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| The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum - John Martin - Source |
MOUNTAIN TEMPLE
It is too hot for mortals to traverse without divine protection. The very air will eventually crisp the flesh, and eyes will sizzle and evaporate away. Pockets of killing gas, treacherous climbs, and perilous vents of scorching ire double the hazard. Nonetheless, sometimes the Mountain Temple is braved: for treasure, for truth and for mystery.
I1: The Bends
When the volcano dreams, her thoughts spill out into the stone. They run like black oozing rivers in the dark tunnels beneath the city, pooling in melted groves where they gestate into primordial chaos. The dreams produce wonders and horrors - monsters, treasures, life, and death. To feel the dream in its fullness is to experience annihilation, to become swept away in the tide of creation and destruction. Only when it has cooled and become a mere echo of itself may one approach without unmaking.
The Tree of Life
High up in the Bends, seldom flooded by the dream. A tree of stone, like an old warty oak. Its leaves like dripping icicles of cooled lava. In its roots are born the Children of the Dream, demons of chaos, who come crawling out of the stone likes moles when they ripen. There's no telling what the irrigation of the Dream will produce when it recedes: monsters, horrors, demi-gods? Hadal creatures of fire and stone, shadow-shades that give flight before the light, champions born with the powers of chaos in their flesh. The Tree of Life hears no plea nor prayer, but it is worshipped nonetheless.
The Mountain Face
A portal of fire at the end of the Bends. To merely gaze at the entrance requires the protection of the gods, or else one burns in the fires of divine inspiration. Nobody looks upon the Face of the Mountain who does not want to see a goddess in her full glory, and perish.
During the Magmalia, sacrifice is given to the Mountain Face. Flaming hearts cut from the the blackened flesh of the greatest bulls, chosen for their plumpness and size, so that the hearts may survive raw until the moment they are cut out, are cast into the fiery pit. The priestesses plea and they bargain, to Mountain and Tiamat, that November continue in her graces.
Demon Gates
There are two kinds of demons, as there are two kinds of dreams: those who elicit the truth, and those who deceive. By passing through the Gates do each become each.
The truth-telling demons assist augurs by giving them visions of things to come. They reside in the flesh of sacred cattle: in pigeons, pigs, sheep, bulls, basilisks, or snakes. They can corrupt it, turning the viscera dark or pale or cancerous or scaly. They come as clear dreams, or transform into visions.
Deceivers create nonsensical dreams and false omens. They cannot inhabit cattle, but often possess birds or undead. They say to never trust a bird nor a zombie for this reason.
Stone Ocean
A great cavern, with cresting stones shaped like waves. Every few days they shake, and the whole of the ocean shifts with a great clacking tumult. It's said that this signals a change in the Bends.
Horrible Black Void
Endless and dark, without gravity to know down. It lies at the end of a tunnel within which grows dark translucent crystals that clog it like a fattened artery - like the body of the mountain knows that if it didn't scab over then the eternal emptiness would bleed it dry.
The Vault
Not one among the wise knows what lies behind the Black Door. Ten times man's height, carved by impossible craft, indestructible, inscrutable, the Door is adorned with exactly one hundred and forty-four locks. Twelve times twelve. Any one lock opens the door, but to where few can say. Ultimately, it is not the locks that matter, but the key which is used. For any key, there is one particular lock. For every lock there is a vault. In the secret histories of the mystery cults, there have been three instances of the door being opened, all of them in the time of myth.
The first was the queen Gliznia, who opened the Vault with a key of iron. The door led to her enemy's home while they were sleeping, and she slit all their throats one by one.
The second was a thief, who is not named. He opened the door with a key of truesilver, and none are sure where it took him.
The third was the priestess Hazraham, who entered with a key of flesh and bone. It brought her to the heavens above, where she was cast down once again to these very pits for torment.
Sea of Unborn
Beyond the dark river of the dreams of promise lies a sea of the souls of those who will be born in the city above. They flow and surge towards the estuary by the river in tidal waves, each ghostly fetal mass awaiting its turn in the womb.
Witnessed once by a priest of November, who surmised that the date of the doom of the city could be determined by measuring the fluid dynamics of the souls and estimating the volume of the sea. Ultimately he gave up, for the journey was too perilous and the sea-depth impractical to gauge.
Empty Prison
Cells of sharp dark glass, sized for things as small as men and as great as is yet unknown, all of them empty... Does the Mountain dream of empty jails, their inhabitants liberated, or does she hope that one day they will be filled?
Anger seeps through the very rock. It absorbs through the skin like invisible mercury. Those who are said to hate the gods sometimes come here in pilgrimage, and never leave. What happens to them none dare imagine.
Web of Ira
One could hardly imagine the volume implied by the great empty space within which is contained the Web of Ira. It could be its own city, suspended in the Bends, gently curving as the Bends do not: outward instead of inward. It could be the home of a million people living upon the great strands of the Mountain's mind... were it not for the monsters.
They are often crucified upon the webs, struggling and trashing against their imprisonment: beings of many heads and many hands, with scales and tentacles and horrible teeth, no two alike, no sense or symmetry to them. All of them, though, have some part of a woman. Perhaps a woman's head, or many heads. Maybe a woman's torso, or hands, or breasts, or legs, or many legs. A woman's anger, or a woman's hunger. They thrash against the webs and escape and roam, and they eat people without a thought. Their strength makes mighty warriors seem like babes.
In the Temple of Knots, they say that there is a woman who wanders the web: a normal-looking woman, perhaps a nymph or other god-child; she wanders, and is the most dangerous monster of them all. Anyone who has seen her befalls a cataclysmic death, often instantly, after gazing upon her. Word of this has only reached the city by those who did not see, but had the sight described to them by brave adventurers who perished moments later. Ira they call her, and surmise she is master of the web.
Weeping Wall
The rock weeps, and melts, and molds itself into the Weeping Wall. Fifty feet high and a mile long: difficult to climb and hazardous to touch. The tears run in slow narrow streams, pooling into molasses-like whirlpools a few feet wide that go to some deeper darker place.
Some say that you can see the doom of the city above in the Weeping Wall. Transient images of civil strife, of crowned cannibal-queens with bloodied hands on the senate steps, of screaming mobs in the streets and thieves in the temples, knives in the sacred spaces, of matrons' children slitting the throats of their siblings, armies of undead, rivers of fire, of sacrificial cattle goring their slayers, worms drowning in the sea, and of the gods above and below averting their eyes in a most profound disappointment.
River of Flame
A river of fire. Those who drink from it are healed of all disease if they can suffer the pain it causes. The greater the disease, the greater the pain. The sign of failure is to vomit the fire out once again, in excruciating agony.
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