"Study the past if you would define the future." ― Confucius

It wasn't until late in the evening that I hit another point of interest, this time all the way at one end of the building in what looked like it must have been a museum – albeit one where the cases were largely empty aside from a few exhibits that had been abandoned, presumably because they lacked inherent value or significance or were simply too big to be worth taking along. It's easy to forget that our ancestors had their own interests in antiquities and unusual specimens, and we often assume ancient peoples had little time or interest to devote to those pursuits. To be fair, that was certainly the case at some points, but ancient peoples prized the unusual, the rare, and artifacts of the past just as we do and examples are plentiful – ranging from stone tools made to showcase embedded fossils to accounts of ancient Greek and Roman tourists in even more ancient Egypt.

The gnomes of this city appeared to fit that same pattern, though attempting to provide context for the remaining specimens was difficult due to frequent gaps in the collection – often literally, with artifacts removed from cases and displays and a lack of explanatory text. That said, between what did remain and the spatial patterning of the three small galleries, I could make some reasonable guesses about how the collection was structured.

The largest gallery seemed to cover the history of the settlement itself, with the scattered remaining ceramic fragments providing a classic seriation of types, moving generally from less complicated and more functional to fancier and less practical as we moved from one end of the room to the other and with my Thermoluminescence skill reinforcing that general pattern as indicating older to newer. The error margins were bigger in the chronology that generated, but they did suggest the gnomish occupation had begun roughly 53,000 years ago and the collection of ceramics as a whole spanned roughly 4000 years.

The other artifacts were mostly fairly prosaic ones that provided insight into the way of life of the early gnomish settlers – who appeared to have originally settled as a mining town focused on veins of precious metals that had been stripped after the first half millennium, at which point they had shifted to trade using a mastery of early airships. That was interesting largely in that there were a series of mosaic maps embedded in the floor that gave a sense of both the growth of the settlement and its trade with surrounding polities.

The other two galleries were significantly smaller, with the larger of the two apparently focusing on the history of the gnomes prior to their settlement of the sky island. They were, apparently, originally a mining colony of a gnomish kingdom on the other side of the globe, and that secured me an interesting map of the continent of Itand, and one of the Gnomish polity of Gearinggate (albeit 50,000 years out of date). Itand, at least, had been mentioned in some of the sources I had, though if Gearringgate still existed it was not mentioned in any text I currently possessed.

Quest Complete: Identify Past Residents; Reward: Intuitive Reconstruction Skill

Quest Reissued: Identify Past Residents; Reward: Variable

I'd almost forgotten that quest hadn't triggered yet, and the reward was an odd one. As near as I could tell, it simply improved the accuracy of my reconstructions when I was working from a patchy record. It wouldn't simply fill in blanks for me, but it would help prevent me from making massive errors; at some point, I'd have to go back through the second level and see which things the new skill objected to.

It was the final gallery that was of primary interest to me, as it focused on the sky island itself and its original inhabitants, specifically. That was, obviously, a lucky break, though not immediately transformative. It appeared that the sky island was already fairly old by the time the gnomes had moved in, and they placed the original creation of the island as more than 10,000 years prior to their own occupation and the abandonment thereof to about 5,000 years earlier – meaning the original residents had been gone now for on the order of 58,000 years. They apparently hadn't left much behind when they left either, though there were still a few ceramic sherds and bits of metal left behind (that loosely corroborated those dates).

The real prize of the gallery was an ornately etched, glowing hammer. It was beyond my capacity to absorb, and my identify skill choked on it as well, returning only a fairly obvious note of "Unknown Magical Hammer." That said, the soft golden glow spoke of its presumed power, and the runes shared no obvious roots with the Daekaran runes I was familiar with. Of course, for all I knew, this could have been the equivalent of an everyday flashlight – though I didn't really believe that, given its evident durability and persistent enchantment. It would have been oversized for the gnomes, and it seemed to fit what I knew of dwarven preferences, though I might need to show it to Hakdrilda at some point. Assuming I decided she was trustworthy enough, that is.

From a practical perspective, the immediately useful find was yet another inlaid mosaic map – this time of the sky island itself, with locations indicated that I assumed tracked with identified locations of settlement of the original residents. No telling where the mana gathering arrays were going to be, of course, but this represented some solid clues for further investigation. That said, interpretation was likely to be a problem, mostly because those locations were presumably all subterranean judging from the cross-sectional appearance of the map. That was fine, except that I currently had no secure way of assessing the depth or orientation of those individual slices of the island– at least as yet.

It did seem like the original settlements were clustered around the central vertical axis of the island, so that offered at least some guidance. I expected that I would look for an established pathway leaving the city and use those to steer future explorations. It seemed like a safe bet that this central route wasn't the only way to and from the gnomish settlement, but residential settlement of the original founding group didn't necessarily translate to the mana gathering arrays. I'd need some advice from someone more knowledgeable, but I kind of assumed that anything involving the generation and collection of massive amounts of power wasn't something they'd drop in the middle of town, if they could help it. It was possible that magic power was safer to generate/collect than other forms of power, but I didn't really get that sense. Still, I would expect them to be accessible from the settlement, for maintenance reasons if nothing else, so if I found a settlement, hopefully I could track the gathering arrays from there.

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In any event, I was hopeful that the individual layers depicted were all going to be oriented in the same fashion, I just had to determine where the dungeon fell on one of them, and the rest would fall into place. If I was lucky, the orientation on these maps would track with the orientation of the city map I'd found earlier, but since the city wasn't very precisely marked on the historic maps, I was left hoping they'd at least track with a set cardinal direction I could tie to my own explorations. The island wasn't perfectly circular at ground level, though it was fairly close, and it tapered both up and down in a generally conical pattern. That meant I could match the city map to the orientation of the island fairly readily, and if they were consistent in their cartographic protocols, establish general locations for the sites (if not the depths, necessarily).

