Crystal-Golems

Overview

The Crystal-Golems stand at the edges of the Apex, the Surplus Plane where everything already exists in its best possible state. They are counted among the Flawless, the constructs and beings the plane has perfected, and they are sentient statues set to guard its borders. Nothing harms them, and nothing they do is wasted. Of all the Apex's beings they are the ones a traveller is most likely to meet first, because they stand where travellers come in.

Appearance

A Crystal-Golem is a figure of clear, faultless crystal, two or three times the height of a man and shaped with the impossible symmetry of everything in the Apex: a human-like form whose every line is the ideal of that line, without a scratch, flaw, or cloud anywhere in it. Light does not throw shadows in the Apex, and the golems throw none either; they gather the plane's gold, white, and iridescent silver and give it back so evenly that they seem to glow from within. Their faces are perfectly made and perfectly calm.

Most of the time a golem stands still. When it moves it does so with no wasted motion at all: no sway, no shift of weight, no step longer than it needs. A golem crosses a distance in the least possible time and stops dead. It makes no footfall that can be heard over the plane's soft, harmonic hum, and has no smell.

Habitat and Range

The golems are found along the borders of the Apex, where the plane meets its gates and its neighbours, standing at intervals like markers on a road. Travellers do not report them in the plane's interior, among the Apex-Born and the Harmony-Beasts. How many there are, nobody has counted; travellers who skirted one border report another golem whenever the last passed out of sight.

Behaviour and Temperament

The golems are sentient, but what they think is unknown. They do not speak to travellers, and the few accounts of one answering a question describe a single precise sentence, given without interest. They seem to judge what crosses the border and to let most of it pass, since the Apex has nothing to fear from the unfinished; what a golem will not allow is change carried in by force. Like the Apex-Born, they seem to regard outsiders as broken, but without the pity.

Abilities

A Crystal-Golem takes no harm. Blades, hammers, fire, and spells meet it and leave nothing; it cannot be chipped, cracked, or worn. It moves with perfect efficiency, so that a traveller who runs from one has already been reached. What a golem does to those it stops is told differently in every account: some were set down outside the border unhurt, some were held until the plane's stillness took them, and some, it is said, were perfected, joining the smiling Echo-Statues of the Apex.

Uses and Dangers

The golems give nothing, and they cannot be worked, carved, or carried off; scholars who came for a sliver of their crystal came back with nothing. Their danger is narrow and absolute: they hold the border, and forcing it is hopeless. The plane itself is the greater danger to those they let in.

Lore and Belief

On the Material Plane the golems are known only from travellers' accounts (see Knowledge of the Cosmos). Many take them for the gatekeepers of paradise, and some sects hold that only the worthy pass them. Others say they were once visitors, great makers who were perfected into the guardians of what they had wanted to build. Stonecutters tell of a statue so well carved it would not let its maker leave the workshop. Accounts agree on two things only, that no one has ever marked one, and that they do not sleep.

Treasure-seekers who tried to chip a shard from one for its worth are said to have been found standing beside it, perfected, in a row.

Where It Appears

• The Apex