Scholars’ Vault
Overview
The Scholars’ Vault is a massive structure located within a vast cavern deep in the City of Scholars. The cavern features wide openings in the ceiling and served as a designated rendezvous point for the Mesektet airship.
Nature and Function
The Vault functions as a gravity well pulling ideas rather than matter. Black monoliths engraved with gold veins float in the air above bluish shifting mist containing flows of fossilized memories and thoughts from another time. The density of concepts is extraordinary—the monoliths serve as strongboxes crammed with imprisoned thoughts, dreams, hopes, and prayers, containing the posthumous remnants of the souls of the City’s inhabitants.
Through Irises, observers can detect currents within the mist composed of information flows. The gravitational force affecting ideas draws powerful entities; Axiom’s Sap veinstones were wrapped in protective layers of ordinariness, blandness, and dullness to hide them from some entity’s hunger for concentrated concepts.
Strategic Significance
The area in front of the Vault’s entrance was established as a contact point for Expeditionary Corps units to reestablish communication with the Mesektet. Section 57 was dispatched to reach this location in 393 AC.
Discovery of Alfie Phillips
The journal of Alfie Phillips, communications officer of Section 57, was found near the Scholars’ Vault along with his body. Phillips had taken refuge on a ledge overlooking the Vault’s entrance after fleeing The Hunger, scanning the ceiling openings for the Mesektet while documenting the massacre of his unit.
Relationships
- City of Scholars: Parent location containing the Vault
- The Maze: Nearby level of the underground city
- Mesektet: Airship using the Vault area as rendezvous point
- Section 57: Unit dispatched to reach the Vault (393 AC)
- Alfie Phillips: Soldier whose body was found near the Vault
- Afanas Korovinovich: Yzmir Exalt who investigated the Vault’s true nature via Senka (393 AC)
- Senka: Chimera that flew above the monoliths during Afanas’s investigation
- Atsadi: Bravos Exalt who fought within the Vault, leaving gashes on monolith surfaces
- Waru Toowoom: Ordis Initiate who discerned the Vault’s true nature (393 AC)