Kartkash temple

"Can you imagine how we can learn from this place? If it's so protected, then they must have valorous things, and that's without counting all the knowledge that it is rumored to have!" babbled Belanor Heleris.
"What I don't need to imagine is all the protections they had, we almost died thrice while trying to enter" murmured Raku as he finished deactivating yet another trap.

The Kartkash temple is an old temple, now half-ruined, that was a base for the Guidersar, a subgroup of the Kit'de'thrak. While it's called a temple, it was big enough to hold a small town's population in order for the temple to be self-sufficient. A couple millenniums ago, it was under attack and put in a siege in order to kill all its inhabitants. It was then lost in time but has been recently refound thanks to an expedition that Belanor Heleris started and is now being rebuild by Raku, Jana Kertha, and a group of workers that Samaira sent to the temple.

Type

Ruins / Temple

Owning organization

Kit'de'thrak (Guidersar in specific)

Alternative Names

Temple of wyverns
Temple of knowledge

Characters in Location

• Jana Kertha
• Raku
• Rotrah Hasez

Location

The exact location of the temple is a secret known only by a small amount of people. There are rumors that it is found in a northern island of Uahum, and there is a group of explorers that swear they've been there, but their maps had been stolen and they aren't sure how to get there anymore.

Officially, people who are part of the Kit'de'thrak know where the temple is or can find its location, but in truth, only Raku, Samaira, Jana Kethra, Kin'rah Shanan, Keir Shanan, and a small group of workers in the temple itself know its location.

The temple is indeed in an island. This island is desert (believed to be caused by magic, as it should be a rain forest by its position) and is indeed north of Uahum, albeit it is deep into the ocean, almost at a third of the route from Uahum towards Amex.

The temple

As mentioned, while it is referred as a temple, this structure is almost a fortress, big enough to hold the population of a small town inside of it. A third of the temple is reserved for the library it holds and the living spaces of the people who work specifically for it. The entrance of the temple opens to a large square, with remains of what looked like market stalls, and behind it, houses and other necessary buildings. Two main roads leave the square, one towards the building holding the library, and one towards the greenhouses and (now dead and dry) farms.

Around the whole place, one can find traps and runes that react only towards people who aren't part of the Kit'de'thrak. Many of them are now depleted or broken, but there is still a good amount of them that are still active and showing no sign of decay or time damage, which shows the powerful magic that was once used in this place and is probably recorded in its library.

Surrounding the temple, there are two layers of a giant protective spell that also hid the temple location from locational spells. The first layer was used as protection, what it exactly did is lost in time, as the runes that made the spell work are partially broken (with tools or weaponry) or fully destroyed. The second layer, which is (luckily) still active and working, is the hiding spell, and the main reason the temple hasn't been found easily, as all magic that was used to locate it was rendered useless.

Brown rock formation during daytime

Purpose

The purpose of the temple has never been lost, kept alive by rumors and stories. As all Thraksark, the temple was used as a base for the subdivision of the Kit'de'thrak that was around Uahum, the Guidersar, as well as being its library, to hold the knowledge they learnt about the world as well as copies of the knowledge stored in other Thraksark. Even though that was its purpose, the temple was forced to also function as a self-sufficient town in order to be more in hiding.

Architecture

The temple has been build with lots of sandstone and stones. It is an interesting and unique mix which is not for everyone's tastes, but as the buildings where focused to be build quick and functional, decoration or making good color combos wasn't thought in its original build. There are a lot of place where one can see marks in the stones showing that they were shaped with magic, to waste less materials, be easier to work with and making the sandstone and stones mix together.

Even though they were mainly focused to be functional when build, the structure of them where made so that cool air was able enter the houses, cooling them. While the island is a desert, it's temperatures aren't desert like yet still tend to be high and humid.

With time of people living in it, decorations in the buildings started appearing. It started with families allowing their kids to paint their houses' walls to make them prettier and stand out in the seas of highly similar houses. This approach of painting houses walls to make them pretty and decorated quickly spread through the temple and one can still see nowadays paint on the buildings. It is mainly focused on low parts of walls, where people reached without help of tools, but there are some rare points where paint is seen in unusually high points, such as in one small part of a wall of the library, which shows a giant tree.

Brown wooden tables inside building by Cameron Steward

History

The start of the construction of the temple has been millenniums ago, how long ago exactly is unknown. The temple was initially only the library building, a place to store the information while keeping it away from outsiders eyes. Most Thraksark started construction around the same time and thus their libraries date around the same age. In the original plan, they were never thought to become small town --fortresses-- with more people than the needed to upkeep the library. Each temple started expanding at their own pace, at different moments in time.

