My Sheowon captors led me past the statue towards the largest building in the village, which was just beyond it, and I finally gave it the attention it deserved.The reason it was so much bigger than the others was because it was, for lack of a better word, a pyramid—though it was round, which, upon closer inspection, the stone buildings were as well. Its base occupied far more land than the simpler structures around it, but each subsequent layer was smaller, until it reached the same general base size as most of the village buildings, at which point a similar structure to the rest was built upon it.Since the base was solid stone, and the building had little extra storage space or capacity, it was very much performative, and likely tied to religion, leadership, or both. Since I was being brought to the “elders” of the village as a result of my blessing, and the goddess’s statue was right in front of it, I was leaning towards it being both.I was guided up the stairs of the pyramid base until we reached the entrance to the actual building, at which point I was told to wait while Ushem entered to inform the elders what had happened. That gave me a chance to study the building a bit closer.In addition to being on top of a pyramid base, it was a lot higher quality than some of the other buildings I had passed by. I didn’t have to wonder for long why they hadn’t made the actual building larger, rather than just building it on a huge base; it was the same limitation the Uli faced with building. There was no lumber, so they had no supports or roofing beams.Coming up out of the center of the building was a round chimney, and as I glanced back at the village, I noticed the other buildings had similar central chimneys. So the structure of the roof under the thatch was possibly domed stone, and if they went any larger, the weight would become a problem—either collapsing the interior chimney or just too difficult to move into place for Sheowon (...)