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Save Point: Zodiacal Light

Somewhere In Arizona

It's the pattern on the ceiling that catches Terrownes attention when they burst into the empty room, not any of the many other objects lying around all over the place that speak volumes of potential significance. Although the electric light has been reinvented now for about a decade, admittedly as yet without the carbon or tungsten filament that would make it practical for home use, the inhabitant of the room has installed a brilliant central light source hidden under a small frosted hemisphere of white glass. Someone who keeps up with technology would probably mistake it for an incandescent bulb because of this, but he recognizes that aggressive white brightness, like misplaced sunlight. It's a light-emitting diode array and it definitely shouldn't be here.

The brothers nose around the room like animals hunting, touching things gently and pushing them aside, looking under them for hidden traces and scenting the faintly cinnamon smell of the sethura that lingers in places where they live for long periods of time. "Hey, he has electrics!" notes the white brother, when he finally notices. "I seen a demonstration once, but I shouldn't think he'd want it in his house."

There are other tell-tale signs of advanced technologies. The roof has been coated with a fibrous, self-expansive textured coating like plaster that has been spray-painted on, with little micaceous bits mixed into it that randomly glitter as the observer moves about and they catch the light. Asbestos or some other long-grained amphibolite may or may not have been used as an ingredient, but the effect is stunning and must make the roof look like the night sky in low light conditions.

Centered around the central diode, which takes the place of the solar principle, an elaborate zodiac has been marked out by pressing pattern-platens into the roof material before it fully dried, to flatten parts of the surface and make them smooth like plaster. Inside the innermost circle, a two-headed lunar moon-snake serpentines out in both directions, like something out of aztec art, then inside the following ring, there's a cutout into what can only be described as a sethura sex scene, placed to emphasize the spined cock of the male on one side and the genital spaces of the female on the other as they entwine.

Further out and approaching the perimeters of the room, twelve individual symbols are placed in a wider circle, like the temple zodiac at Dendara, with slight vagaries of placement to allow for minor variations in the underlying architecture of the roof, such that they appear perfectly symmetrical from directly under the lamp. These are not the symbols of the earthly zodiac however, or at least not completely, because they seem to represent the Houses of the Demimondaine as described to him in one of Sethkill's long-gone reminiscences. There are certain local influences; the sign that should be Leo is depicted instead as a female lioness, something that a werewolf with some cultural history might be likely to do, and the Draco that stands opposite her has two sets of ears and a split tail, much like himself. Yet apart from that, the symbols suggest a very long history of archetypal development entirely separate to any human culture.

"Huh. Creepy room," is the comment the indian brother limits himself to. He seems to have recognized the symbols, as though they're a more sophisticated version of something he's seen before, perhaps as a series of pictoglyphs or similar. "Those are skin-walker symbols. They mean something like, ah, 'seasons', or maybe the magical influences that each season represents. Like, what sort of magic will work best then, and what other things are associated with it that you should do."

"I wonder where they're getting the electricity," mutters Terrowne. "They must have a small water-powered generator in one of the local streams or weirs. Otherwise we'd be able to hear it."