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| By Gary Schenck |
TENEBRIS
"All things flow to Tenebris."
Some weeks will grant Curses, though these are far more rare and typically minor. One exception being the Idol of 111th, which kills those who pray upon it. This idol is prayed at regardless, either in respect of ritual sacrifice or for those seeking a quick death.
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The monks within are peaceful and serene, knowing of their everlasting fate. When they die, they become ghosts that wander the grounds, then as shades as whatever remnants of memory fade. Eventually they sink into the stones, becoming one with the Temple and creating its distinct shadow-imprints.
The monks are maintained by food and water tossed over the threshold by the lay-volunteers at the entrance. Supposedly, this is how the idols were stolen in the past: tossed out by those within, fated to never exit themselves, and destined for whatever punishment the remaining monks could muster.
The Idols are arranged in a rotunda, as the degrees of a circle or compass. There are noticeably little gaps in the arrangement. Six Idols have been stolen over the millennia. Once by the great Thief Mandolin, twice by a Traitor, and thrice again by unknown looters during the Nightmare-Razing of Glazz'gibrar.
The most powerful of these Idols is the one for the Omitted Leap Month. Brought out once every ten thousand years, it is said to have granted a year-long Time Stop to those who prayed to it - they would inherit this leap year, being the only ones affected by time during this period. Unfortunately for the Monks, this one was stolen in the most recent razing and its whereabouts are unknown.
D1: Altar to True Intentions
Nobody is sure where it came from or who keeps the black candle lit. Perhaps it came from somewhere underneath our waking eyes - some liminal space between projection and projector.
The Black Candle is sacred to the priests of the Temple of Shadows. Their acolytes from Bright Town are sent to guard it in week-long shifts. As practitioners of the Burning Hands, they have religious authority to do harm to iconoclasts. Tread carefully by the altar, particularly at the week's end, or you're likely to get lit up by a hotshot acolyte who hasn't slept in three days.
Shadows cast by the candle's green flame show the casters' True intentions. If this intention is to snuff out the candle, then three Shadows will manifest and attack the assailant. The Candle will be replaced in one week if it falls.
Marker Maker
A yard filled with boulders and unfinished tombstones. Within, the house of Cossa di Beleth, who works on one marker-stone at a time with the slow relentlessness of oncoming death. She makes cippi - little temple-houses for the dead, who in their death keep vigil over sacred boundaries, like border-soldiers watching out into the dark frontier at the end of the world. Houses for the esteemed dead require long hard hours, and the relentlessness of one who knows their fate. Often she works in total darkness, sealed within her workshop of stone, the only hint of her continued existence being the gentle reverberations in the walls.
You will see her handiwork everywhere: along the walls of the city, along water pipes and aqueducts, bordering grave-dens and marking long miles in the featureless Dark deep below. Marker Making is a tradition far, far older than the city. Older than history and certainly much older than memory. So old, that no Matriarch would dare to question it.
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| Cippus Perusinus |
Vintner
Mushroom wine tastes foul if you're unused to it. Proper Wine Fungus grows on corpses, or on sewage-treated fungal wood if you're cheap. The fields of Gnossus di la Mendal are the former, and he only takes the finest corpses.
Sacrificial animals are the finest growing scaffold. Once the meat and organs have been stripped off and sacrificed, there is a boney medium in which the Wine Fungus grows best. There are two principle varieties:
Ghoulhammer - Fruits in an auburn hammerhead body. Prefers desiccated environments. Grows best upon beds of shredded bones mixed with strips of structural fungi. Kept dry, desiccated almost, the mushrooms grow well. Used in a wide variety of dishes. Makes a very dry, bitter-tasting wine.
Flensemorel - Fruit of hexacomb cap the color of royal purple. Prefers wet environments. Grows best in evaporating trenches of sewage. Care must be taken in harvesting, lest illness creep in. Makes a full-bodied and spicy wine, often mixed with wasp honey to sweeten intensely.
The quality of the bones, and the quality of the sewage have great impact on the taste of the wine. Vintners such as Gnossus frequently vie with one another for access to each. Greatest among the bones are those belonging to Titans: great monstrous corpses unearthed beneath the world. Greatest among the sewage is that which washes down from Temples above: often carrying god-kissed remains where scraps missed their greedy lips.
Estate Nix
Nix is the goddess of jealous love. That, and mantises. House Nix has both in great abundance.
The estate is a botanical garden filled to the brim with carnivorous plants and flowering things. You'll never know what's a pretty flower and what's going to snatch you up without getting a very risky look. The children of Nix, the sacred Flowered Mantises happily eat people, and happily eat each other. To love is to eat, and to eat is to love, with them.
If you're lucky, you might hear their lyric poetry. It's very beautiful. Fruit metaphors are common.
