Information

Zinovea
Legacy Name: Zinovea

The

Glacier Harvester
Owner:

Matryoshka

Age: 9 years, 3 months, 2 weeks

Born: February 24th, 2015

Adopted: 9 years, 3 months, 2 weeks ago

Adopted: February 24th, 2015

Statistics

Level: 1
Strength: 10
Defense: 10
Speed: 10
Health: 10
HP: 10/10
Intelligence: 0
Books Read: 0
Food Eaten: 0
Job: Unemployed

A clattering in the distance wakes me from my slumber. It's been weeks since I'd heard any movement from the depths below. My "guests" tend to bury deep underground, and once they find an ample source of energy, they stay for a while. It looks like they finally ran out.

I ignore it for now, trying to fit in as much sleep as I can before I receive any visitors.

~

The noise worsens as the hours pass. It starts as small and insignificant, but at this point it's a deafening roar. It reverberates in the room I'm hibernating in, probably amplified due to the quality of the crystals around me. They're some of only a small handful of pure stone left in this place.

~

They hunger.

I can already feel them draining the energy away from crystals maybe a few hundred yards away. These crystals will drain as they feed and recharge as I sleep, but for now they greedily feast on whatever stores I have at the moment.

~

I can barely stand the sound anymore. They must be only a few feet away.

Then it all comes to a grinding halt. They must know I'm here. All I can do is sit and wait, knowing that this will be a brief period of waking.

~

One of them looks around the corner. A golem, several feet higher than an average man and several tons heavier. It glows a deep shade of red, meaning that it's angered and ready to feast.

It slowly trudges toward me at first. The grating sound of stone against stone is deafening, but there's not much I can do to stop it. It gently touches the outer layer of my crystal, and I can feel my energy fading. It shouldn't take much, but I already grow weary.

Two more golems arrive and take their share, and by the time I lose consciousness they've begun to dig through the bottom of the room.

~

[pic here eventually]

Zinovea is one of the last remaining parts of a great force that drives their planet.

It started small, like a spark, when the planet was young and still developing the most basic forms of life. No one knows how it came to be, or where it came from, but everyone can agree that without this new "being", the planet would never have evolved beyond the very building blocks of life.

As this first being grew, both in power and sentience, it discovered it could breathe life into the stones around it. They weren't powerful at first, but these attempts created the first golems, capable of protecting their creator for centuries on end.

Millenia pass, but the first's reach was still extremely limited. It reached its power as far out as it could to seek new crystal chunks, which eventually grew in a similar fashion to their parent. All clusters mimicked the original crystal's effects, though to a much smaller degree. Some grew sentience of their own, which gave birth to clusters such as Zinovea and many of their sisters.

Through this system, the planet flourished. More complex species were made, eventually leading up to an intelligent humanoid species. Things were quiet for many ages as the crystals kept growing.

This new race spread like wildfire, however, and eventually found smaller pockets of crystals near the surface. They greedily dug down, causing their species to accelerate, and quickly cause the planet to fall into decay. Golems fiercely defended its masters, though technology soon surpassed their ancient magics.

As this war raged on, the original crystal was dying. Each cluster that fell meant less power to it, and essentially less power to the planet. It took many centuries before the assaults began to desist. It now uses all of its power to keep the remaining clusters alive.

Many of the golems were angry and on the verge of starvation as the war ended. With so little sustenance left, it turned to the crystals themselves as sources of power. They constantly move, looking for any crystal pockets that remain.

As power from the crystals decreased, the planet began to decay. Cities turned to ruin, and the once proud species eventually was spread thin, with extinction looming on the horizon.

However, there is still hope.

The more pacifistic groups, usually revered by their species as mages or alchemists, looked into restoring power to the crystals using various techniques. One man in particular found Zinovea and created a special guardian for her, one well equipped to handle the ancient magics, in order to keep people out and any remaining golems away so studies could progress in peace.

Zinovea and their sisters are still struggling to survive, but decay has slowed to a crawl. Research is progressing just as slowly, so only time can tell if the tides will turn and life will eventually be restored to some extent.

---

Golems are protectors created by the first crystal. Crystals can breath "life" into stone, and while anything created with stone doesn't have any sentience beyond a certain extent, they have a very delicate system which must be recharged every so often. Before the war, the crystals satiated them just enough to keep them going, but as war raged on, energy came in short supply, and eventually some golems turned on their creators. They now live in the earth, trying to find any sustenance they can, and unable to comprehend that they're slowly killing the planet (and eventually themselves) with they rate they currently consume energy.

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