Neither its maker nor its subject has been identified. It has outlasted both.
Zoomorph in Ejecta is the designation applied to a small animal carving recovered from pyroclastic ejecta on an asteroid in the Zodiac Village chain. The piece is carved from a dense, dark volcanic stone and depicts an animal whose species remains unresolved: the form is clearly zoomorphic, with limbs, a defined head, and a posture suggesting deliberate naturalism, but no feature is pronounced enough to settle the question of identification. A thin lobe of dark basaltic glass, consistent with rapidly cooled volcanic melt, has fused to one surface of the piece, attesting to the object’s passage through intense heat at some point before deposition. Set within the carving is a crystal of unusual character, identified by those with sufficient knowledge as a shard of the Mythekah.
History
The asteroid on which the zoomorph was found lies within the chain of rocky bodies orbiting the greater mass of Zodiac Village in the astral sea. Its ruins predate the Zodiac clans and have not been attributed to any known culture. The pyroclastic matrix from which the carving was extracted is consistent with ejecta from the eruption of Mount Origin, suggesting the object was thrown from Rolara into the astral sea during that event and drifted into the Zodiac chain in the centuries that followed.
When the zoomorph was made, by whom, and for what purpose are not recorded. The ruins in which it was found yield no clear cultural markers, and the carving style does not correspond to any Jiao, Harengon, or otherwise identified tradition. Whether the Mythekah shard was incorporated at the time of the carving’s creation or added at a later date, the pyroclastic encasement makes stratigraphic analysis impossible.
Significance
The presence of a Mythekah shard distinguishes the zoomorph from an ordinary carved figure. The Mythekah is known to almost no one in the current era; identification of the crystal requires specific and rare knowledge. What relationship the original maker had to the Mythekah, or whether the crystal was understood as such when it was set into the carving, remains unknown.
To those without the means to examine it closely, the zoomorph presents as an unremarkable piece of dark stone with a flaw of glass fused to its surface.
Table of Contents
Item type
Wondrous Item
Rarity
Rare