Shadows & Sorcery #58
And next up—the fifty-eighth edition of Shadows & Sorcery!
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This week, we delve into the grim tale of the Graveyard Dungeons, we uncover the history of The Old Kings, we learn what drives a Pilgrim of Defilement, we sit in on the recording of a Divine Dream, and learn what dwells in the Church of Flames…
Graveyard Dungeons
The Lord Livronne Fedarin II was a zealot, the kind that gave people of faith a bad name. Not that he wasn't genuine, or that he used it as a cover or shield, no--he really believed in that narrow little slice of divinity he cherished. Believed, and he so claimed, personally knew. He started his reign already a zealot, something that had been building up within him since he was a young man on a battlefield, when according to him, a god of the Triple Trinity revealed itself to him and helped turn the tide of battle against the Habrautsch Khan of that age.
Present in court and a fervent ally of the Temple, he surrounded himself with clerics and won honourary membership in no less than four different holy chivalric orders. When his mother, the Lady Livronne who preceded him, grew ill, he spent his free time at her bedside in silent prayer, not for her swift recovery, but her quiet, comfortable end. He was a man of faith, but that never precluded his ambition. When he took the throne, the ceremony was a solemn one, with nary a hint of the joyous ascension and abundance of previous coronations. There's something about the Temple of the Triple Trinity that inspires sternness and stoicism in its faithful. May have been why it rose to prominence, as opposed to more rapturous cults of local origin.
Under Fedarin's guidance, and the consultation of the Temple, Livronne won back much of its northern coasts from Habrautsch invaders. The lands rallied behind him, and the Livronne Empire waxed within. One of Fedarin's long term projects was the construction of one thousand temples across the land, and he got over halfway in. If you've visited or passed a temple in south or central Livronne, it was most likely one of his. But with this project, his fervour grew. He began to consider his station as Lord Livronne as holy, and wondered just how else he might honour the gods with the power he had.
Fedarin has been dead for three hundred years, but the things he did remained, standing out stark in the story of a land whose history is already more than colourful. The Empire encompassed about a dozen nations and clan-based confederacies, with the capital state of Livronne in the middle of it all. There was a great diversity of beliefs and customs throughout these lands. Many subscribed to the Triple Trinity, and many subscribed to their local natural religions, ancestors cults, and sometimes a comfortable mixture of these. But Fedarin was predictably at best wary, at worst outright hostile of most of them. He had an especial distaste for those who mixed worship, while the heathens were, to him, merely ignorant.
He had considerable trouble stamping out pagan practices across the Empire, as many of his governors were themselves followers of their lands' native faiths. But over time he coerced some, and gained the loyalty of those who shared his "purity", or as pure as he was willing to accept. First the Triple Trinity was encouraged through funding and local programs. Then it began to be enforced. The Lord Livronne's sternness seemed to seep into every aspect of his rule. He was particularly anti-social, distant with his magistrates, met with foreign delegates coldly, and almost outright refused a visiting Habrautschen Khan. At first, alien faiths began to withdraw on their own terms, retiring to basements and back chambers as their cult centers were repurposed with the declaration, for the first time in the history of any nation or empire, a state-sanctioned faith. For many that was the last straw, and they left for further regions. Fedarin was glad to be rid of them. Now he could deal with those who remained much easier.
The Lord Livronne enacted laws which gave a sacred sense to his reign on every single level. The Law was divine, and the Empire was the Law. Blasphemy was a crime, and paganism was outlawed, offered no right or protection. And yet, Fedarin did not instate mass re-education or sprawling theocratic re-writes of the Books of the Law, he merely added and tweaked what already existed, like so many before him. Life changed relatively little, save for a sense of discomfort in everything. Fedarin wasn't forcing people into temples, but he was watching, and some were watched more than others.
There exists underneath the Livronne capital, as well as three surrounding major states, a series of extensive subterranean prisons. Those three states also happened to be home to Fedarin's closest allies and fellow zealots. They are filled with numberless cells in the sides of low, wide corridors, which have long since sat dark. The walls between each cell hold a symbol of a god of the Triple Trinity, and each cell door holds the full nine symbols. Most of the doors are rotten and their holy sigils have fallen to the ground, rusted and browned. But the cells are not empty. Only a relative few are empty, and that is because they hold no graves. That is the purpose of these dungeons, they are graveyards, each one the tomb of a heretic caught and slain under Lord Livronne Fedarin's secret war against heathenry. Buried in a dungeon, so that they may remained imprisoned in death, forever.
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