The Golden Order College is no monastic construction. Once inside the soot-blackened, fortress walls, there isn't a classroom or a library in sight (any book would swiftly burn in the intense heat anyway). The interior is both a foundry and an open cast mine. Furnaces the size houses spew out torrents of liquid metal, while clockwork golems as big as oak trees pound massive hammers against weaponry and armour still white hot from casting, filling the vast space with a deafening clang. A cyclone of choking black smoke spirals upwards towards the five chimneys up above.
All this arrayed around an impossibly deep pit in the center. Huge buckets of glittering ore chunks, crystalline fragments, and gems are constantly being lifted from these depths by pivoting mechanical arms, which somehow manage to avoid the gantries crisscrossing the vast space.
The group of first year students huddle together at the entrance, hands over their ears, choking for breath in the thick fumes, flinching in fear at each powerful blow from the golem metalworkers.
"Really makes you feel small, doesn't it?" the wizard closest to you murmurs in wonder. Well... bellows in wonder. He's short and slight with bronze skin, copper coloured hair, and green eyes. "My father owned a blacksmiths but this is something else altogether." He moves closer. "Mind if I tag along with you? I don't want to get lost."
"You think I know where I'm going?" you shout back.
"Not really, but you look..."
His words are drowned out as one of the golems lays down its hammer, moving towards the group, its ponderous steps thudding. The group shrinks back. Just as it seems about to step on them, it sinks to one knee, the clockwork gears and cogs inside its torso rolling back to expose its heart, a human figure fitted neatly inside its breast.
You can sense the power emanating from her. This must be the professor. She is naked and dripping with sweat from the heat. Her body displays the scars of chemical burns almost proudly. Her short, canary yellow hair is stuck to her head with sweat. Looking closer, you notice she has neither arms nor legs, her limbless torso connected seamless with the machinery that surrounds her.
Many Gold Order wizards are known to replace one or more of their body parts with prosthesis of their own creation, especially as the toll starts to corrupt them. This is the first time you've seen it in the flesh. She seems no worse for wear for her condition, flashing them all an ecstatic smile. "New recruits! Awesome!"
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