This post is dedicated to the lovely Loch.
The Forest of Worms is popularly held to be depthless, and exploration from the ground has certainly born this out. Whence then, comes the so-called 'Iron Panoply', which was retrieved about 150 years ago from the swollen stomach of an enormous worm creature during one of their attacks on the fortified border, and which is now kept displayed in the permanent collection of the Scholomance inside a vitrine of glass.
The 'panoply' is actually a single piece of what was presumably once a larger set - a breastplate (and a piece of gorget, fastened with a strange irregular clasp in the shape of a bladed star, now rusted together such that its mechanism is no longer discernable) of curious design, apparently human, but very large, and extremely heavy. The material is also strange, iron certainly, but alloyed with substances unknown to the chemists of the capital. The metal has formed (or grown?) crystalline ridges and striations, which sometimes form into 'spines' or 'blades' across its surface, which keep a fractally sharp edge. One of the many treasures of the Scholomance is a small knife made from one of these 'spines', once worn by the chancellor in a ceremonial sheath about the neck, but in modern times displayed with the other famous arms of that ancient institution in its grandest halls.
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Knowledge of the last flight of the Sphinx-Eater is a closely guarded secret, even inside the Baroness' elite spy services. She has run many programs over the years to attempt to reverse engineer the great balloon craft of the White City - once understood, the principles of lighter-than-air travel of this sort are not so difficult to put into practice - but she is always careful not to do so too publicly. The boundaries of Imperial tolerance towards their 'little brothers and sisters' in the Barony have been known to collapse without warning where military technologies are concerned. The Sphinx-Eater was the most successful of her prototypes, swift, reliable, and capable of propellor propulsion while air-born.
The Sphinx-Eater was stolen by the Baroness' old spy masters; two of her closest friends, Thomas and Chrysanth Wighter, who were also husband and wife. The three of them fought together in their younger mercenary days, and at that time they were known to be inseparable. The Wighters were an indispensable piece of the machinery that facilitated the Baroness' rise to political power, and were very often the muscle (or indeed to blade) in the dark that facilitated it. They were also celebrated adventurers and heroes in their own right, and travelled the world entire with many strange companions in pursuit of riches and glory for their patron. They presided over the Baroness' spy service for nearly three decades, and had her complete trust as advisors, seconds, companions, and, if rumours are to be believed, occasional lovers.
The Wighters had many children and their eldest was a son named Richart, who, with markedly less success than his parents, pursued a life as an adventurer and hired sword. Following baseless rumours of treasure in the forests along the border, he hired a band of ruffians and with them penetrated too far in and became trapped there, unable to fight his way out through the seas of bodies that swarmed about them. His parents, knowing him to be under-intelligent and over-ambitious, were in the habit of having him followed and reported on, and when the they heard of his situation they provisioned the Sphinx-Eater and stole her for her last voyage.
They arrived at the forest too late to save Richart, and, tragically, as they attempted to retrieve his torn body from the forest floor, allowed the steering equipment on the Sphinx-Eater to be somehow damaged. They were able to safely retreat back to the crippled airship, but were powerless to stop its flight into the unknown east across the tops of the great trees. Patriots to the end, the Wighters decided to make good use of the four messenger birds they had on board, and report their findings from the air at these extremest edges of the known world, before their inevitable deaths by privation.
What the contents of those four messages were, none but the Baroness and her chief advisors know, but air travel of any kind over the forested territories has been expressly forbidden and strictly enforced at her order. The Barony is a fragile island in an unending sea of the most terrible chaos. So it is said, and so it has ever been.
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Several years ago, the Baroness' name appeared in the proscriptions, and she was nearly assassinated by a conspiracy of angels and church priests. During the bloody purges that followed the church was quite radically restructured, and the spy services earned (more than once) their red-handed reputation, and the whole affair was kept as quiet as anyone could reasonably keep it.
During this coup, one of the infamous Church Assassins, who had taken the side of the conspirators and begun a spree of massacre and decapitation inside the Baronial palaces, happened by chance upon a room of sealed reports and other paraphernalia collected by field agents in the spy service. Using coded shorthand, he transcribed as much of the information as he was able - focussing at first on the details of the infiltration of the church by the Baroness' agents - on lists of names, on double and triple agents, the addresses of safe houses, etc. - but then, as he searched for more detail, on a strange series of reports on what he termed the 'great eastern expanse'. The coded messages were sold on the black market by a church official, trying (ultimately unsuccessfully) to raise funds and flee the capital with her life. They read as follows:
- Red earth, red sun(s plural?), a great field of bodies. Everything is red in this place. The bodies are burned up/swallowed by the suns, and the suns burn/swallow one another. The bodies speak by a mechanical transcription of the limbs: they speak the names of the suns.
- Great red trees, which hold up suns and bodies. The trees are arranged: both regular and symmetrical (emphasis in the original).
- Larger shapes within this configuration: black, not red, shapes of madness. Beasts perhaps, and very large, no two alike. Sometimes the shapes of people too in all the redness, but too large. The people tend(?) the trees and tend(?) the beasts, they are shod in black iron, they are symmetrical but not regular (emphasis in the original).
- The bodies in the red earth speak the names of the people who are shod in iron by mechanical transcription of the limbs.
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