Watchtower of the Specular Portal
"In the beginning, we didn't know what we were looking for. We came up with all sorts of plans to enter the City, we even thought we could blow our way in, but we soon realized that the walls were impervious to harm. All we could really accomplish was blasting our camp. Then Len had a dream, the first of many. In it, the first Symmetry revealed itself.
We ignored it at first, but as our options were depleting, we turned our attention to her vision. Len guided us as best she could through the headaches. The design was flawed, but the outer structure seemed to respond to it, as if by some strange resonance. Our instruments picked it up, but we're far from getting any definitive answers."
Journal Entry 89 - Dr. Nazim Karat.
Writings of the Watchtowers.
Beyond Mage, the roleplaying game that revealed them to me, the Watchtowers are now fully integrated into my personal project, with an overarching narrative tied to legends and research about Atlantis, the ancient antediluvian civilization that's said to have been destroyed in a cataclysm some 12,000 years ago.
In my narrative, Atlantis was a real world-spanning civilization which possessed vast knowledge of the Universe and its workings. They built moving, transformative cities and fortresses that could navigate through land, air or underwater indistinctly, and they powered their creations with complex arrays of crystals and machines. While their Watchtowers were indeed used for military purposes, they were also places of learning and observation, rising many hundreds of meters above ground level to peer across great extensions of territory. Some of them were built into existing mountains and promontories, and matched their surroundings seamlessly. They could even support life, so they could take the shape of colossal trees.
After the downfall of the civilization, its greatest Mage-Priests rose to the Supernal Realms and manifested the Watchtowers there, as beacons of Truth that could help other prospective Mages regain their heritage in the millennia to come.
Here are some other examples of my Watchtower sketches from last year. The shades behind the images are other exercises I did on the other side of the paper, thought they looked cool so I highlighted them. You can check more of my work visiting my Instagram
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