Golemancy

Ever since the days of yore when the ancestors of the dwarves toiled endlessly away in the heart of the mountains, carving vast halls from naught but glittering gems and rough hewn stone, have the earthen beings known simply as “Golems” existed. It is quite true that the dwarves are the creators of these marvels of engineering and magical prowess, but even as the mightiest of men cannot weather the passage of time neither can knowledge itself. Despite what they have lost the dwarven folk stay very true to the nature of their ancestors, for even the dwarves of yore were a secretive untrusting people. Much knowledge was held by the very few, and the very elite, among the dwarves. This proved to be a grave error when the Ironborn took power. During the blood age and the purging of dwarven knowledge a majority of these close kept secrets were destroyed forever, those who held them slaughtered mercilessly. Amongst the plethora of knowledge lost was something invaluable; how golem cores functioned.

Indeed it is true that we might know how to create golems, but we do not know how they function. We are but mere workers, blindly following the blueprints to a grand machine without truly knowing what makes it tick. Tick it does, however, and thus we continue to make more and more of these stone behemoths. But, as they always say, “what goes up must come down.” I like to say something quite similar, “what is lost can be found.” Would you believe it if I said that I may have found the reason for the tick?

Golems are rather peculiar creatures, created from stone, precious metals, and nothing else. The purpose of the runes on the outside of a golem are known, from the runes that provide the many senses (touch, sight, etc), to the runes that run the length of the golems body (they provide the information and instructions to and from the core). What has not been known, however, is what the runes on the surface of the core do. A golem core has six sides, five of which are required to have very specific runes on each else the golem will not function. It has been the general assumption that these runes served as the “brain” of the golem. While this may still be, and likely is, true for three of these runes, I believe I have found something rather extraordinary regarding the remaining two.

These two runes must always be created in a specific order and up until now no one has known why. The rune that is created first acts as a sort of “storage” for the information that the second provides. The reason for needing to create these runes in a particular order is because the second rune only works once. Upon the completion of the second rune it activates instantly, gathers the necessary information, and then burns out in a manner of milliseconds. The information gathered is then stored via the first rune and utilized in the golems overall function. What is the information gathered then, exactly? It is my belief that the rune examines the golems creator and, more specifically, their soul. It then takes the so called “blueprint” that it observes from its creator's soul and applies it to the golems core in the place of the first rune. I have dubbed the examining rune the “transcribing” rune and the other the “transcribed” rune.

This explains a great deal of things, like why a golem has to be humanoid, or why a golem cannot be created by a soulless being such as a homunculus. Furthermore it explains how thanhic golems achieve sentience. The soul taken from soulbound cores is simply a power source, just as the thanhium is in thanhic golems. The small amount of lingering memories from soulbound golems are just a side effect of using this form of golem. The actual sentience and intelligence of a golem is spawned from the information that the core rune draws from its creator. The implications of this discovery are massive. I cannot let this knowledge be forgotten again.

-Excerpt from the field journal of Dizzy Irongrinder; Golemancer

Summary:

To summarize the above lore:

- Golem cores gain their intelligence and motor capacities from a specific pair of core runes.

- These core runes gain said information from the golemancer who creates the golem.

- The information is taken from the golemancers own “soul blueprint” upon the immediate completion of the newly dubbed “transcribing” rune.

- The transcribing rune then places the information on the “transcribed” rune before promptly burning out and destroying itself.

- The golem references the information on the transcribed rune in order to figure out how to move its body, think, see, articulate speech, etc.

What does this change?:

There are several things that this change / addition does to golemancy as a whole:

1. Explains how golem cores function

2. Explains how Thanhium golems achieve the same sentience and intelligence as soulbound ones despite lacking a real soul

3. Explains why soulless creatures are incapable of performing golemancy

4. Explains why golems can only take a humanoid shape

5. Explains why one cannot simply open up a golem in order to learn golemancy by copying the runes (the transcribing rune burns out and destroys itself instantly).

6. Explains why golemancy must be taught and cannot be learned by books (The runes on a golem are very fine and require a masters hand and an experts eye. A drawing will not suffice. It must be taught because the student must be present during the creation of the transcribing rune to observe how it is made before it burns out and destroys itself.)