Light of Fontan/Hannibal's Reports
1. Dear nobles of Fontan,
When you have time, please travel to Fontan and join the Light of Fontan religion. We worship the Gods of the Celestial planes: The Sun, The Moon and The Stars.
The Light of Fontan temple (in construction in Fontan City) is built upon the site of an ancient civilization. My brother Asdrubal was the one that discovered it not long ago. He was digging around looking for buried treasure ( I think some wench told him it was a good idea!) and he came across a stone slab in the ground. Thinking he’d found treasure he commanded his troops to remove the slab. To everyone’s shock and bemusement, there was just a dark, cold chasm, with no obvious signs of *anything*.
He sent me a messenger telling me of this strange “hole” in the ground. I told him that he should keep guarding it until I had time to get there. Some time ago I had to travel to Fontan to deal with this, and since then the site has kept pulling me back to it. As if there was something, no….. some-*one*, begging me for help.
2. The first time I arrived there I commanded my troops to lower me down on a rope. They seemed glad that I volunteered myself, their eyes were avoiding mine, as if they knew something I didn’t. I couldn’t see anything until I hit the ground. I lit my torch and only then realized I was stood in a massive chamber, painted in artwork of creatures I have never seen before.
It was dark, but I wrote down everything I could describe. Here is a copy of my original writings:
“It’s freezing down here and I think I’ve just about had it with my stupid, cowardly troops. Anyway, the room is about 10m high and 20 metres wide in a pyramidal shape. It seems I came through the top of the pyramid. I wonder if this is the entire structure, I can’t see any signs of anything below me. The walls all have paintings of people fighting bizarre looking animals….there’s what look like hybrid creatures, half man – half….something else. There’s also birds, but not as we know them, they have reptile like faces and skin, with jaws instead of beaks. It’s hard to tell what this all depicts, it might be a story or just random pictures.”
I hauled myself back up the rope. I’d seen enough to know I should be careful and come back with some equipment and better lighting. This “find” obviously needed to be studied in detail.
3. Asdrubal kept asking me questions at this point. I told him to be quiet, he’s not the brightest and I feared if I told him what some of the pictures showed, he might cause a widespread panic. I brushed him off as I knew I had to, whatever was down there, it could be devastating to our people.
The next time I went down to the dig, I setup a more permanent base of operations at the centre of the chamber. I lit the torches and the room became fully illuminated for the first time in perhaps generations. It was strange, the stone slab that sealed it appeared to be thousands of years old, worn and full of roots seeping their way into the cracks. However, the inside looked as if it had been built within the last few years. There was no damage to anything, and the paint was vibrant, not dull like the paintings we have.
There was no evidence of this place even having existed as a myth, so what the hell was going on. Who built this place and for what reason? I think what was most disturbing were the images of people fighting creatures that were….not from this world.
4. As I looked around the chamber, I decided I should try and document the objects. This might shed light on what this place was and would help to keep a useful inventory in case of looters. Here’s the extract of what I found:
“North Wall:
A bookshelf with 10 books. All written in some unknown script. Looks a bit like how our ancient writing was, but it’s not the same.
East Wall:
10 Swords, all pointing to the North Wall.
West Wall:
10 Axes , all pointing to the North Wall.
South Wall:
10 Bows, all pointing to the North Wall again.
Nothing else, apart from the paintings of course, which happen to cover the entire room. I’m beginning to realize that there must be a story here, as the pictures appear to follow a sequence. It starts at the North Wall, goes around each wall, and spirals all the way to the top. From what I can tell, it ends at the North Wall aswell. Unless there’s more to this place, I think the answer to this enigma are the books. While I try and figure out what to do with that, I’ll make a log of the story of the pictures.”
At this point I was deeply worried, the pictures were grotesque in places. The events depicted were…. disturbing.
5. This was getting bad, I knew I should bury the lot, but something kept me going. Something kept drawing me back. I had to solve the riddle, I just didn’t know how.
Asdrubal was starting to suspect I was “losing it”, but what did he know? To him the world is “black and white”, and this to him would definitely be evil. My common sense was telling me that this place should be buried and forgotten. I can’t explain in words, but for some reason I had to finish what I had started. It was almost as if I knew this place was an answer to something we did not know about.
I pushed my torch closer to the North Wall. It lit up the entire face clearly. The pictures at the bottom were much smaller than the ones at the top; I guess so it was possible to get the maximum amount of information across without needing the viewer to climb up the walls. I touched the first wall near the first painting in the elaborate sequence. It was incredibly smooth, either the paint was extremely thick or the stone had been carved that way. However they did it, it was clearly at the limits of our anything our technology could create. One odd thing about the wall, was its temperature. It seemed to be as warm as my hand. I took off my shoes and stood on the stone floor….it was warm also. I can offer no explanation for this.
6. So there I was, stood in the Pyramid, looking at the first picture on the North Wall in the lower left hand corner. It took up the entire bottom row of the Wall, and it depicted a battle of truly epic proportions. I looked at it in amazement. Maybe I’d spent too long on the battlefield, or maybe we really didn’t have great artwork. The depth of colours and perspective were astonishing, it was like they had taken the real world and placed it onto the wall.
On the left hand corner of the wall was an army of many battalions, from various Flags. Thousands of knights, all in formation, ready to charge forward into what lay over to the right of the painting. What lay there was a castle, no…it was a fortress. There was water behind it, and so the fortress was surrounded by invaders. The fortress was under siege and from what I could tell, there were not nearly as many troops defending it as there were attacking. The troops inside looked just like the troops outside, except with a different flag. They had similar armour and even had similar expressions on their faces. I think the picture showed that the war was a pointless one, and that they fought for false reasons. It doesn’t appear to show any siege that I can remember, and although the people are certainly like us, they are subtly different. The flags and some of the siege weaponry are totally unknown also.
