The Discovery of Forgotten Arcane Artifacts
The Awakening Wards: The Return of the Golem-Forging Relics
As the Succession Wars dragged the Sphere into cycles of attrition and suspicion, a new shadow emerged—older than war and even the Great Houses themselves. Rumors began to spread from the deepest ruins and most cursed corners of the world: the artifacts of the League of Stars—arcane devices tied to the creation of their legendary Arcane Golems—had begun to resurface.
These constructs, known as Starforged Titans in ancient records, were the crown jewels of the League’s magical might: towering golems infused not only with spellcraft and metal but with conscious pattern-weaves, giving them limited sentience and purpose. They were not mass-produced engines of war, but symbols of unity and guardianship, each uniquely forged by a council of artificers, inscribers, and high mages. Most were believed destroyed during the fall of Lumina’s Hearth or scattered when the Astral Paths collapsed.
And yet, one by one, their foundational components began to emerge.
It started with the Soul-Circuits of Elaris, discovered in a collapsed temple beneath the Aetherglass Sea. Then came the Core Glyph-Stones, unearthed by Davion archaeomages in the Red Ash Wastes. Liao spies stole a partially intact Weaveheart Sphere from a ruined Star League observatory just weeks later. The artifacts, known collectively as the Awakening Wards, held the secrets not just to building Arcane Golems, but to awakening those that remain dormant. Each Great House reacted with a mix of awe and dread.
House Davion, long revering the League’s ideals, launched formal expeditions to reclaim and reassemble the artifacts in hopes of restoring order through legacy.
House Kurita sought them secretly, intending to forge golems not of gold and crystal, but of obsidian and discipline.
House Marik’s Arcane Guilds saw the artifacts as a blueprint for fusing soul and machine—an opportunity to create constructs that could command legions or rewrite magical warfare.
House Liao infiltrated excavation teams across the Sphere, weaving illusions around entire dig sites, while attempting to recode the golem-forging glyphs to serve their ever-changing doctrine.
House Steiner poured its vast wealth into mercenary-led recoveries, offering whole provinces in exchange for intact relics. Some whisper they already control a half-functional Titan buried beneath the ice of Tharkad.
Conflicts sparked in places once untouched by war—forgotten libraries became battlefields, and remote monasteries saw spells clash over forgotten vaults. Once keepers of the knowledge, the Order of the Astral Scribes declared the artifacts “sacred and unstable,” urging caution. Some artifacts remain inert. Others hum softly, reacting to the presence of magic or intent. A few, too many, have activated momentarily, unleashing construct echoes that devastated entire teams of would-be salvagers. One entire Liao expedition vanished into a shimmering vault of golden crystal, last seen walking single-file toward a figure too tall to be human.
The race is on—not merely for relics, but for the right to command the guardians of a forgotten golden age. And in the silent dark beneath the earth, some old golems wait... for new masters.
“The League did not fall because it was weak. It fell because it feared its own creations. We have no such fear.” — Magister Thennak Vos, Guild of Broken Iron, House Marik
