Tenebric Bastion

Forged by the vault-smiths of House Mavraen nearly seven centuries ago, the Tenebric Bastion was not a simple automaton but a fielded law — a walking garrison installed to watch the family crypts of the barrow-halls outside Kharvoss. House Mavraen imbued each Bastion with a fragment of a litany called the Covenant of Watch, a ritual of will that anchors the construct's waking and its rules of engagement. Over time the Bastion was interred when the family was betrayed and the vault sealed; the litany's final clause caused the machine to enter an extended dormant state rather than rot in place. Scholars of antiquities, such as Archivist Madir of the Collegium of Sundering, have theorized that the Bastion's war-magic can draw power from both the dead it guards and the ley-lines that pass under many barrows. Bands of grave-robbers learned to fear single Bastions after a string of raids ended with the raiders' hands and not their loot returned. The barrow where your party awoke this Bastion is rumored by locals to be a death-trap called the Hollow of Kervan, and the folk-singers avoid the road after dusk. The Collegium keeps a locked report labeled 'Bastion-class constructs — recovery & pacification protocols' for a reason: pacifying a Tenebric Bastion is possible, but costly and ritual-laden.

Imagine a towering, humanoid machine roughly the height of a large doorway (about 9 feet tall) and built of overlapping bronze plates darkened with verdigris and soot. Its torso is a ribbed cage of filigreed metal that hides a dimly pulsing core pod, veined with brittle glass tubes. Limbs are thick segmented pistons, each joint bolted with oversized rivets and wrapped with braided copper filaments that hum faintly when the construct moves. Its head is a faceted hemispherical helm with three glazed lenses in a vertical row: the central lens is the largest and emits a low inner light when awake. Old ward-runes, some pitted by time and others glowing faintly, are etched across its chest and the inside of its forearms. The fingers end in blunt, drupe-shaped hammers and small auxiliary tools (a pry-claw and a jeweler's pick) that can retract from beneath armored plates. Surface textures vary: corroded hammered metal, smooth polished bronze in places where hands rested for centuries, and strips of woven leather used in antiquity to insulate arc conduits. A human stands about to its mid-thigh, giving a clear scale for artists.