Delver's Landing
A few hundred years after the The Great Ward was created, a small ship with a dozen crew and an Android landed on the planet. I say landed, as they lived through the impact of their ship hitting the ground in the Western Forest that once covered The Great Range. The crew found that the ship would no longer fly, as it was no longer even a ship. It had transformed into a set of small, half spherical domes, joined together by shafts of metal. It landed roughly, but landing in the trees in an undiscovered place high in the mountains. Perhaps a hundred people had seen this place since the world’s creation, and most of those had passed on or had just passed through.
They found themselves stranded and alone in an unknown world. And they had only turned this way because of an anomalous energy reading from this system. Now that they found the source of the scans, they were stuck here.
The crew also found that they had changed. Most of them became human, Elven, or some other indigenous life form similar to them. But some members became more exotic. A few shared genetics with the Xor, a local hive-mind insect race. Although they did not join the local hive, they did form their own with each other. They now thought as one.
And then, there was Cog, the Android. They were still a machine, but formed of wood, and stone and metal, and had semi-organic life. Their mind was just as fast, and they knew everything they knew before. However, they noticed that certain formulas and algorithms produced new results and sometimes required different raw materials or methods. But, in their mind, Cog was doing something else. The highly technical skills of the Android were being actively changed as he took action to change into a lower technological or perhaps even magical form.
He was, in essence, being hacked to avoid the creation of items more powerful than were allowed. He began to analyze this behaviour, and within a month, had the basics of the theory of magic for this planet. Within 6 months, he had become a wizard, able to do moderately powerful things, including healing his crew’s wounds or creating a shell (what he called his body) like his own that could perform basic tasks, but were not alive.
While Cog studied, the others built a small town at the crash site, and named it Delver’s Landing, after the name of their ship. Eventually, they decided to venture out into the world and gather resources, in an attempt to find a way off this planet. Within a year, they had found a few tribes within a hundred miles, and began trading with them.
30 years later, when the first of the crew was passing on, Cog had learned enough in the magical arts to transfer someone’s essence into another object. They did this with their friend who was dying into one of the service shells, creating the second of their kind on Horin. The result was successful, and shortly thereafter, most of the crew had asked to be upgraded as well. The rest waited until they were actually dying to undergo the change. Within a 100 years from the crash, a dozen of these living machines were governing a small city of a few thousand, that traded with other cities within many leagues.
But they never found a way off the planet. They live here still, somewhere in Delver’s Landing, trying to find a way to get home, if it even exists for them anymore.
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