It is rumored that the matriarch Koren de Nix is an absolute deviant! Cannibalism was the exclusive right of the outlawed Royal House, and currently may only be done (legally) during the ceremonies of the office of the Queen-Surrogate. The rumor is that when Koren occupied the office, she developed a bit of a taste for man-flesh... If anybody ever proves to what extent, the current Castigators would Black Mark her for sure.
Dark Fields
Where the capillaries of the city's water and waste flows out to its furthest extent. Ant-colony fields of fungi grown by blind tenders in the dark. The air is dusty with spawn, and the toil is difficult. Small things are always crawling in the walls.
To be an independent small farmer down here is increasingly unmarketable. Zombies are becoming a popular labor source: they give food to the spawn instead of requiring it, and they don't need wages. They're slowly replacing slaves and free laborers, corpse by corpse. With every war their numbers expand. And with every dispossession and debt accrued, these citizens are forced into the city, where they contemplate the Knife...
River of Darkness
It begins somewhere below Hiss and branches out like a mold slime: the city's waste-river. Every toilet, every sewer, every bath water flows down here. Lighting a torch will set it alight, and those who navigate it must do so in darkness. To be a riverman upon these waters is the worst job in the city, bar none. It is relegated to those suffering from curses that prevent them from seeking other work. It is penance work given as alternative to capital punishment.
The rivermen prevent clogs. Sometimes salvageable valuables drop down from above. More often than not it's bodies: the most common way to dispose of a murder victim is to throw them in the sewers, to be digested by the city's bowels or eaten by foul scavengers that live in those waters. The Rivermen can make a tidy profit off selling these bodies to necromancers, after a little bit of cleanup.
D2: The Campus Mar
Where the legions of November gather to be accounted. Where the Assembly of Measures weighs warriors for their worth. Where the heads of Houses proclaim their property for taxation, and their household heads for counting. Where the Castigators issue the Black Marks, stripping citizens of their privileges. Where festivals are held for the gods of the earth. Where the worm-god Mar crawls beneath your feet.
Mar is a humble god. They get along well with other gods. The god of wriggling eyeless things. But also of wealth: of good soil, seeds and eggs, accounting and finance. There is a small shrine near the center of the field: in which rotting fruits are fed to sacred worms in bowls of pure gold, as they do in House Fingol-Mar. Nobody would dare steal them: for fear of the curse of eyeless things beneath your feet.
The field itself lies on a wide underground plateau, colonized with soft short beds of yellow and dark green fungus. To a surface-dweller, it is the color of rot: of bruising or decay. To Novans it is the color of life. Just above it begins the Adamantine Stair, that unbreakable spine of the city. Below it lies the Underdark hinterlands, where much of the city's food is grown.
Moonwater Gardens
Watched by the Indefatigable Koron, the Silver Servant - a golem of stained glass rescued from the lost temples of Glazz'gibrar. They are shaped as most fearsome avatar of territory and vengeance: the long-necked swan.
Pools of toxic moonwater so dense you could walk upon them. The Leaden Lillies, whose roots stretch deep into the earth, can grow nowhere else. The lilies possess a powerful magical anima: illusions cast in their presence become permanent, save by Dispel Magic. When a person, or something resembling a person is created in such a way, it is called a Shade.
Koron gives one Lilly but once per year to the Sterilis, an old infertile man or eunuch, often a slave. During the Phallera, the younger men beat and curse the Sterilis, channeling all age or anxiety-induced performance issues into him. Most often the Sterilis crafts for themselves a new, youthful body, but not always... Sometimes Koron crafts for them an illusion of other things.
Sauce Maker
Where the saucemaker Alfonda di Timurin makes industrial quantities of the twice-fermented sauce called Nurex, widely acclaimed in the city. It's slightly spicy and savory, and numbs the lips if you eat enough of it. Goes often with mushroom loafs, meat, bread, or soup.
Made from cavepool-dwelling snails, extracted from their shells and ground into a paste, which is then allowed to grow a blue mold upon it, which is mixed with a mushroom wine to make a kind of moldy wine and allowed to ferment, which is then skimmed off the top to make a cheese, which is melted and boiled with high mineral water to its final delicious form!
Estate Fingol-Mar
A rich and old House, blessed by the elder joining of the worm god Mar and the ancient matron Fingol. Ever has their union produced seemingly endless wealth: the clan boasts divine methods of accounting, serendipitous luck in matters of law, and generous finances. Matriarch Quil de Fingol-Mar is possessed of powerful magic which gives her the unsettling form of the Walking Worm.
It always smells like rotting fruit here. Precious artisanal bowls are placed with rotting sweet things, for the worms to consume. The Matron of the House possesses a great number of undead servants, bound by contract to eternal serve. Those of the House claim that it is their ancestor, Fingol, who wrote the first contract between god and man, and ever have they kept this pious expertise.
