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The Ramoros Fragments

The Ramoros Fragments are a collection of five irregular tile-like objects embedded in a cliff-face on a headland to the north of the city of Ramoros, overlooking the Sea of Jars. Obviously artificial, they are popularly connected with the pseudo-historical wizard Morogyad and thought to be of great magical significance.  
 

Content

  The five tiles are arranged in an irregular, roughly star-shaped pattern over an area of some thirty square feet of cliff-face. They range in size from substantially less to substantially more than a square foot. From a boat out at sea they can be vaguely determined with the naked eye, being of a dark grey colour very distinct from the beige sandstone of the cliff, but not examined or studied with any accuracy. Such work requires an expedition up or down the cliff-face.   The topmost fragment is roughly lozenge-shaped, with its upper left-hand quadrant evidently a deeply-eroded curve. It features a large glyph positioned on the outside of a section of a circle and defective sections of two more such glyphs to the upper left and lower right thereof.   The second fragment - moving clockwise from the first - is the smallest. It is a dart-shaped concave quadrilateral arranged so it is pointed east, away from the remainder of the formation. Devoid of glyphs or other evident inscriptions, it is recognisable as part of the formation mostly by its colour.   The third fragment is the largest, heavily eroded into a vaguely rhomboid shape but with some evidence of once having been part of the rim of a circle. Two glyphs are inscribed upon it, both generously embellished with marks generally agreed to be diacritics of some sort.   The fourth fragment is of a highly irregular ovoid shape. It features a complicated collection of curvilinear inscriptions which might be interpreted as a series of slightly run-together glyphs, possibly constituting some sort of lithographic precursor to calligraphy.   The final fragment is basically triangular but with rounding of its three corners regular enough to  indicate deliberate working. Like the first fragment it featured an inscribed glyph and an incomplete section of a second such inscription placed on the outer side of a circle.  

Commentary

  Various biographers of Morogyad, both pre- and post-Wesmodian, attest that the Ramoros fragments constitute remainders of the stone disc that the wizard reputed rode on when flying home to Ramoros after being tutored in magic on the island of Kobolon. Although there is little that can be done to prove this, the attribution is widespread enough to have achieved essentially folkloric status; the dark grey stone of the fragments is certainly characteristic of the island where Morogyad reputedly spent his youth. This makes the fragments akin to the Morogyad pieces found in the insular cities - physical objects closely associated with the wizard and thus of great interest to thaumatologists.   As reputed fragments of an artefact attributed with powers of flight, the fragments are thought to contain useful information about the practice of telekinesis. It is generally agreed that the glyphs evident on the fragments probably constitutes the remnants of an inscription that had something to do with granting the disc its powers of flight, and research into this matter tends to focus on reconstructing the code from the fragments that remain, which in turn involves theoretical reconstructions of the disc itself. Given the speculative nature of such research - accounts differ on exactly how many pieces Morogyad broke the disc into - progress on such work is slow.  

Availability

  The fragments are unique artefacts which remain embedded in the cliff-face, at an altitude which makes attempts to study them from sea level largely pointless. It may be possible to construct reproductions of the fragments from closer examinations, accomplished perhaps by abseiling, though this remains only a theory.   One other possibility in researching these fragments would be to compare them to the Discus of Morogyad supposedly in possession of the Oluz Guildhouse. Since the Guildhouse has kept the Discus under lock and key for long enough that their possession of it has become largely folkloric, however, this poses difficulties of its own.

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