Kunza

Phase 1:
The flight to Dragonhome was uneventful, just as I told Murk it would be when he refused to make the trip himself. I have to admit, after leaving the Labyrinth, air that didn't smell like plants was pretty refreshing, but Dragonhome is a... visually striking place. That's about the nicest way I can put it, the vast plains of drab, inhospitable rock aren't particularly inviting, though there is the occasional crystalline stalagmite sticking out of the rubble. The best part of the trip was the end; seeing dragons of all shapes, sizes, colors, and flights coming together to help unearth this massive secret beneath our claws was inspiring, to say the least, and I'm excited to join them.
The Master Archaeologian was lovely to meet, an old nocturne named Velya, she welcomed us all and sent us down to her Head Archaeologist in order to be divided up and assigned tasks. His name was Armik, a fairly intimidating looking snapper, but surprisingly anxious.... in fact, every guild member I've met so far has seemed incredibly stressed... I suppose I can understand why, coordinating a project of this size. My first order of business was to begin cataloguing things, which was absolutely perfect, considering what I came for. The assignment was just menial stuff, organizing fossil records, but I made my own catalogue to bring back for Murk. It really is fascinating stuff, but I think I understated my archaeological experience to the guild, because I don't think I'm supposed to be able to tell that there's something off about these records.

Phase 2:
The main diggers have begun working on a vertical shaft in order to get deeper, and they're uncovering stranger and stranger fossils. Or, they just look stranger, the more I catalogue them. I get the beastclan ones, but they don't look like any kind of beastclan I've ever heard of before. Prehistoric beastclans would make sense, I suppose the modern tribes had to evolve from something, but none of the experts seem to be able to recognize them either. I've asked to be reassigned to the actual digging, in the hope that I can see one of these relics unearthed in real time. I can probably help out more effectively like that anyway.
While digging, my crew and I came across one of these fossils encased in a deposit of glowing gemstones. This is some key context I was missing when cataloguing these fossils. Once we found it, we were reassigned to allow more practiced claws to collect it, but I got to keep a piece of the gem. It didn't look like kunzite, my namesake that helped light up these tunnels when powered by dragon breath, and honestly, I have no idea what it is. If it follows the same logic as the pink crystals in the Starfall Isles, the implications of such powerful and ancient magic use would be fascinating, but that's just speculation. Getting moved from tunnel to tunnel gave me ample time to figure out if there was an underground route back home, but I couldn't find anything. I've given up on any form of stealth, as I'm technically not doing anything wrong anyway, and it's difficult to be stealthy when there's a swarm of lavender fireflies that have been following me since birth. My father Lazuli has it too, he called it a pheromonal abnormality that attracts them. The rest of my crew seems to appreciate the extra lighting, though, so I've got that going for me.

Phase 3:
The other dragons are resting as I write this, though not all of us rest easy. Many members of the guild have gone missing, including the Master Archaeologian's apprentice, a spiral named Fetter. I've heard through the other volunteers that guild members aren't the only ones going missing, and I can only hope I'm not next... On a brighter note, we've discovered a whole new network of tunnels at the bottom of this shaft, one of which leads to actual ruins! We broke through the wall of earth to find an open room with some ancient stone pillars, and steps that appear to have been carved centuries ago. The opposite end of the room had caved in, so we've got more excavating to do, once our break is over.

Update: The digging has gotten easier. So much easier that we don't even need blasting powder anymore, and the walls of the tunnels we come across are clearly not natural. We're definitely digging up some ancient construction, so we're putting up extra support beams to be safe. The real reason I'm writing this, however, is the light. The further down we dig, the more the tunnel is filled with this strange green glow, and nobody can find the source... I don't like it. It reminds me of my mother's stories of the rip in reality she once helped guard, and how that forbidden portal poisoned the world around it with it's green lightning and its alien monstrosities... Perhaps it's just that association, but the light makes me feel sick...

Phase 4:
As we continue to dig, we've found more and more unnatural relics. The source of the green light turned out to be a strange crystal, in a room that looks like some kind of temple, and there's a tundra in a mask that keeps wandering in to stare at it. This does not ease my worries, or answer anybody's questions about anything. We decided not to mess with it, and dig in a different direction. The stone is carved in a style nobody can recognize, none of this even looks dragonmade... I think we might have discovered a new type of beastclan, a type with disturbing and never-before-seen abilities. As we unearth these ruins, it looks as though these tunnels have caved in... deliberately. Someone wanted these secrets buried.
Almost all of the workers are becoming more tense, whether through anticipation or dread. The atmosphere down here would be unbearable if not for Apera. Normally, my crewmates and I are too busy digging or thinking to actually hold much of a conversation, though that masked tundra I spoke with this morning was nice enough, but Apera's been incredibly friendly and easy to connect with. We've been discussing our theories of what might be down there, and she thinks that this is where the Speaker and her people fled to after their era of peace in the Second Age. We have differing opinions on the green light and the crystal, though, she doesn't seem worried about it at all. In fact, she's managed to stay in high spirits the entire time. As a wind-aligned imperial seven times my size, it can't be easy for her down here, but her passion for archaeology is incredible, and somehow she always finds a way to make us both laugh. As curious as I am about what exactly the end of this dig will bring, I'm not sure I want to find out just yet.

