#A-Hyrrhai

[hraeth-ethile]

The A-Hyrrhai is the name given to an ancient, subterranean culture or society that thrived sometime during the Greek Dark Ages. Their role in the world, and the causes of their disappearance, have drawn a great deal of academic deliberation since the ferret American scholar and college lecturer, Peter Marlborough, first discussed it during his historic 1899 cultural exhibition in Paris where he makes the very first claims of its existence.

To a crowd of several hundred interested and affluent people, Peter Marlborough held a confronting speech about having discovered a lost city in a very isolated section within Turkey's Cappadocian region.  The discovery was made entirely by accident, with he and his team planning to explore an already extent Hittite village ruin when one of their trail horses fell into a sandy ravine. The ravine, steep and hidden behind thick primeval olive trees and arid foliage, was revealed to Peter and his caravan of researchers at the sudden expense of the horse's life.

The caravan was about to leave, having written the experience off as unfortunate but not at all remarkable, until Peter noticed a huge sandstone beam lying at an angle against an embankment wall which was now visible due to the horse's fall.

Subsequently, the large ferret-led joint American-Ottoman team returns to the region's then-largest settlement of Alan. The stark shift in objective led the entire science expedition to change their plans at Peter's 'desperate' behest.

Over the next year, the ravine is excavated and explored, but the efforts reveal very little until New Year's 1898 when a causeway, once thought to be natural limestone, breaks away to reveal the interior of an underground structure. The location is later revealed to be a large habitation area, which brings up questions about a possible lost settlement that has been stolen away by both time and nature.

Over the next few months, the environments surrounding the home see the constantly repeating efforts of Peter and his field crews to excavate, only for each sapiological attempt to secure data to catastrophically fail due to the limitations of the technology and equipment at the time. The rocks and stones in the ravine sediment that traps 3/4ths of the ancient underground home's exterior turns out to be far too dense and heavy to break with tools, or move with animals, or even blast with explosives.

It's only on the next New Year's that significant progress is finally made. Peter, incensed at the lack of sufficient progress, attempts to dig beneath the home's foundations by himself late at night. His foot catches in weaker sediment and he falls dozens of metres down into a dark chamber far below the main digsite. The excavation crews do not realise he is missing until the next morning, and after hours of careful searching, find a large hole that was not there the previous night. Attempting a blind rescue, unsure of the exact nature of Peter's fate or location, they inadvertently cause a horrible rock fall and trap him inside. He remains missing for three more days, during which time the entire joint expedition comes to a sharp and frustrating halt.

Peter returns on his own, during a blisteringly-hot afternoon, and on the side of a distant, opposing ravine nowhere near the camp or the hole where he first fell. He finds the search teams, also on his own, nearly dead from dehydration and shock. Despite these severe conditions, his overall health appears nominal.

It takes another day of rest before Professor Marlborough conveys his experiences down below, where he writes his first reports down while convalescing in a Lebanese hospital. In those reports, he explains that he had found a large room, like an atrium, with strange humming, orange-white crystals that reacted to his mere presence by illuminating a dim amber glow in response to his proximity to them. In this room were several skeletons, feline in appearance and strewn about the floor. Each of the remains, he claimed, we wearing ornate clothes that had silver and gold stitching. The atrium itself, its skeletons, and the clothes on their remains, had all been damaged from some long-ago subterranean fire.

In the last of his hospital reports, Marlborough details his remarkable discovery of a well-hidden and adjacent room that he 'accidentally' locates by pressing some kind of hidden button in the surrounding wall. He'd been trying to use his sense of touch to find a way out in the total darkness. The door that opens reveals the room in question, wherein a long light shaft with sunlight coming down from high ceiling slits illuminates a massive, circular stone table with over a dozen more skeletal remains sitting in a slouched position over the table. He finishes with the shocking claim of a huge, paper map unfurled on the table that looks to him like the layout of an enormous underground complex complete with roads, stations, settlements, and resource deposits. He does his best to make a small, mock map in the shape of the map he found, the table it sat atop of, and the placements of each skeleton which surrounded the table itself. He notes, as well, that every skeleton he found was feline except for one that he calls 'the King' because of the tall crown on his head. The details in this final section of these papers, which are now called The Marlborough Ledger, describes 'the King' with specifics, along with the table and what he can remember of the map itself: "...I beheld, with fascination, his crown: four corners, tall and sharp but wide like the tips of Roman daggers. His features, even in death and even as a skeleton, were regal and most certainly lapinous. Did these felines worship him? But, if they were slaves or adepts, why share a seat at this table with him? Was he special in some way, or chosen for his merits? Possibly even elected in some way? It is the map, though, that draws the brunt of my fascination. It is enormous, the size of a warship's banner at least. I saw roads, marked with important points and stations. The roads seemed so large, larger than even the lanes in Paris, and built entirely underground. There were settlements, too; towns, and maybe even cities, as large or larger than ones we'd find in current Europe or America. Everything was marked with brilliant, orange ink, or described with vibrant white chalk, and the language they used was both far too familiar for my comfort and far too alien to decipher. It was Ancient Greek, for certain, but... not at all, either." Marlborough does not return to the expedition after his departure from Lebanon, which causes the excavation of the unusual underground site to cease entirely. Without him, or any additional funding from his French and English patrons, the teams all retreat and return to Ankara. Marlborough's story begins to circumnavigate the globe, reaching the front pages of nearly every major newspaper publication in nearly every major city on earth. It spurs a rush of creativity and adventure in people throughout the Middle East, who feel emboldened by the thought of a previously-unknown 'claim to Empire'. In the summer of the following year, as intense debates between prospective sapiology teams from around the world rage to the question of returning to excavate the region or not, a small group of 'vigilante scientists' - mostly young adults from Persia and Armenia - meet in secret to excavate on their own. They're found dead the next day from some catastrophe that buried most of them alive after they'd attempted to remove the rubble from the original cave-in. There was only one known survivor from the cave-in: the tiger youth Mahin "Maria" Rostami, who succumbed to blood loss while crawling towards the horses her and her friends hitched up the previous night. She'd managed to free the horses before drawing her final breath, discovered in the morning dead and clutching a huge piece of thin, artisanally-shaped stone.

The stone was later brought to Peter Marlborough in his home in Maidenhead - a small market town outside of London where he resided while not at work. He was able to confirm that the stone, which was actually a large section of bas relief, had the same language as the language on the map he found. The figures and designs on the relief are painstakingly-painted, and carefully and keenly etched, and has an Ancient Greek inscription alongside the previously-unknown language presented in the relief. This discovery shook the whole world, adding tremendous interest to a mystery that everyone was already overeager to understand.

The Ancient Greek inscription, going down the length of the relief's shape, reads: "...the long heat. The Kings A-Hyrrhai prepare."

Despite over thirty attempts by dozens of universities, and with over one-hundred years of technological advancements, the stone to this site, and the cave-in during Peter John Marlborough's time, has proven to be too expensive and too dangerous to fully excavate or explore without destroying either the structures below or the only remaining passages inside.

Yearly public and private polls, coordinated by the United Nations and its research satellites, attempt to gain enough votes to help fund and give oversight to civilian excavation efforts - with the explicit warning that doing so may lead to financial ruin and the loss of life.