“What is all this?” she asks Edger.

“Relics from another world, that also happens to be our world.”

Dyeawan doesn’t understand, but there’s more than enough to distract her from that answer.

Two truly giant stone statues tower over the endless stacks and piles. They were obviously carved to oppose each other. The first is an armored warrior grasping a curved sword. It’s facing off against a monstrous creature with the head of a dragon, the body of a man, and the claws of an eagle. Dyeawan has never seen anything like it in the Capitol, nor artifacts as bold and full of life and death and human interaction as the rest of these.

Crachian art and architecture are touted as second-to-none, and they are undoubtedly beautiful, but they lack a quality she’s seeing here for the first time in her life. Dyeawan can’t define it for herself at first, but as she absorbs more and more of the artifacts filling the space around her she begins to realize what that quality is.

Crache never honors or immortalizes people or events, not in stone or in word or on canvas. They produce monuments only to the nation itself, never individuals, not even the Skrain, whose name is whispered in the streets among even people like Dyeawan.

She studies the images of the people in the artifacts. While the style and material changes their proportions and exaggerates their features, they’re all of one discernable race. When painted in color, they have golden skin and eyes of sharp oval. Their hair, worn long most often, is either rendered black or white with age.

“These people,” she says, pointing at a triptych of a grand feast. “They all look the same. I mean, not the same, not exactly the same, but all look… they’re the same color, their faces are the same shape.”

“Yes.”

“Who are they?”

“I like to think of them as the first architects. They designed and built an earlier, obsolete version of our society. But we owe much to them. And they had their time of innovation, some of them worth preserving. We still eat the food they taught us to cook. We’ve adopted many of their weapons of wars. And many of their names and aspects live on in our people.”

“Then… this was here? This was all from here?”

“Once, and no more. It does seem like an ancient, distant land from what we’ve built, doesn’t it? Time truly is the grandmaster of artisans in that way. It can change and create things our hands will never be capable of creating.”

“But why is this all here, locked up this way? Why did you put it here?”

“Not me, Slider,” Edger corrects her. “My predecessors, the ones who formed the first Planning Cadre, they undertook this, thousands of years ago.”

“Then why did they do this? If this is all part of us, of Crache’s history?”