Ancient Golem

THE GOLEMS

A golem is not a creature; it is matter that has been persuaded to stand upright. A sculpted body, engraved circles that hold the energy of another plane, an odem chiseled with runes that calls it in. It takes a craftsman of repute and a mage able to make a ritual of its waking. What you get has neither will nor judgment: the energy poured in gives strength, never discernment.
You do not speak to a golem, you speak to the object that holds it, and that object takes any form at all. One word wakes it, you set it a task, a second word puts it back to sleep. There is no third word.

How it kills

It has neither haste nor anger: it executes. It strikes with exactly the force its matter allows, and begins again for as long as the task is not closed. It does not hear surrender and it recognizes no face. Nothing stops it, save the word that puts it to sleep or the ruin of its body.

The Ancient Golem

No one sculpted it. The craftsmen who cut these stones have been dead a thousand years, and it is their work that rises: a rite of protection laid over a sacred place, a tomb, a relic, and the whole ruin becomes a body. Six meters of rubble, column shafts and capitals. It never leaves its site.

Apparition

Ambush: you are walking through a place where nothing moves when the stone cracks, on every side at once. Beneath your feet, circles of sacred magic kindle in the dust: you were standing inside them from the first. Whole sections of the ruin come down beside you in a crash that all but puts you on the ground. That is only the beginning: the stones set off, converge, and the mass takes shape in front of you.When you catch sight of it: it is already standing among the columns, motionless, covered in moss. You tell it from the ruin only by a slab set into its chest, the one stone in the place that nothing has eaten away, its runes as clean as on the first day.

Combat

Extraordinary strength, neither pain nor compassion. It keeps watch, and it will not stop until the silence of the dead has come back over its site. Those that guard something precious enough sometimes hold powers from the god the place was vowed to, and you do not learn which ones until you are under them. The control object exists, but do not look for it on anyone: it was left beside what the golem guards, which is to say behind it.