Location: Just inside Athkatla’s main gate, pointing directly toward the city’s heart
Shape: A long, tapered building shaped like a stylized arrowhead, with a sharp stone spire at its “tip”
“It’s a museum, right? Something about caravans and old trade routes. The murals are nice.”
“I took my son there once. He loved the bit about desert elephants. But the place is strange… like it’s watching you.”
“My cousin swears the exhibits rearranged themselves. Said a map she saw one day was gone the next. I think she’s touched.”
To the public, the Arrowpoint Archive is a well-funded, slightly odd museum dedicated to:
Trade history, especially Caravaneer expeditions
Relics from desert cultures, including spice artifacts, early coinage, magical textiles, and broken Yuan-Ti weapons
Interactive exhibits: enchanted displays of ancient trade caravans, singing maps, talking ledger scrolls, etc.
The museum is free to enter, thanks to “generous Caravanneer donations,” and sees plenty of foot traffic, especially from new arrivals at the gate.
From above, the Archive forms a sleek arrow shape, with the “fletching” near the gate and the “tip” aimed toward the city’s inner ring
Built from pale desert limestone, with inlaid veins of dark bronze that shimmer in sunlight
A huge etched compass rose dominates the entry plaza
Inside, the building narrows gradually, making visitors feel like they’re walking deeper into a focused point in history
The final room, the “arrowhead,” is reserved for rotating exhibits—though some say no one’s ever seen a rotation happen.
Beneath the exhibitions and public access lies one of the Caravanneers’ primary intelligence gathering nodes, serving multiple covert functions:
A listening post: magical runes and subtle enchantments collect snippets of speech from visitors—especially foreigners, mercenaries, and traders discussing business as they enter the city
The Archive’s rotating exhibits hide coded messages and mission briefings for operatives in plain sight, accessible only by those who know how to “read the routes”
Some of the relics are fakes, embedded with scrying focus crystals or divination sensors planted by Caravaneer mages
There’s a secret library sealed behind an illusory wall in the narrowing “arrowhead” chamber, accessible only with a phrase from an old trade dialect. It houses:
Personal journals from vanished caravans
Forbidden maps detailing contested territories
Records of internal betrayals and the names of “sleeping agents” scattered across the region
The arrow shape? Deliberate. A metaphor: all visitors are passing through the gate, into the city’s beating heart—and the Caravanneers are always the first to know where they’re going.