Phase 5:
Once we fully unearthed the caved-in ruins, the Preservation Guild called for a break for us to make camp farther away from the ruins, and forbade us from exploring them while on this break. Frankly, I'm not sure what they expected from us. Apera and I took a break of course, the food looked delicious, and Shadow - that masked tundra I mentioned earlier - invited us to a nice open area to eat together. Unfortunately, she didn't actually show up... As we were eating, we planned to sneak away and find out what was in those ruins. I would be going in person, but due to her size, Apera decided to send in her pet gem guardian instead. On the topic of gems, our meal had allowed us to finally have enough of a break from digging to let some of the earth fall off of us. Poking through her especially thick coating of dirt, I could see Apera had this gorgeous turquoise gembond that caught the light of the oil lamps perfectly. I can't quite place what mineral it reminds me of. Not actual turquoise, or sapphire... an unusual type of chalcedony, maybe? Whatever it resembles it's beautiful... Anyway, Gyre - the gem guardian - and I snuck into the ruins fairly easily. If there's one thing Murk taught me, it's how to get into places you're not supposed to be. The interior is definitely sized more for dragons than for beastclans, but the architecture doesn't look like anything we've seen before. It's truly fascinating, and I took a few rubbings of the carvings on the walls. We were careful not to disturb anything that might affect the guild's studies of the place, but we just had to look in some of the deeper rooms. One of the first rooms we came across were filled with... eggs. dust-covered shelves of dragon eggs, of every size and element. There was a larger nature egg near me, and all I did was touch it... I suppose after all this time in hibernation, it would only take a tiny bit of nature magic to let it know one of it's own kind had come back for it. It began to glow and split, and before I knew it, a grayish hatchling had spilled out on the floor. It looked like a ridgeback, but there was something off about it somehow... Maybe it's a prehistoric ridgeback? Or maybe I'm just terrible with children? Either way, I'm royally screwed if the guild finds out about this. I did not sneak into these ruins to steal artifacts, let alone to become a parent to a prehistoric child. Gods help me, I'm so screwed.
As soon as the hatchling had figured out how to stand, I carried her out and snuck back to the camp without being noticed. Quite a feat, honestly, considering she was over half my size. Apera was obviously surprised, especially when Gyre came back with a small plague egg. Great, we just stole two prehistoric children. I frantically asked Apera whether she'd seen a ridgeback baby before and if she could tell me whether this hatchling looked normal to her, and if she could put the plague egg back before we screwed up the dig site even more, but nope, it was already hatching. Apera was now holding a strange looking fae, with over 20 crimson eyes dotting its body. As usual, she was somehow not concerned about this situation in the slightest, and decided to name the many-eyed prehistoric fae Bugsy. I supposed this giant child in my arms needed a name as well, and until further notice, decided to call her Fossil. By some divine mercy, Apera was able to conceal both children in her massive satchels, buying us some time before we got our tails kicked by the guild. I signed up for an archaeological dig, dammit, not parenthood.

Everything's gone to hell. There's a river underneath this cavern, and it's been wearing away at the floor for years now, and all it took was a little extra weight to collapse... Me and Apera just wanted to get a closer look at the ruins, then there was a crack, and screaming, and a huge chasm in the floor that just kept splitting apart, and when I looked down, she was lying in the river at the bottom. Even from there I could tell there was something wrong with her wing. I flew down immediately, it's definitely broken. I knew enough first aid to splint it and keep it from moving, but she can't get out. She told me to get Bugsy and Fossil out first, they're waiting on the other end of the cave right now and aren't hurt themselves, thank the gods, but we need more rope for Apera to climb out. As I went back to the mouth of this cave I saw that a bunch of other dragons had fallen through the floor as well, including the Head Archaeologist Armik, so I went to find Shadow, the only other person I really talk to down here, to tell her to get help from the surface. I thought I checked the cave, and even went down to that creepy green crystal chamber to see if she was staring at that again, but she wasn't there. She must have gone for help while I was getting the hatchlings. I've been gathering as much rope as possible and sent 3 complete strangers up for more of it, but right now, I'm on my way back to the hole to go wait with Apera. The only reason I'm bothering to write this is because there's nothing else I can really do.

