Definitely something that’s been on my mind too, especially with Havenstone mentioning that we’ll see adamantine stone on the inside of the Wards. Acknowledging that pottery isn’t people and architecture isn’t culture, we could nevertheless construct an ancient aether-based civilization stretching from Vigil to Corlune that would’ve collapsed hundreds of years ago. The question then would be whether there’s meaningful evidence of that, but our rebellion really hasn’t had a chance to explore places that would have that evidence, since we’ve mostly been in the woods, in the mountains, or in a place where nearly everything has been destroyed.
“Do you know who built it?”
“Swive me, no. Always been here, the nomads say. Corlune has some old buildings that look like these, and they’re older than the Hegemony.”
I suspect Archlich Ghaesh would be able to answer a lot of these questions, with his centuries of knowledge. Who knows, maybe Ghaesh comes from this ancient civilization.
It has made me revisit my hypothesis of Cunning-Quick as the creator of Vigil; now I’m toying with Cunning-Quick as the one who rediscovers Vigil by way of the boulder of dreams. To pivot back to Cunning-Quick for some addenda to my earlier thoughts…
Cunning-Quick’s “family” exiling her to the driest wastelands and summoning Kargash was weird to me before, but it clicked for me recently that the Brauracha people mythically all descend from Brurq the Kinslayer: this allows us to view the Brauracha people as a “family”, and fits with other testimonies about the Xaos-storms where it’s the Goety of the Brauracha as a whole that caused them.
Past proud Kargash crept Cunning-Quick
Feared not, stole his spear
And fled again laughing—ha!—out into the wild wastes
To trick, tease, taunt, seize,
Slay Kargash’s children with Kargash’s weapons
Live free from her family
Never kneel nor obey. To this day.
It’s also been tricky to interpret these lines, but now that I’m reading them, I’m getting a sense that they could be symbolic of Xaos-storms, emanating out from Vigil into the wild wastes, Kargash’s weapon to slay Kargarsh’s children (the Brauracha), rejecting the meta-telos to return to original form (not kneeling or obeying that supposedly fundamental idea).
I don’t think it should be literally interpreted in that way, but I don’t have a good interpretation for Cunning-Quick’s fate and this idea seemed compelling.