In case of the Kartkash temple, it used to depend for materials and foods on the islands north of Uahum, and it did so for centuries if not a millennium (its position being in the middle of the ocean helped it stay hidden for longer than many temples) but in the end, it was found by other people and attacked for its believed riches. It wasn't a big problem to drive the attackers away, but it showed that the temple wasn't as hidden as believed.

The construction of the buildings outside the library and the wall started slow. It was hard to find people who would fit in the Kit'de'thrak and that would be willing to live away from the rest of the world, not them but also their descendants. After a century of slow construction, the temple asked for temporal workers to its sibling temples, which they fulfilled the request happily. Around 25% of the fortress was build in a century of slow construction, and after a century with temporal workers, they finished building everything needed for it to be self-sufficient. The temporal workers returned to their original temples, albeit some asked to stay in Kartkash. It took another century or so to gather enough people for the town to properly be self-sufficient, filling all the jobs needed for it.

While all construction was made, mages where researching (with help of mages from other temples, as it was a Kit'de'thrak project) to craft a big rune, surrounding all the temple, that would protect from attacks and will help keep them hidden from the outside world. The knowledge they hold and expected to hold was too powerful and people worried about what would happen if it was stolen, destroyed, but also lost.

A person standing in front of a building by Valdemaras D.

Constructing the rune was a great feat. Never before had a rune been so big and working as intended. Although they had to make two runes rather than the original plan of one, which make the construction of it be slower, as there was twice the construction for it that needed to happen. They anchored the complex points of the runes into gazebos that were build around the island; the non-circular shape of the island meant there were points where the external rune wouldn't work, so defenders were left in these zones.

Other than such a great feat accomplished, after some time, they also decided to shape the island's borders to something that would make it harder to attack; cliffs. With great effort, lots of people and time, the borders of the island, which where mostly beaches, where shaped to turn into cliffs, with elemental magic. Only one point was left intact, the harbor of the island.

After all the hard work put in so the temple was more protected, the Guidersar relaxed a bit. For a couple of years, lots of celebrations occurred in the temple, as a thanks from the temple to the workers that worked so hard into making the temple protected. Afterwards, life in the temple went back to normal.

For many centuries if not millenniums, the temple was happy and worked fine. At some point, the temple shifted their ideas of everyone being born in it being forced to stay part of it, to allowing the kids to decide once they were old enough. While some kids decided to leave, most of them ended up staying, and thus, the population of the temple grew fast and the temple was not only able to be self-sufficient but also lived well, without worrying of lack of food, water, or whatever they might need.

Lots of things in the temple were done with magic, so everyone coming to live into the temple or born in it was forced to do magical studies. This made the temple have some of the best mages in the world as the mages they produced helped to research new things and grow more powerful. The temple was powerful and the world knew that, no one seemed to dare to go versus it.

It is unknown who or why attacked the Kartkash temple. The seclusion of the temple made it so that barely any information got out of the temple when it was attacked and destroyed. The only thing known, other than it was attacked, is whatever the new Guidersar (led by Raku with help of Jana Kertha) is finding in the ruins of the once magnificent temple. So far, the only thing known is that the temple was besieged after forcing whoever might be alive into the library, leaving everyone to die because lack of food.

Gray rocks under cloudy sky by Alex Rhee

The efforts of the new Guidersar, founded by Samaira but given the leadership to Raku, are slow but steady on making the temple once more habitable. Many things that once were easily used with magic might need to be changed or researched, as most information about it is either in the immense library that Raku doesn't allow access to, or lost in time. Thanks to Raku being an inhabitant of the temple before it got attacked, some of the machines are now properly working, but a single person wouldn't be able to know how everything works, specially after not thinking of the temple for decades.

The plans for the temple right now, are to rebuild the broken parts, at least of the main original building, the library, and its surrounding buildings. This is focused so the library don't lose it's books and artifacts and to give the working team a place to live comfortable while all the work happens. After these buildings are fixed, Raku plans to start gathering new people for the Guidersar; Samaira gladly shared with him the rituals to make someone join the Kit'de'thrak. By making people join, two things can start happening: checking the books of the library (mainly its state and what is it about), and keep rebuilding so the temple can once more be self-sufficient.

A close up of a pile of rocks by Christian Bass