Asebes

[ Planes of Cordance > Sheol ]

Asebes

CHARACTER: The former realm town of a power of dark knowledge, Asebes is a place which holds more than its fair share of secrets—darks which are supposed to be kept in the dark. The chant goes that the burg’s Grand Library holds vast collections of scrolls that hide all kinds of secrets of the cosmos. The sort of darks that powers, archfiends, and other high-ups alike wouldn’t want to see the light. Thing is though, if this is true, then why in the planes does the burg still exist at all? Frankly, most cutters outside the burg reckon the legend of Asebes is just screed spread around by the Athar.

WHO RULES: Thaolin (prime human wizard, former priest / Athar / LE) originally hails from a Prime at war with a Abyssal Lord. The demon lord in question—to this day, Thaolin will not speak her name—invaded his world and wrote many of the Crystal Sphere’s powers into the dead-book. He’d grown up in the priesthood but when his power stopped answering prayers or even bestowing spells he left the church.

He became a self-trained spellslinger to escape the endless war with tanar’ri, to find a new home. After plane-hopping on the Inner Planes for a few years he eventually found Sigil and the Athar. They welcomed him in as a refugee of divine war, and under their ministrations his distrust of powers blossomed. 

When the news of the ‘discovery’ of Sheol reached the ears of the Athar—and especially how unfriendly it seemed to be to powers—Thaolin was among the first to volunteer to explore this new unknown. He’s currently the most senior local factor of the Athar in the planelette of Sheol.

Thaolin doesn’t hide his mistrust of the powers, but his true intentions are only known by high-ups of the Defiers. With the discovery of new planes arises new possibilities. Thaolin is apparently searching for a way to break the link between powers and their clerics forcibly; a spell, ritua,l or relic perhaps. He won’t admit it openly, but he wants them to feel the horror he first felt when his power stopped answering his own prayers.

WHO REALLY RULES: The power whose originally made their Asebes their realm isn’t quite as dead as everyone thinks. Its consciousness exists as a distributed entity within the scrolls themselves—every text contains a fragment of its awareness or knowledge. It can’t act directly, but it influences readers through subtle suggestions in the marginalia, gently steering events, perhaps to engineer its own resurrection.

A cabal of senior librarians who’ve spent years cataloging the forbidden knowledge here have become something more than mortal. They’ve absorbed tiny fragments of divinity from the scrolls they guard, granting them the powers of exemplars and a subtle influence over the burg. They manipulate Thaolin through carefully curated “discoveries” in the archives, using him as their public face while they pursue their true agenda: preserving dangerous knowledge until the multiverse is “ready” for it.

DESCRIPTION: From the exterior, Asebes resembles a colossal scar gouged into the eternal gray slope of Sheol. It does not protrude outward like a typical fortress; rather, it is recessed, carved directly into the bedrock. At the entrance are four empty platforms. Chant goes they used to be the home of four guardian statues, but they long ago disappeared when the power died. Inside the burg, the entrance is dominated by the Great Portico, a row of fifty-foot-tall columns carved to resemble tightly rolled scrolls, now petrified and cracked. Between these columns hang heavy iron chains that rattle in the windless air.

Because status on Sheol is determined by altitude, the “entrance” is actually at the bottom of the settlement. To reach the districts of higher knowledge, one must navigate narrow, lung-burning switchback tunnels carved under the plane’s surface that connect the subterranean libraries in a maze-like network.

Inside, Asebes is a claustrophobic marvel of engineering, a cross between a cathedral and a termite mound. The majority of the town is comprised of the Dark Stacks: miles of cylindrical passages bored perfectly smooth by unknown magics. Every square inch of wall space is honeycombed with hexagonal niches, most of them still unexplored and uncatalogued. Some hold crumbling papyrus, others hold bound tomes wrapped in lead, and still others contain strange, glowing crystals that whisper when touched. The Dark Stacks are lit by witch-lights—cold, pale blue orbs that float lazily near the ceiling. They provide just enough light to read by, but leave deep, ink-black shadows in the corners where secrets breed. In the larger cavern-plazas, narrow stone bridges span the darkness, connecting opposite sides of the library-chasm. These are often unguarded and have no handrails, ensuring that only the sober and the careful survive the walk to the restricted sections.

The burg is built upon the bones of a dead god’s realm, and the architecture refuses to let the residents forget it. Caratyid column statues of the former deity hold up the ceiling in many places, but in accordance with Athar philosophy, they have been ritually mutilated. Faces have been chiseled off to leave blank, smooth surfaces. Whether or not the Athar know the identity of the power isn’t public knowledge, but if they do, the name is illegal to speak.

Deep in the lower districts, there’s a deep shaft that descends into the darkness that wasn’t dug by the current residents. It exhales a dry, warm breeze that smells of incense and dried blood. It is said that if you listen at the vent long enough, the wind sounds like a prayer, urgent and secretive.

MILITIA: There’s not much of a militia, but the Athar have an unknown number of golems tasked to to protect the burg. Of course, the Athar themselves are hardly defenceless—they might look like book-bothering librarians but many of these bashers have decades of magical learning to fall back on, should they be threatened.