I also wasn't foolish enough to assume that the top of the map necessarily meant north, particularly as there was some variation in that regard in the works I'd already been given. Elven maps and dwarven maps, for instance, used different units for distance, though both were autotranslated into the metric system for me, and the elves oriented to true north according to their star maps while the dwarves oriented to a magnetic pole that was even farther from true north than was the case in my old world.

It remained to be seen what constant the gnomes of yore had oriented their maps to. I was leaning towards a magnetic north, but since magnetic poles tend to meander, even if I was correct that wouldn't make orienting it easy. Given that the city itself had a mostly consistent grid pattern, I was hoping that would track with their mapping, though the fact that the city had a constant grade (rather than a level elevation) as well as orientation opened the possibility that the city had some other organizing basis. There wasn't any significant variation in the stone the city was carved out of, at least, so it probably hadn't simply grown in the wake of an ore lode that had been mined out. I'd have said that it was too consistently patterned to be anything but constructed to a plan – or reconstructed to a plan at some point, at least.

In any event, I now had some clues as to where to look next and some additional information on the timeline of the sky island and its early occupation. That was reflected in a bump in my local, regional, and global lore as well, if only a significant one at the local level.

There were no obvious clues as to why the gnomes had evacuated or where they had gone. They'd had enough time to take the more portable and more valuable artifacts, I'd guessed, but wherever they were going, they apparently had left less important artifacts behind. Or in the case of the hammer, I was guessing, ones that were too big and awkward to be readily portable. It would have been nice to have placards telling me what the missing items had been, but this find was already more than I could have realistically hoped for.

I was thinking of the place as a gnomish museum of archaeology, but accurate as that might have been, I got the impression these were more incidental finds than evidence of formal research and scientific investigation. The vibe was more like a Renaissance Cabinet of Curiosities crossed with a more systematic historical approach – something akin to the 18th century investigations of interested amateurs, really. I might have been doing them an injustice, though, as with well over half of the exhibits missing, I was doing a lot of guessing.

I left the process of trying to overlay these ancient maps with my own, more recent but differently scaled maps for later. Those I'd generated of my own domain were accurate to a level of resolution any cartographer would envy. Those generated through information provided by the hawk-eagle were much less so, but still good enough to hopefully enable an accurate cross-referencing.

In the meantime, I wasn't quite ready to give up on completing either my divine quest or my Xenoarchaology quest that required absorbing non-residential buildings, and my next target was the proportionally large church across the plaza. I'd consider it comparable to a cathedral, at least a smaller one, or possibly more reminiscent of the Pantheon, though the architectural differences were significant. The curving white marble facade was centered around a large set of ornately cast bronze doors with iconography suggesting a focus on metalwork from the mining stage all the way through ore processing, smelting, forging, engineering, and even enchanting, though at the top there were again the symbols of an airship (in classic zeppelin style) and a spanner meeting at an angle where the doors joined. There were no stained glass windows, though, and the large circular windows were carved directly into the facade and open to the plaza. The roof of the structure was a large dome, either supported by magic or careful engineering or both, with no obvious buttressing or external support; from the outside, the building seemed entirely circular in layout. I supposed at this smaller scale and protected from the elements a high arching dome was somewhat easier to carry off, though I didn't want to run down the achievements of the architect. The facade curved with the circular (hemispherical?) form of the building with organic curves along the top seeming to both melt into the dome and reference a cloud-like symbolism reinforced by the pure white marble sheathing the building.

As I began to push my domain into the church itself, I could feel traces of a connection to the deities it had supported. I wasn't sure that the church had been deconsecrated before its abandonment, but in any event, 50,000 years of abandonment left the connection feeling rather tenuous. Internally, there was a brief gallery running along the outer edge of the building supporting a pillared arcade and some small inset shrines, and there were smaller doors across from the main doors and on either side. The majority of the space, however, consisted of rows of long, curved basalt pews around a central focus point dominated by two large altars flanking a central pulpit. I was guessing that it might have originally had a variety of sonic enchantments, otherwise the sonic qualities of the building might have been difficult to work with. The vaulted ceiling was painted in a dark blue and dotted with small, gilded stars; it seemed entirely likely that they would represent an accurate portrayal of the night sky above the island at some specific time and place. At the very top was a small oculus, and as I absorbed the building into my domain, I noticed the beginning of a vertical shaft above the oculus. I'd guess the shaft was at least partially filled now, but for a very brief period at certain times of the year direct sunlight might have shone directly through to the pulpit.

The two altars were quite disparate. To the left, as one looked from the main doors, was a large black iron cubic structure that I would guess was dedicated to a god of engineering or craftsmen as the symbolism was all that of tools in the pursuit of complicated artifices – spanners, yes, but also hammers, chisels, gears, springs, wrenches, drills, and more complicated devices that weren't readily identifiable to my eye.

To the right was a large, circular altar in white marble, alabaster and ivory shot through with a variety of blue glass beneath a hovering airship in gold. It wasn't actually hovering, nor was it actually gold, rather it was supported by some very fine poles of silvery metal and either gilded or simply painted in gold. The iconography didn't seem all that obscure, and I was willing to guess that the gnomes had worshipped deities relating to industrial production and the sky, with a particular focus on the creation of flying vessels. That even set me to speculating that they had departed the sky island in their own fleet of airships, though I had no evidence for that.

Offices for the priesthood seemed to be focused on the back wall along the arcade, but were relatively small, suggesting either the priesthood itself was small, or more likely, had separate administrative offices elsewhere. I'd have to explore those possibilities a bit later though, as it was daytime again, and I had obligations to my current residents in need of my attention.

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