Whispers in the Stone

The excavation team has dismantled the gates without compromising the integrity of the dig site. The tunnels converge kilometers below the surface in an abandoned city dating many thousand years. It has been built with extraordinary craftsmanship in an environment that is deadly to most organic life.

With no sign of its founders, the city is populated instead by gruesomely grimacing crystal statues posed in lifelike situations as if frozen in time. There are statues operating mines, statues fallen over in agony, statues locked in embrace.

It seems unthinkable that the masterly stonecutters, capable of such beauty, would also make something so crude, yet the statues clearly held great significance in their society. They are featured prominently in carvings all around the city.

Translations of the carvings reveal that they all revolve around the enigmatic statues, called the Kha'lanka. Never are the stonecutters themselves mentioned. The Kha'lanka creation myth however tells of a race of Godlike creatures who breathed life into the mountain and birthed the Kah'lanka from fire and stone, deep within the world's molten core.

Could the stonecutters have imagined themselves as Gods over their creations? Or were the statues perhaps created in their image?

A material scan of the Kha'lanka statues has revealed that they were in fact once alive and their genetic composition resembles no other we have encountered before. They are a silicon-based lifeform that have somehow reverted back to a lifeless crystal state. Is it possible the stonecutters really did find a way to create life from fire and stone?

The stonecutters are the Kha'lanka! Closer study of their remains has shown that they were crystallized when their silicon-based molecules bonded with oxygen, forming quartz. The Kha'lanka habitat is at a depth where oxygen does not occur naturally. They developed as an anaerobic lifeform, suffering horrendously excruciating and drawn out deaths on exposure to air.

Surveys of the tunnel system confirm the suspicions of our scientists - until the first archaeology team pierced the tunnel system, the Kha'lankah civilization was still alive and thriving.

Our discoveries here have led to the invention of a technique where crystals are manufactured synthetically by oxidating artificially grown silicon-based cell-clusters.