Calagah

Calagah is an ancient alien ruin on the southern continent of Anshar on Emesh, located in a coastal basalt cleft visible from the sea. The site is the focus of an ongoing excavation by the xenologist Valka Onderra and is attributed to the Quiet, an extinct xenobite civilization that built it nearly a million years ago. The exterior facade is approximately three hundred feet wide, constructed from stone so black it appears darker than any natural color; its surface is glassy and smooth, with a molecular structure that field scanners cannot read — returning only 'black.' In direct sunlight the stone remains cool in most places but presses a violent, shooting cold into the palm in certain spots. A complex layering of columns, arches, angled buttresses, and pilasters converges inward from three hundred feet to the width of a single door, with every element canted by exactly 0.374 degrees from true.

The interior is lit by phosphorescent tape strips. Descending from the surface entrance, one passes via a rattling metal staircase to a plastic gangway leading to the pillared exterior, then through a branching junction room, down a gradual slope through a main tunnel approximately a thousand feet long, and finally into the sepulcher — a keyhole-shaped chamber with graceful webbed pillars stretching to the ceiling. The round domed junction chamber's ceiling is covered in interlocking circular glyphs resembling Umandh knot-pattern artwork. Lower levels flood seasonally; additional sealed chambers have been detected by neutrino scanners built into the bedrock — constructed already sealed, as if space were inserted into solid rock. Deeper tunnels are circular in cross-section and coated floor-to-ceiling in shallow circular anaglyphs of varying sizes. One passage leads to a hidden chamber containing a massive single glyph approximately fifty feet high on a raised three-step dais, though this chamber cannot be found on any subsequent search.

Above the sepulcher, the ruins connect to the surface via ventilation shafts that pierce the stonelands; some are deep enough to kill a person who falls in. All of Calagah's tunnels — ascending and descending branches, loops, and spirals — ultimately funnel into the single dead-end keyhole sepulcher chamber, as if the ancient builders designed everything to converge on this one point. The sepulcher itself contains a stone altar at its center — waist-high, wide enough for two men to lie on — beneath a hanging tongue of dark glassy material descending from the ceiling like a uvula, cracked under the pressure of geologic time. The Chantry swept the site in the first century of Imperial occupation and currently tolerates the excavation as theologically low-risk, though Tor Ada warns that all findings will eventually be sequestered. The Jaddian Satrap of Ubar compares the cave-like interior to Cielcin vessels she has encountered, and the Cielcin raiders who shelter here declare the site a holy place not meant for humanity. During the Cielcin incursion, combatants descend through a ventilation shaft, fight through the upper tunnels, and are driven to the sepulcher, where their captain Uvanari formally surrenders to Hadrian. The excavation camp is visually conspicuous from miles away across the coastal stonelands.