Beranth’ahl

Until 739 years ago, there were twelve gods who walked among their subjects, powerful and oppressive. They appeared as mortals might, but somewhat taller and with features and limbs that seemed eerily longer and more drawn than was natural. All mortals were their faithful and their chattel. And their food, for the Twelve Tyrants feasted upon the flesh of their subjects, too.

Several thousand years ago, the Tyrants forced their masses to build an immense city formed only of megalithic towers of stone. There, countless years later, where the Wyrm’s Tongue arm of the Grey Reach Mountains strikes out into the waters of the Norahdrig Ocean, the city of Beranth’ahl was constructed. Two hundred and ninety-three towers cast from dark granite and marble, carved from thousands of quarries. The tallest of them rose up from where the highest ridge of the Tongue ended in a sheer cliff at the coast, adding thousands of feet to its already height. The other still-impossibly tall towers were arranged in a diamond pattern that descended down and away from it on both sides of the peaks. Arching stone bridges that should not have been able to bear their own weight spanned the distances between them. Deep beneath the city, in the deepest heart of the mountains and below, was a subterranean lake. Heated by geothermal activity, its waters gather and vent through hundreds of natural cisterns, which were put to use in powering an immense and complex system of mechanical infrastructure for the city, mostly as heating and other pneumatic systems, though these would come to serve a different purpose in later centuries.

Then, at the peak of their monumental power and absolute authority over mortals, the gods left the perfect sanctuary of Beranth’ahl and went on a pilgrimage. They traversed the “low-lands,” feasting on their subjects in every village, town and city they passed through. As the pilgrimage drew to a close, the Tyrants stopped at the site of Dominatum Deum, their oldest temple and greatest architectural monument, before the gothic enormity of Beranth’ahl.

There in the Dominatum, the feasts of the flesh took on new life! Myths of that time say the Tyrants were insatiable, ravenous, as if their appetites had turned bottomless. And so they kept feasting. For days they ate, and such was their gluttony that they grew more and more corpulent. Days turned to weeks, and still they fed upon their faithful, and still they grew fatter!

When the feasting had gone on for nearly a quarter of a year, and winter was nigh upon the land, the gods began to die. Discontent among their subjects had always been present, but most were smart enough to keep such thoughts unspoken. But with the gods growing both fat, weak—and getting weaker—discontent turned into something far more dangerous. Hope. And, as all know, hope in the hands of the trodden is a dangerous thing to the ones whose boots are upon their necks. No one knows why the gods began to die, but the people did not care. They had an opportunity for freedom, and they would take it!

A slave woman offered herself up as the next victim of the Tyrants’ gluttony. Legends say that she bowed her head low over a bowl of platinum and gold, itself filled with bones and discarded viscera. When the god dipped its own head to begin his next course, the woman pulled a jagged bone from the pile of offal and drove it up and into its neck, where a mere mortal might possess an artery. And, lo and behold—the thing bled like one!

The moments of stunned silence that followed are still talked about today, but that is not where our story ends, and it is certainly not where freedom begins.

In the wake of the quietus of one Tyrant, the grand hall at the center of the Dominatum exploded with the feral violence of slaves who had been oppressed and fed upon for untold thousands of years.

Once the holiest of places in the glorification of the Twelve Tyrants, the Dominatum was turned to a charnel house kill.

The blood of gods, it seems, is a dark and cloudy violet that produced smoke in thin, lazy wisps.

Theocide. This first sin, the slaying of a god, opened the door for freedom.

The gathered masses roared with triumph at having ended millennia of vile oppression.

“What was theirs is now ours for the taking!” the woman’s voice rang, rasping with emotion but filled with the overwhelming strength of a victory previously thought impossible. “Let us do to them what they have done to us for so long. Drink of their blood, feed upon their hearts, and let us become more than they ever were!”

Then, in a fit of rapturous vengeance, the woman-slave who had taken the life of the first of the Tyrants bent to the work of carving its heart from its chest. And then she began to eat. Eleven other once-slaves gave only the briefest thought before joining her.

Theophagy. The Consumption, as it would eventually be called. This, the second sin, slammed the door on a nascent freedom that had been only minutes old. They did not know that then, however, and so they kept on.

As the slaves sacramentally fed upon the Fallen, the wisps of smoke curling from the dark violet blood began to thicken and move with unnatural intent. It curled around ankles, caressed their skin, wormed into nostrils and mouths, and eyes. Whispers tickled the minds of those present, indecipherable but terrible. Anxiety turned to paranoia, and paranoia turned to fear. Fear turned to flight. The feast was over.

As one, they made haste to leave of the Dominatum, even as they were being violated by the miasma. They did not even make it to the doors before their gorge began to rise. All fell to the floor, clutching at their guts and their throat. Their stomachs churned, their minds screamed and their souls tore. What spewed forth from their mouths was not the meat of the Fallen they had consumed, but rather a beautiful and haunting stream of crystalline light with a hazy core of yellow fading to orange. It looked like a late-afternoon sun peering past a lone cloud on an otherwise cloudless winter day. It was pure. It was achingly beautiful. And, as those streams of light spilled from the mouths of the twelve Liberators, it took with it their compassion, their shame, their regret. Twelve streams of light, carrying all that was once good in those twelve men and women, surged together and formed a crystalline teardrop containing a trapped, slow-moving aurora of yellows and golds. It did not flicker— it pulsed with a slow, rhythmic heartbeat.

The Liberators picked up the strange artifact, not yet knowing what to do with it, but only that it must not be left for anyone else to find. And, with that, they hurried from the Dominatum and put out a call to rally all of the peoples to Beranth’ahl. The Tear, as it would come to be called, has spawned countless myths since that day. Most commonly the Tear is seen as hope and how the Faceless have hidden it away, to one-day return.

The miasma continued to rise from the corpses of the Fallen. It spread rapidly across the countryside, as far as the horizon and beyond, chasing the masses back to the safety of the city, where the Liberators would become their new rulers.

In the year that followed, those who committed the Consumption were slowly transformed into very much the same creatures they had freed themselves from. Limbs, digits, and features became drawn and eerily elongated. Their faces were the most terrible of the changes. Where there should have been eyes, there were only layer upon layer of concentric oval-shaped mouths filled with jagged teeth; their noses flattened to a shallow bump with only two tiny mouths where their nostrils should have been. And while their true mouth remained where it was, it now nearly split their face from ear to ear in a horrific rictus. By the end of that first year, each of the twelve Liberators attached veils to the plain crowns they wore atop their heads. And so the Liberators became the Faceless Hierarchs.

And so the Hierarchs became the first lords of a “free” Beranth’ahl, City of Spires, Kingdom of Towers. I say first lords, but that is to say they are the only lords Beranth’ahl has known since the Consumption. That was 739 years ago. An entire religion has been built around them. And though the citizens are not slaves, there are Feastdays when the Hierarchs and their Arch Vicars will dine upon the flesh of citizens identified as possessing a lingering fragment of Discordant power from the Fallen.

Still, the citizenry holds a modicum of freedom, though they live in a grand cage of gothic towers.

Below, the low-lands remain blanketed in the undulating Pall left behind by the corpses of the Fallen. That syrupy rolling surface is occasionally punctuated by the twisted heights of the tallest trees or of mountains blackened as if by fire, whose heights are still sometimes crowned in snow-capped white.

All this invites the mind to curiosity, incites the ambitious and avaricious to greed. Though to wander the Pall is to invite death, there are those who are willing to flirt with their own mortality.