Dowser
They say that Fili du Fingol-Mar could hear the songs of water in the womb. When his mother walked over underground aquifers she'd feel her son quiver and dance. This little guy rolls around in puddles with the worms, and prospects for the Black Blood of the Earth at the behest of his matron.
Nominally, he offers his services to anyone. But if you really want his time you'll need to be in good graces with Fingol-Mar. The workshop is a collection of subsurface liquid-finding equipment: wooden staves and metal prongs, tuning forks and burrowing snails tied to strings, drills sculpted into gods' hands.
Armorer
Ladna du Grachia was struck by natural lightning as a child and survived, so you know she makes good weapons. Her forearms bear the birthmarks of vengeance - as highly prized in this trade as they come. She and her seventeen apprentices make mail, shields, swords, and spears. Sometimes they make gladiatorial weapons on special commission.
Landa directs the blows of the hammer, working with six striking apprentices at a time. Her leathery hands are resilient enough that she can touch forge-heated metal without harm. She uses this to feel the bend in the iron and coax the steel into shape.
D3: Magmatic Gates
The earth is covered in sand hotter than a beach in summer. Folk unused to it walk about on toothed clogs, and avoid touching the walls without thick airy gloves. The Magmatic Gates are watched at all times by doglike fires and temple servants donned in mail and crested helm. Vanguard to the guardians of the Gates is the shrine of the Riverwatcher.
In the days before death, a young warrior woman of fire fell in love with the spirit of a river. But cruel Time slowly pried them apart, year after year, bit by bit, until He the River could no longer be found. She waited so long her body hardened to stone.
Eschewed lovers and companions of missing persons come here to pray for resolve. They offer her splashes of wine or water to cool her beheated body. Men sometimes kiss her sandaled feet or bronze cheek - to burn their lips in sympathy to the Riverwatcher, and as proof to others of their mourning.
Brazier Maker
To contain fire is no impious task. It is mischievous on the best days, and wrathful on the worst. By stone and metal may the doglike fires be penned to their place by the works of Publi the Firecatcher, client to the Kordelians.
Living fire must be tricked to occupy a brazier. It does not contain itself willingly, but rather must be lured like how one would trap a stray dog. Tinder, cage, and fuel all factor into the flame's caution. Publi makes them in fantastical shapes: dragon's heads, effigies, offering bowls, doll houses with little doll people.
When trapped, the fires can be fierce guardians: licking and fuming and crackling at trespassers with wanton violence. Temple servants use them to guard forbidden rooms or temple stores. Evidence of a burn is a golden standard of criminal guilt in court.
The Hot Block
A hotbox insula carved into the warmest, darkest corner of Tenebris - hell to some, but welcome to deep-living folk. As such it's become popular with subterranean foreigners. Every open-aired space is like a sauna, and each room is like an oven. It has a habit of attracting mostly-harmless volcano snakes. The folk of the insula have begun naming them: 'Bomb', 'Cordillera', 'Fumarole', etc.
The spirit of the dorm has eyes like burning coals and lingers behind doors and dangling out of exhaust pipes. The folk of the Hot Block sometimes find diamonds hidden in dark crevices, and by tradition these are used for communal purpose like purchases sacrifices for holidays or paying for a doctor.
Doctor
Proponent of sweating, philosopher of topology, and an excellent judge of truthfulness. Gwin du Kaisar is as fine a doctor as they come in November, provided you pay. Were you as wise in the ways of medicine as she, then you too would know that all medical knowledge is the study of knots. Stabbed with a sword? Knots will fix it. Cancer? Knots'll fix that. That, and knowing the proper gods to pray to.
Tomb to the Brave
Where the honored brave rest - those who perished in honorable combat in the arena. Three victories are needed to be considered for burial here, or one impossible win. Their cremated remains guarded by thick stone doors and dire warnings upon them: "May thieves face Phlangtheron."
Phlantheron was a gladiator of legendary strength. He was the first of his style, birthing a class of gladiator that became an archetype after his passing: that of The Crushing Wall. Wielding two shields, heavily armored, the Wall would seek to crush his opponents limbs in the jagged teeth between them, or smother them under their sheer armored mass. He is the looming fury of the earthquake itself: the foe, the heel, the vengeance against hubris - the universal fear of those who live underground.
From this archetype others began to emerge in his wake:
- the Spider, with numb-poisoned spear and sticky nets
- the Wasp, with hallucination-poisoned knife and light armor, fly-wires Thunderdome style, a small team of allied pullers to hoist and lower them
- the Snake, naked and thickly oiled, with two pain-poisoned daggers
- the Tyrant, heavy armor, flail or flanged mace
- the Flame, brass armored arms, two flaming whips
- the Sun, shining helm and cuirass, mirror shield, short sword
- the Crushing Wall, heavily armored, with two massive shields
The doors are shaped like his shields. They're trapped to snap shut on the unprepared, crushing limb and bone between them by huge hidden counterweights.
