The Sealed Archive
Recovered Documents of the Order · Ledger IV · From Scoundrel Games
Ledger IVThe Golems of the Moon
They built him an army out of granite and dressed it as heroes. It has never once spoken to him.
Filed under: the Vigil · the Moon · standing observation · do not approach · c. 50,000 BC
STANDING COUNT · LUNAR DEFENCE
Maintained by the Ledger. Exact figures held separately. Superseded entries retained.
at commission a legion
after the first war a legion, lessened
after the fleet no longer a legion
at the closing a scattering
last full count a handful
current a handful
No entry has ever been revised upward.
They built him an army, and they built it out of granite.
Not soldiers. Statues that walk. Perfect human replicas, carved to scale, enchanted with the heaviest magics anyone has ever committed to stone, and then dressed. That is the part nobody expects. They were given armour and helms and blades, and they were dressed deliberately as heroes out of legend, because the men who made them thought a defender should look like something worth defending.
The Source built them. The Order built them. Iyr built them, which matters, because he was the one who would have to stand beside them.
The Order was not called the Order then. The name came later, as names do when a thing gets large enough to need one.
They were made because Earth had been closed but not made unreachable, and the things that still wanted in came the long way, by ship. For a long age they came and were met, and the count went down. Long after that a whole fleet tried the crossing and the Moon broke it. One vessel was allowed to leave. Somebody wanted the news carried home.
Since then it has mostly been quiet, and quiet is what the count records.
Here is the thing about them that the Order never wrote down, because it is not the kind of fact a file has a field for.
They do not answer.They fight, they hold, they fall, and they do not speak, and they were never built to. He has stood beside them for fifty thousand years. He has never once been greeted. A man alone knows he is alone. A man with a legion of companions who cannot answer him learns something worse, slowly, over a very long time.
The Order keeps an arm called the Vigil, whose entire job is watching outward for something trying to come in. It is named for these. The name came long after the things it names, which tells you which of the two was the improvisation.
A few of them are still standing. They are the ones that outlasted everything that came, and they are battered past recognising. Whatever they were dressed as is mostly gone.
Two men walked past them in 1969 and did not look twice, because from any distance they are rocks.
Every culture your players have ever visited has the same story somewhere in it: the bronze giant, the stone champion, the armoured figure that comes when the walls are breached and never says a word. Your players have heard it a dozen times and filed it under myth. Then they find one, and the reason all those stories agree is that somebody stood on a hill a very long time ago and saw one walk.
Drawn from the sealed history.
The next page of the sealed history arrives Tuesday.
Recovered documents from the world behind the world, free, straight from the Scoundrels to you.