Excerpt from “The History of Visinell Sanctuary”, by Rennick Carever

When I was a boy, I used to try to teach myself to be brave by playing at the edges of the lamplight. I used to try and catch glimpses of the Watchers that I imagined were teeming out in the darkness beyond our Lamp’s light. Of course back then, I did not know how remote our Lamp is, not from other Lamps, but from the empires of the Thramorri. The only Watchers to ever pass near us were the occasional scouting party sent from one of the distant cities to the south. Our sanctuary is small; smaller than many of our neighbouring sanctuaries, and our Lamp is rather tiny and dim by comparison. There are only twelve families here and mine is the oldest. We Carevers have been living around our Lamp for many generations, and we have been tenders of the fungal caves for just as long. Our Lamp’s light does not shine brightly enough to grow strong crops, and so most of our surface harvest is stunted. Our fungal caves however produce mushrooms the size of dinner plates, and they teem with fat white grubs that we use to feed our knots of giant cave salamanders. Their meat is nourishing and tender and when we combine them with the cave fish, insects, mushrooms and the berries we grow on the surface, our sanctuary thrives. It is rather well known that our caves run beneath our entire town, but can only be accessed from a large entrance located in the rocks beneath the base of the hill that our Lamp sits on. In fact, the roots of the Lamp descend like a pillar through the main chamber near the entrance of the caves.
Our sanctuary is peaceful, known far and wide as a place of learning. We have our very own healer; a woman who has lived near this Lamp for over half a century and thanks to her our people remain strong and healthy. When our numbers grow too large, as they do from time to time, we arrange for some of our younger people to travel to one of the neighbouring Lamps or another. We make sure that our children are taught useful skills from a very young age so as to be useful to whatever new sanctuary they may be sent to. Our weavers, scribes, and smiths are the most skilled in the region. We have turned the deficiencies of our sanctuary into strengths and we are the better because of it. We have even discovered a way to replicate the light of the Lamps on our own – though on a tiny scale. While we cannot build Lamps or even the smaller, more portable Lanterns, we have invented what we call Sunstones; tiny, smooth stones about the size of a fist, that shine like miniature suns while casting no more warmth than one might find in a warm hearthstone. We use the stones to light our caves and for a dozen other tasks. They are remarkably helpful, though they are less useful when it comes to defending ourselves from the Watchers; Sunstones are too dim to do much more than hurt and blind them temporarily; if a Watcher is willing to risk the pain and the possibility of blindness, they are sometimes able to withstand a sunstone’s light in order to reach its wielder.
My role in the sanctuary is to preserve what knowledge we have so that future generations might benefit from it. While the minor loremen here are tasked with keeping records of the day-to-day activities of the village, my task is to determine what discoveries or events, or ideas are important enough to be recorded in a more permanent fashion. When something of this nature must be recorded, I etch a detailed account of it onto large, heavy plates of copper that have been specially treated to withstand the corruption of time. I use special acids to burn the knowledge into the surface of the plates, and then I coat them in an alchemical substance to preserve them. Once complete, I add the plates to a special repository at the base of our Lamp. Even if our village were to die, the knowledge would remain secure, protected by the most powerful sunstones we have. When the Dawn finally comes, it will find the knowledge of this sanctuary, even if all that is left of us is dust.

Rennick Carever, Third Loreman of Visinell Sanctuary, Seventh Lamp South, Third Lamp West from Brightspire, Month of the Tower, Year of the White Harvest, 2234CR