The Vault 20 mural is a painting of the night sky on the ceiling of a communal hall, Vault 20 of the sealed Underforge Vaults beneath Argentum.1 It shows the sky over the region reversed east to west, with a new moon.1
Description
A deep, rich, dark blue field carries countless specks of faded white, like an evening sky full of stars. It is faded but still fairly legible, unlike the chipped murals in the foundries and around the dwarven kitchen and shrine nearby.1 The sky it shows is an accurate rendering of the region’s night sky, flipped east to west, as if seen from the other side of the constellations.1 Among the stars is a circle of black, as if for a new moon.1
The mural is representational and mathematical, accurate in the positions of the stars and the distances between them.1 Its layers of blue are deliberately uneven, cooler in places and more violet in others, in variations that serve no purpose of representation.1 An artist’s mark, a monogram in a lighter blue, sits in one corner.1
The Paint
The paint shows no sign of magic, and the stone beneath is good dwarven stone with no unnatural resilience.1 In conditions like those in the vaults a mural could last five, six or seven hundred years. For one to be as clear as this after seventeen hundred years, with its violets, dark blues and near-blacks still distinct from the true black of the moon, would be remarkable.1
History
Session 13
The darkmantles’ magical darkness hid the mural until the party killed them on the Vigil of Remembrance, 1714 PSF.1 Luma documented it and kept it out of her official report, since the hall lay one vault beyond her work order.1 Hazel took the new moon to mean it was painted before the Starfall, and Luma allowed that it might have been painted by someone who knew the moon from before.1 Rhysaene suggested that someone was lying about how long it had been there.1