in tribute before them, a third pair lay clasped within their lap.
For now, as for almost all of time in the current age, they focused on the fluctuating energy strands that flowed beneath the surface of the globe. They watched with their minds eye the bud of energy that lay cocooned within the core. Pulses of aether radiated outward from the cocoon, flowing along the deep lines that connected the core to a network of energy that criss-crossed the surface of the sphere. Where the lines crossed, junctions formed, the aether radiating further outward into the air surrounding the sphere.
The Watcher maintained their stillness as the aetheric weight of the sphere increased. Interference with the natural order was strictly prohibited. The elders from the time before the current age had learnt their lessons well.
A soft glow emanated from one of the watcher’s tails as a deep golden burst of energy flowed out along one of the southern ley lines. The energy slowly filtered through to a nexus, which pushed it into the atmosphere as well as deeper into the earth below. Slowly the golden glow faded, and the sphere and its watcher returned to stillness.
