First appearance: Into the Mirror 7–9 - Claws of Sand, Shifting Sands, Hourglass (session 2) · watch it on YouTube
The ziggurat is a vast stepped pyramid topped with a gem of glass or mirror that throws a beacon of light straight into the sky. Elianna first saw it in a vision of hope, though Flynry had spent years wandering the desert without finding a single structure. When the pair finally reached it with Cerys’ help, it stood at the center of a teeming city that was not what they expected.
Description
From outside, the ziggurat sits on a huge trapezoidal platform that stretches for miles, built like the bottom third of a pyramid. A second, massive ziggurat rises from the middle of it, “a ziggurat on top of a ziggurat.” A large gate waits at the top of the great stairs. The pyramid itself is immense and enclosed. It seems to touch the sky, its door is hundreds of feet high, and a slit-like opening glows with a pleasant bluish-green light.
The city around it is a dusty desert metropolis of tents, bazaars and paved streets, where thousands of people buy, sell, drink, eat and repair buildings. The desert’s green hue fades into ordinary sandstone tones in the ziggurat’s light. Sand is only a building material here, used alongside clay, wood and stone. Nothing is “ethereally made out of magic sand,” and no creatures are made of sand. The streets slope upward toward the ziggurat, and the buildings grow grander along the way, with columns, ornate decoration and government halls kept up by the monarchy. Wildlife is oddly sparse: the occasional rat and a horse or two. There are no children.
Inside, the ziggurat is cavernous and mostly empty. Bridges run in every direction over a chasm that drops hundreds of feet into darkness and sand. At its center stands a beautiful palace glowing in blues, with a throne hall. Tiny floating “stars,” no bigger than grains of sand, twinkle in the air, and passing through them feels like walking through bubbles. Holes in the summit let in light from the celestial bodies, and a series of mirrors bounces it into geometric patterns and great balls of ghostly blue light. The effect is soothing, “like… those blue street lights in cities… to calm people down.”
History
Into the Mirror 7–9
In Into the Mirror 7–9 - Claws of Sand, Shifting Sands, Hourglass (session 2), Elianna looked into Flynry’s sword in search of “any sign of hope… something with positive energy.” She saw the ziggurat and its beacon. Then the vision rewound along the path that led there, until it ended with her looking over her own shoulder in the mirror. The sword had shown her the truth: the place existed, on this very plane.
Elianna drew the path and the ziggurat and ran to Flynry, hiding the part of the page where she had been writing to the Grandmaster. Flynry was doubtful. “I haven’t seen a single structure of any kind,” he said. Elianna insisted they had to go. Flynry gently turned her arms around, because the drawing was upside down.
Into the Mirror 10–11
In Into the Mirror 10 Shatter + Into the Mirror 11 Mortaurios (ITM session 3), the travellers met Cerys. She recognized the pyramid, “in fact, a ziggurat,” and was trying to get back there. Another person from the city had once brought her there, but she had never been inside the ziggurat itself. She blew sand from her palm and spoke the name. The whisper echoed across an infinite distance, and the sand swirled into a mirror-like portal that carried them to the foot of the city’s stairs.
Flynry found the city almost unfathomable after his years in the wastes, “mundane in a way.” The lack of sand creatures unsettled him too: “Just when you think you know a place.” Then the royal military guards turned up. Their armor bore a crest shaped like the crystal atop the ziggurat, and they brought “simply a request from their majesties.” Cerys advised them to comply. The group made its way up through the city, and Flynry noted the route on the way. They passed through the towering door into the starlit chasm and its glowing blue palace.
Notable Figures
- Elianna: saw the ziggurat in a vision and mapped the way, upside down.
- Flynry: the doubtful wanderer whose sword revealed it.
- Cerys: knew the ziggurat and opened the portal that took the group there.