There is a small man with a paintbrush in his hand, kneeling on dry cracked ground beside a large round metal plate, painting the plate with coloured inks drawn somehow from glass spheres in the open case that lies on the ground beside him. Occasionally he checks his work against the book propped up beside the case.
A whole lot of really foreboding diary entries and only marginally less foreboding research notes. The diary entries are a bit all over the place in the way of diary entries, but the research notes are fairly neatly divided into 'what is happening to the global climate and how can we fix it?' and 'what are we going to do about all these ravening fiends?'.
"I guess they never found a solution to the ravening fiends," says Tiro. "And then I guess the ravening fiends all starved to death."
"Did anyone ever find out where the ravening fiends came from? Or the climate problems?"
They did not. It was widely speculated, but never confirmed, that the fiends were someone's failed workaround for the climate problem; the fiends never seemed to get thirsty that anyone could tell, and everyone's normal essence plants were being badly affected by the water shortage, so if someone invented the fiends as a water-free essence reclamation/generation mechanism and got a few too many things wrong in their prototype... well. And the study of the climate problem was severely hampered by everyone's inability to go outside without being eaten by fiends.
"And the current climate problem is that there is no climate," Cam remarks. "Although not all of the water is gone, just most of it..."
"I could do progressive scale models of the planet but all the water will fall off pretty promptly, not sure if that gets us anywhere."
"Would you have to leave out all the alchemical essences too? I guess there probably won't be any in big enough concentrations to see on a very small scale model..."
Tiro peers at it.
It's a planet. It has several continents. One of the continents has an enormous crater in the middle, surrounded by absurd amounts of flooding that are visible even on this tiny scale.
"That looks like a problem," comments Tiro.
A month later, the crater is noticeably bigger, the flooding is noticeably worse, and the amount of water elsewhere in the world - already low - is noticeably less.
"Poor Problem Continent," says Tiro. "Poor everybody, really."
In only a couple more month-intervals, there is indeed such a discontinuity! The crater has finally reached all the way through the planet's crust, and there is magma visible at the bottom, and it's twice as big as it would be if it had been keeping to the consistent schedule of the last few intervals, and the rest of the world is nearly dry and the flooded continent's water supply is noticeably diminished.
"Whoa," says Tiro.
The crater is not yet all the way through the planet's crust, and the flooding has not yet begun to vanish.
"I wonder what that big crater actually is," says Tiro. "As far as we know, if there was something in there that you can't conjure it has to have been either magic or intelligent, right?"
"Well, we know this world has a magic thing that can cause awful fuckups. I've never caused a fuckup that awful, though. They were all, like, person-scale, not continent-scale."
"If it was easy to do they probably would have destroyed the planet a little earlier," Cam remarks.