Discovery
It really amazes me how little everyone worries about things like the cave floor falling apart. Apera just kept telling me to calm down, as if she hadn't been stuck in a river for the past few hours. Once everyone else miraculously calmed down enough to investigate the river, that Deepseer Tetra announced that the Tidelord had deliberately redirected it here for some reason. How this helped the situation in any way, I still fail to understand. Other dragons have been traversing the river around us, and downstream, they managed to find a large chamber full of statues. Of course, Apera wanted to investigate immediately, despite her broken wing... Of course it was a bad idea, but this mystery was the one good part about this situation, and I couldn't just tell her to sit that out in a freezing river. Even if there was nothing there, I thought she might be able to find some dry ground to rest on.
However, if there was truly nothing of interest in that chamber, I wouldn't bother writing about it. The statues were... fascinating. For structures that must have been buried for eons, they were beautifully intricate and were made of a mineral I had never seen or read about before. It came in a multitude of colors, and depicted dragonlike creatures never before seen on Sornieth. Apera and I instantly went to examine them. I chose one in a sitting pose, made of a strange purplish-indigo variant of that mineral. It looked like amethyst, or charoite, or maybe some form of sapphire, but the other properties didn't fit any of those. As the other dragons around us were looking at the statues as well, the chamber began to rumble. At first I was worried it was going to collapse, but the statue began to shake as well, as if it had a will of its own. I leaned in closer to observe the cracks in the indigo mineral, hoping I could get a sample before we evacuated, then it crumbled away, and the dragon underneath looked at me with deep green eyes.
This is absolutely not what I was expecting when I signed up for this dig, but I would say I handled it pretty well, considering a statue just came to life in front of me. The large dragon shook off her coiled mane, sending indigo shards across the floor. Looking around, I saw the same was happening to the other statues... it was incredible.
Physically, the dragon was perfectly fine, and I thank the Earthshaker for making her both able and willing to help Apera get out of this place. She was also mentally in mint condition, though this unfortunately meant that she couldn't answer any questions about any of this, and was almost as clueless as we are. The only thing I could learn from her was that these new dragons were called Obelisks, and that they were created to help defend Sornieth from... something. Not exactly comforting, but at least she had some vague knowledge about how the world worked, so we weren't starting completely from scratch.
As we were returning to the surface, I may have lost Bugsy and Fossil. Of course they wouldn't have waited at the other end of the cave for that long, I couldn't believe I had forgotten about them. Apera sent her gem guardian Gyre to find Bugsy while I went after Fossil. Thankfully, she successfully understood my warning that the hole in the floor was to be avoided, and it didn't take too long to find her. She had found the chamber with the green crystal and stood staring at it, dead silent. She didn't even register my presence at first, only when I pulled her out of the room did she decide to look up at me. Her eyes had that same green glow to them as the crystal. I questioned her about it, a lot, but she just wouldn't explain. She didn't even seem to register anything might be wrong, and her vision didn't seem to be affected in the slightest. All I could do was lead her back to the others, where Gyre and Bugsy had thankfully returned, and Apera was showing off her digging skills to our new jasper-colored and thoroughly impressed Obelisk friend. (She seemed to like the name Jasper when I suggested it, even more so when I showed her the sample of jasper I keep in my travel collection.) On the way to the surface, Apera and I decided that she would come back to the Haven with me, since her home was too far to walk to, and there was no way she could fly with her broken wing. As we sat outside the mine entrance and figured out the easiest route to walk back the next morning, we noticed Jasper had been surprisingly quiet. Looking over, she was staring up at the darkening sky above us in absolute awe. When I asked if she was alright, she said that when the Earthshaker told her and her siblings about the sky, he had never told her it was this beautiful. From my point of view it wasn't anything special, mostly obscured by dull purple clouds... I suppose it's easy to take the sky for granted when you're born and raised under it.
Overall, I'd consider this dig a success. It did not go as planned in any sense, but we've found quite a few new friends underneath the earth. However, a lot of questions remained unanswered. If the Obelisk were created recently, then where did those ruins and that egg cache come from? Where did all the missing dragons disappear to? What in the Earthshaker's name is going on with that glowing green crystal?, and why are my this child's eyes glowing because of it? It's alright, though, I can rest a little easier knowing that the guild will be studying all of this relentlessly, and I fully intend to keep an eye on their findings. I may not have learned as much as I'd hoped to when I joined this dig, but at least I got to answer one of my many questions. During the meal we shared before sneaking into investigating and exploring the ruins, I couldn't figure out what mineral Apera's gembond reminded me of. It took a couple of days, but I finally figured it out, it reminds me of Apatite.

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A Reminder Don't forget to take care of yourself! Or I'll teleport send Bugsy track you down and pelt you with caterpillars! You cannot escape the caterpillars!!

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