The Shattered Temple

Contents

1. Overview
2. Key Areas
   1. Temple Grounds
   2. Main Buildings
   3. The Portal Room
   4. The Fallen Tower
   5. The Bois Verdurous
   6. The Terraces

Overview

The Shattered Temple is one of those places that berks tend not to come unless they have to. Not unless you’re the barmy Athar that is. Any Lady-fearing folk of Sigil know this place is cursed, and stay the hell away.

Not the Athar though. These barmy gits have made the place their home, finding the devastated ruins of a temple to a fallen power to be the perfect place to set up their faction headquarters.

Sure, the Athar’s recent initiatives are bringing more sods off the streets for treatment, and the fact they haven’t been flayed by the Lady is slowly giving it a better reputation. For most people though, this husk of a building still represents ‘that one time the Lady snapped and flayed a god’.

The guards stationed here find themselves redirecting berks to the rear entrance more often than not. That gate is known within the Faction as Poor Sod’s Gate; being as it is used by the sick and injured. Those with actual business to attend to in the temple get appointed a guide instead, one of the more enthusiastic Athaons who like to run their mouths about how great the Athar are, and led through the front.

Key Areas

Temple Grounds

Ruined walls surround the Temple Grounds, giving the appearance of being hardly defensible. Nice illusion, eh berk? The poor sods rioting in the Second Upheaval learned that the hard way when they tried scaling it. They’re actually a glamour, reinforced and trapped. Oh, and they’re alive too! They lay dormant till a sod tries to come in the gaps in the rubble, at which point the walls themselves take up arms and blast the git back to their Home Plane.

The temple grounds resemble a large patch of rough grass, dotted with mole hills and invasive weeds. The main path isn’t much better - a careless berk could easily lose their footing on the uneven walkways that lead from the peripheral outbuildings towards the decaying pile of stone that is the Temple proper.

Main Buildings

In a small detached wing from the temple, complete with glassless windows, half an upper floor and a wall of force where the missing roof once stood, lies the Scriptorium. This light-filled chamber holds roughly 50 scribes at a time, who all sit in hunched silence drafting up new informational pamphlets and inscribing the Athar’s Mark upon the freshly-printed papers.

A separate refectory sits opposite, and is full of long oak tables and yet more glassless windows, and serves as the social hub of the Athar. Whatever time of day you pay this place a visit, you can expect to be greeted with mouth-watering smells and a large amount of enthusiastic debate (things have been known to get rather heated at points).

The Portal Room

Accessed via a bulky building that sits alone beneath a massive arch is the Portal Room. The interior is designed to give the sense of entering a tomb; a cold, musty interior chock-full of cobwebs.

Inside the vaulted entry hall are two ornate portals that lead to the Astral Sea. One such portal takes berks to a graveyard of dead gods, where the Athar make their secondary headquarters. They come here for a moment of quiet contemplation, or to remind themselves of the folly of the gods.

The other portal leads to a mostly-empty section of Astral Sea, with nothing but a thin cloud of ash surrounding the portal. Most Athar opt for cremation followed by a scattering in the Astral; those ashes are the Athar dead, so try not to breathe too deep.

The Fallen Tower

Here lies the most well-maintained (not that that’s saying much) part of the temple. Truth be told “The Fallen Tower” is a misnomer, as it’s currently standing. Chant says it was once fallen and the Athar just hiked it back up to make more room for books when they ran out.

This place is a maze of falling shelves, boxes of paper and piles of ledgers. You can often find the ghost of two-Factols past doddling about this room, peering over a book or napping in the corner.

The Bois Verdurous

This tree was the pride and joy of the Athar back in the day, being the main reason for the Temple’s high security, and the location of the Athar HQ. This enchanted tree, imbued with the power of thousands of sacrificed items of divine power, plays a key part in the Ascension rituals.

Burned and razed in the Second Upheaval, from its ashes was born a weapon of tremendous power - an arrow, said to be carved with the True Name of a god (though no-one can really decide which god… some even say it has the Lady’s name… they don’t keep their friends long after such barmy claims).

Thankfully, the forewarned Factol at the time had taken to carrying one of the fruits of the tree on him at all times, and so it was, that among the ashes of the tree, then-Factol Terrance planted an apple. All members of the Athar attended a ritual, calling upon the powers of the Great Unknown to see the seeds take root.

And take root they did. A small sapling grows there now, barely a metre high, with dark green pinnate leaves covered in a slick, silvery coating. Beside the tree is a chest of permanently gentle-reposed apples. Both tree and chest are guarded passionately by round-the-clock guards and twice as many magical wards as ever before.

The Terraces

These construction works are a recent (and controversial) decision, and were built within the last few years with the donations received from the Athar’s new initiatives. Two of these are fully built, whilst the third is under construction. Some Faction members are pushing to stop construction on this third, or even demolish the new buildings due to defilement of their temple… an irony that is not lost on its proponents.

• Piebald Printing Press is accessible via the West Wing, and is home to the faction’s printing press - a new and experimental instrument that has revolutionised the ability of the Athar to churn out mundane pamphlets and handbooks. It requires a fair amount of maintenance at present due to frequent breakdowns. Still, despite the daily cursing that comes from the engineers in this room, it’s one of their proudest inventions, giving them an edge over the other factions in their ideological war.
• Rust Infirmary is accessible via the South Wing, though a second, larger entrance, leads directly to the street outside (the aforementioned “Poor Sod’s Gate”). This building functions as a small hospital, stocked with plenty of healer’s kits, unguents and a small amount of diamond dust and powdered silver. Athar members do their best to treat whoever walks in off the streets for suggested donations, but reluctantly must charge for any spell cast that has expensive components.
• Shining Maw is accessible via the East Wing, and is still in the early days of its construction. Its purpose is currently ambiguous, but faction members involved in its construction talk about it as looking like an enormous library - possibly to hold the factions ever-expanding collection of books and artefacts (those who can’t afford to donate coin often rustle up other possessions that might interest the Athar… as such, they have a lot of books and unwanted holy symbols).