The Observatory in the mountains outside of Northgate
215 – 216
The observatory brought many things to her. The realization that the Octurne’s designs and structure, as seen through the cunningly-constructed telescopes there, matched the stonework and designs on the ruins she called home. The friendship of a girl not too dissimilar to her in age or interests. Hours of quiet contemplation, and a few rare treasures of manuscripts, too.
The Octurne became a focus of fascination for her on her realization of its connection to the Skyfolk ruins, and she spent hours with her eyes glued to the eyepiece of the largest telescope, watching its rotations and tracking its progress across the sky. For all the detail they gave, they could not magnify the returned octahedral to sufficient detail to show whether any inhabitants remained on it. They did show just enough for her to realize, from the designs she could spy upon it, that it must be enormous. Large enough that even if people did live on it, they might be too small to see with the telescope, or perhaps only specks. Assuming, of course, that they were the same size as folk here on the ground. The few tracts she’d found that mentioned sky folk — aasimar, to use the term the texts did — had not seemed to indicate such, but who knew.
She wondered frequently how it stayed up there. From her own experiments with the forces between objects, the power of connection that the ground exerted was immense. Whatever was keeping the Octurne up must be equally powerful. Or perhaps she wasn’t even thinking of it in the correct manner? There were no answers for her on this. She learned to pull on the threads of the world enough to enable her to escape the bonds of the earth, but no matter how she tried, she couldn’t continue the spell for long enough to get anywhere significant. Once she flew so high that ice crystals formed inside her nose and she grew dizzy, unable to breathe; she nearly activated her gentlefall devices too late, with her mind swimming from the air-that-wasn’t.
After that, she put aside the effort for the moment. Still, every night, she looked up, taking comfort in the sight of the Octurne floating above, an undeniably visible symbol of the eldritch returning.
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