SERVICES: The library’s catalogue is far more subversive than simple history or arcane theory. Students of the esoteric and occult will find all manner of forbidden subjects hidden away in the labyrinthine stacks.

The Anatomy of Divinity (and How to Dismantle It). This section is the pride of the Athar collectors, containing forbidden treatises on the biological and metaphysical structure of the Powers. Careful research might uncover the Dead Book of the Gods, a census of every former deity currently floating in the Astral Plane or buried in Sheol, and detailed records of how specific powers died when their worshipers were wiped out or converted. It includes treatises on how to disrupt the flow of belief energy from the Prime to the Outer Planes, so-called ‘Starvation Theory’. There are also catalogues of weaponized myths—stories that, if spread widely enough, might weaken a god’s portfolio.

The Sins of the Ascended. This section is essentially a vault of material which could be used to blackmail living gods and archfiends. A researcher might uncover dark records of Celestial powers who broke their own laws or made secret pacts with fiends to win ancient wars. There’s also scrolls which hold evidence of illegitimate lineages and offspring that powerful outsiders have tried to cover up. There are even histories of how certain demon lords and archdevils rose to power, and fragments of truenames. Thaolin hoards this kind of information once it;s uncovered, hoping to be able to use them against his enemies in the future.

Apocrypha of the Erased. Because Sheol collects dead realms, Asebes is the final resting place for the literature of extinct civilizations. Cutters come here to learn about clerical spells that no longer function because the god who powered them is dead—or more dangerously, spells that do still function but draw power from a rotting, insane source. Original copies of religious—now heretical—texts that were purged from the multiverse by jealous gods. These books often contain the “Truth”, before it was rewritten by the victors.

To make sure the scrolls aren’t damaged before they can be found, painstakingly translated, and catalogued, the Athar have constructed a small village—more a rag-tag collection of huts and tents—in one of the more central chambers of the library. It acts as the kitchen and living quarters, to isolate activities that could potentially damage the scrolls in the rest of the library.

Unless a party contains a Defier however, they are unlikely to be welcomed here. Only proven Athar scholars are allowed to access the Stacks themselves. However, if a letter of recommendation from faction high-up is shown they’ll be permitted as much as the letter allows for them—just don’t try faking one berk, because the scholars they have magic to detect forgeries.

CURRENT CHANT: The air in Asebes is thick with the dust of crumbling paper and the electric tension of heresy. The Athar scholars here are actively looking for the cracks in the divine armour, and there’s always a frisson of whispered scandal rippling through the ranks of the Athar readers in the library. Which of these rumours are true though, if any at all, who can tell?

The “Empty Throne” Hypothesis (Ishtar & Ereshkigal). The myth goes that Ishtar, the Babylonian power of Love and War, famously descended into the Underworld, died, and was resurrected, trading places with her lover Tammuz. However, a controversial scroll circulating in the upper stacks claims that Ishtar never came back. The theory posits that her sister, the death goddess Ereshkigal, successfully consumed Ishtar’s essence and took her shape. The scandal suggests that for the last three millennia, Babylonian worshipers of love have actually been feeding the goddess of death, and the “war” aspect of her portfolio has become more bloodthirsty because it is being driven by the Underworld’s hunger. If true, “Ishtar’s” realm the City of the Star in Elysium is actually a back door to the Underworld of Kur in Nether.

The Parasite of Olympus (Zeus). The Greek pantheon is a boisterous, dysfunctional family ruled by Zeus, who overthrew his father Chronos—who charmingly ate his own children. Research into the flow of divine magic by the scholar-mages of Asebes suggests Zeus is guilty of a similar crime to his father, just metaphysically. The chant is that Zeus has placed a tithe on the rest of the Olympians. When a mortal prays to Hermes, Apollo, or Aphrodite, ten percent of that spiritual energy is instantly siphoned off to Zeus without the donor or the recipient knowing. The scandal implies the other Olympians powers are weaker than they realise, kept in a state of subservience to keep their King of Gods vigorous.

The Dawn Cataclysm Cover-Up (Lathander). The Morninglord of the Faerûnian powers, Lathander, once attempted to reshape the pantheon in his own image, resulting in the so-called “Dawn Cataclysm” which destroyed several deities and their realms—many of which ended up in Sheol, apparently. Lathander’s priesthood portrays this scandal as a youthful mistake of over-zealous benevolence, but Thaolin’s scribes have uncovered correspondence from a dead power that suggests the Cataclysm wasn’t an accident at all—it was a failed coup. The theory states Lathander wasn’t trying to eliminate evil rivals; he was trying to merge with the sun god Amaunator to become a tyrannical “Over-God” of absolute, searing light to challenge Ao themselves. The real scandal though is that he hasn’t repented; and that Lathander is once again trying to destabilize his rivals for a second attempt.

Source: SGreen, Jon Winter-Holt. Canonwatch: All of the Planes of Cordance and the concept of the Splinterlands are homebrew and non-canonical. Expanded from Greg Jensen’s original conception, more information on his Planes of Cordance can be found here.