Tatehan spent the next day at the Red Crest Clan library.

It was a quiet, solemn place, lit by the soft blue glow of countless holograms suspended in the air. There were no physical books here, no dusty shelves or the scent of aging paper like the normal libraries on Earth. Instead, knowledge lived as light and data. Along the curved walls (made of metal), circular bronze devices, each the size of a palm, rested in shallow alcoves. These were the "books."

You pressed the center of one, and a complex holographic interface would blossom into the space before you, presenting menus, text, images, and archival footage. It was efficient, vast, and to Tatehan, very futuristic.

He had the place to himself. Earlier, he'd run into Riven and Lyra in the morning meal hall. They leaned close, talking in quick, excited whispers that broke into laughter.

He'd given them a nod. He noticed Riven and Lyra were starting to get along by the way.

He had told them he was going to the Red crest clan library and might spend the whole day in it.

The ladies had replied that they were going out too, something like a girls go out.

He'd watched them go,a pang of something like loneliness hitting him briefly before he buried it.

Now, alone in the silence, he navigated the holographic menus with gestures. He bypassed the tactical manuals and clan genealogies. That wasn't what he was looking for.

Now, why was Tatehan in the library. Well, that was a pretty easy answer. He was here because he wanted to research on the four cities he would be joining in a meeting soon.

It felt it would only be wise and sensible knowing about them.

The first entry shimmered into focus: City of Loenitt.

Founder: Kryana Smith.

That was the city he'd be researching about first.

Tatehan's brow furrowed. Smith. That was a name from Earth. A common one. He knew a Smith back in his old neighbourhood, a gruff man who ran a small supermarket . The familiarity of it, here in this record of Martian history, was jarring. Kryana, though… that sounded old. Unheard of actually.

He delved deeper.

The record stated that Kryana's mother was a survivor of the cataclysmic Space Dragon Wars on Earth. She had been married only six months before losing her husband to the conflict. Pregnant and widowed, she was evacuated to Mars in one of the first ragged refugee waves. She arrived on a planet that was a hellscape: a thin, toxic atmosphere, relentless radiation, and dust storms that could scour flesh from bone.

She was five months pregnant. And she was powerful.

The archive didn't specify her ability in detail, only noting it was of "significant geokinetic potency," which allowed her to survive where others perished. She huddled with other survivors in prefabricated shelters, part of the desperate, collective struggle to terraform the red planet while their own bodies were slowly, painfully modified to withstand it. It was a battle on two fronts: taming a world and changing their very biology to live on it.

She gave birth to a daughter, Kryana, in a sterile medical pod as the first human to be given birth to on Mars. Then, the planet was slowly getting better. By the time Kryana was a toddler, the sky was better looking, and you could walk outside with a respirator, not a full pressure suit.

But the planet took its toll. Kryana's mother fell ill, a strange, wasting sickness blamed on a latent Martian pathogen in the air her modified lungs still couldn't fully filter. She died. The record was blunt about it.

Young Kryana grieved, and that grief was fused with a fierce, protective resolve. She had inherited her mother's power, but here, the old name for it felt different.

The ability on was known as people who could control the ground... Something like Earth benders or something.

Here, on Mars, it wasn't "geokinesis" or "earth control." This was Martian soil, red, iron-rich, and strange. The archive listed her ability as Lithomancy—the command of stone and bedrock.

'She did not want others to suffer as she had,' the text glowed. 'She envisioned a shelter that was permanent.'

Using her burgeoning lithomancy, Kryana began to shape the very ground. Not just digging shelters, but pulling the bedrock up, willing it to form walls, arches, and chambers. Some structures rose above the dust; others sprawled safely underneath, shielded from storms and radiation.

'Wait… what?!' Tatehan's thought was a silent shout in the quiet library.

His mind raced. Buildings made from the ground?!. People living underneath. That meant the entire city, from its foundations to its highest spire, was essentially one giant, sculpted stone. It wasn't built; it was instead grown. The implications were staggering—structural integrity, unity, a literal connection between every citizen and the ground beneath their feet. It was crazy…and…and brilliant.

He leaned closer, the light of the hologram reflecting in his eyes.

Kryana wasn't alone for long. Other early Martians, drawn by her vision and her strength, joined her. They were a mix of human survivors and native-born Martians, their bodies now adapted to the lower gravity and thinner air. Together, they worked. They channeled their own abilities: some minor kinetic talents, others physical strength enhanced by Martian adaptation, to aid her lithomancy. What began as a cluster of stone huts became a district, then a town, then a city.

They named it after the land itself. The particular region, a high plateau rich in a unique, dense volcanic stone, was called Loenitt. The city took the name.

Tatehan scrolled through accompanying images.

Loenitt was breathtaking. It was all sweeping curves and organic shapes, as if the city had been weathered into existence by millennia of wind, not shaped by human hands in decades. There were no sharp corners. The stone wasn't the dull grey of Earth concrete, but a deep, rust-red veined with black and streaks of coppery green. It glittered dully under the Martian sun.

The record noted that while the city adopted modern technology (atmospheric processors, water recyclers, data-nets) its people chose to retain the stone aesthetic. It was their identity, their history made visible.

And the stone itself was special. Loenitt Stone was a rare, ultra-dense mineral formation found only on that plateau. It was naturally radiation-shielding, an incredible insulator, and, when worked by a skilled lithomancer, could be made as strong as reinforced plasteel.

His eyes widened as he read the final section. Kryana's first and greatest work was the perimeter wall. She raised it, a formidable barrier thirty meters high. But after her death, the people of Loenitt didn't stop. Driven by memories of earlier insecurities and new threats, generations of lithomancers worked in unison. They raised the wall higher, and higher still, pouring their power into the stone.

The current Wall of Loenitt, the archive stated, was now a monument, a cliff-face of red stone that soared so high its upper reaches were often wreathed in the low-hanging Martian clouds. It wasn't a metaphor to say it touched the sky.

And the legacy of the founder lived on in the people. The ability of lithomancy, the control of that unique Loenitt Stone, was a common genetic trait in the city's populace. It was a defining mark of being a Loenittian.

About 98% of the citizens had the ability.

Tatehan leaned back, the hologram casting shifting shadows on his face.

'Crazy stuff!' he thought.

He had one city's tale now. There were three more to find.

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