Immortal Impatience

find a more intelligent life form

Spreading a dozen wings of various forms, you surge into the sky. Wrapping the clouds into a robe around yourself, you disguise your flying form and peer down upon the land. It seems that there are cleverer creatures about, but they are not the ones that you remember at all. Though still bipedal and capable of wielding tools, they look nothing like the hairy creatures that gave you sacrifice.

These creatures all bear large, feathered wings, easily double the span of their height. The forested ruins of your temple seems to have been largely ignored by them in favor of the cliffside of the plateau on which the forest rests. There, they have constructed a many levelled city, with numerous balconies jutting out from the cliff face to serve as the entrances of homes, storefronts, and offices. It is a bright and colorful settlement, with numerous colored lamps of burning oils that shine even in daylight to advertise the shops and businesses which they are placed in front of. You can assume that more such lanterns light the walls of the caves themselves, allowing them to be deep and expansive should they desire such space, though their exact size can only be guessed.

From what few children you can see flying up about the city, they appear to have a stable rather than an expanding population. Two or three of the smaller winged humanoids which you presume to be children follow an adult. It is unclear from this distance whether the parent guarding the children is typically of a particular sex or if they are even necessarily following a parent, but your presuppositions based on the races that you remember suggest that this is the case, which would imply small family units.

Rather than the tablets of stone and clay which you recall, these people seem to prefer using something which you at first took to be parchment, but later surmised to be too thin for even skin. This material seems to be ubiquitous, as pieces of it are given out frequently as advertisements to passers by and great piles of it litter the base of the cliff as the discarded sheets are blown about and frequently swept off the balconies on which they settle. If nothing else, this appears to be a literate people - far more so than any that you can remember.

For all of their apparent widespread education, however, there is little that is astonishing about their technology. It is more advanced than you can recall, of course, but given the eons that must have passed since your departure from the world, the weaponry that they wield is all too familiar for your liking. What few guards they have appear to be bedecked in cloth armor of all things, and they wield spears that are barely more advanced than the kind that have been long in use even when you still were worshipped. The only sign of craft of the limited military that you can see are the extravagant designs of the uniforms and the fact their spears are almost entirely metal.

The uniforms are matching in design, but vary widely in color depending on where the presumed guards stand. The highest level of the city wear a bright red, whereas those lowest to the ground wear purple, and a veritable rainbow can be seen between the different levels, with orange and yellow placed above green which are placed above blue. The metals that make up the various buttons and buckles on the uniform vary as well, though this variance appears to be scattered and nearly random. The fact that metals of a kind all cluster together, with gold standing with gold and never found near silver, suggests that either factions exist or that otherwise identically equipped watchmen have been given different purposes.

The fact that this is a tiered society also becomes evident as you look more closely at the levels that the color spectrum of uniforms make clear. The balconies on the higher levels appear to be wider and the lamps outside them more extravagant than those of the levels below. They are naturally also more easily kept clean, as garbage quite literally makes its way downhill, and the blue and violet levels are far more frequently left unclean. Whether this is a caste system assigned at birth or a pseudomeritocracy is not clear from your vantage point.

This civilization's presence at the top of the plateau is limited to a few watchtowers manned by stark crimson garbed guards with elegant looking telescopes and a handful of lumber camps which roll their logs over to the cliff face to be lowered down to factories on the green level which bring the wood inside of a massive cavern for some sort of processing which you cannot clearly see. Most likely this is to feed the city's addiction to paper, as the wood is not widely used in construction that is externally visible.

The area immediately at the base of the cliff appears to be an artificial stream which exists largely to carry away garbage through its carved passage and is fed by a number of small waterfalls which have been carved out from the lower-west corner of the city. It eventually feeds into a natural river, which presumably bears the detritus out to sea.

While the city itself may be vertical, it is fed by the flatlands below it. If there was forest at the base of the cliff, it has long since been cleared away. Spreading out for miles directly away from the city is a vast swath of farmland, irrigated in part by channels running from the river and, closer to the city, by rivulets running from the artificial channel. Though far more sparsely populated than the caves of the city, the flying farmer folk seem to be gathered in either single larger families or a set of several families with a nearly matching ratio of children and adults. This matches your earlier prediction of their stable reproduction rate, which bodes poorly for this people's prospects of growth and expansion should you wish to use them for conquest.

There is some transfer between the farmers and the cityfolk aside from the wagons of produce being brought to the base of the cliff to be lifted up to balconies at every level of the city and manufactured goods being lowered to the ground, but less than would be expected of a truly integrated society. Though you cannot see a physical difference between the ground dwellers and the cliff dwellers aside from the lack of colorfully garbed guards, not many of the farmers fly up into the city and fewer still fly down from the city into the rural lands below them.

All in all, they appear to be a stratified people, who while largely educated are pitifully armed and limited in their ability to sacrifice by their seemingly static population. You suspect that their widespread literacy can lead to them having a larger than average number of mages given the knowledge required for the use of magic, but you see little in the ways of ostentatious displays of magic power, especially given that you cannot see precisely how their factories and elevators function. Similarly, you cannot see any signs of their religion and while their thoughts are warm and varied, you cannot sense the presence of a rival divinity among them. While it may be difficult to win their worship, you at least should not have any other true gods to compete with.

Given what you now know of the locals, you can try to investigate them further, make an immediate bid to earn their worship, or move on and try to find a more suitable people to indoctrinate to your cause. There are sure to be other civilizations scattered about the world and there is no rush to try to use these creatures to be your followers given the lack of a rival deity, but travelling too far or too quickly could lead to your being discovered by another divinity.