Wells of Completion

The Wells of Completion

Realm of Haurvatat

Location: Mount Celestia / Venya

High above the halfling communes of the Green Fields, way up in the inaccessible mountains of Venya is a steaming valley where the sparkling snows never melt. Dotted amongst snowdrifts you can find bubbling pools of boiling water—but cutter, this is Mount Celestia remember, so it’s not just any water. No, the hot springs here are holy water. These are the Wells of Completion, the realm of the Persian amesha spenta Haurvatat, the goddess of perfection and life after death.

Guvners note the place as a curious mirror of to the infamous Wells of Darkness, down in the 73rd layer of the Abyss. While the Lower Planar versions are prisons which hold some of the most awful beings in existence who are regarded as too dangerous to loose on creation—even by other Abyssal Lords—the Celestian wells in Venya are places of restoration and healing. A series of natural hot springs in the mountainside, boiling holy water bubbles up through sparkling righteous geysers and collects in scintillating pools of steaming purifying water. While most hot springs are places of relaxation and rejuvenation, bathing in these waters is not for the faint of heart. They have the supernatural property of healing alright, but it is healing for the soul rather than the body, and you’d better believe that healing a fractured soul is not a painless experience.

The Wells of Completion receive souls, petitioners, doubting celestials, and even rare fiends or mortals whose identities have been spiritually shattered. Here they are free to bathe until memory, moral coherence, and even a cutter’s true name are re-knit into a stable whole. Souls who make the pilgrimage here—better believe there are no convenient portals to drop a cutter off nearby—are always welcomed, but don’t make the mistake of thinking they will be forgiven automatically. It’s an uncomfortable process, not just because the waters are so hot, but also such self-reflection and soul-searching can be agonising.

Chant goes the first ramadeen came here as part of their redemption arc. Most visitors have taken the long walk up the great mountain from the Lunian burg of Redemption. There are even former prisoners who trek here from the Chambers of Repentance—you’d better believe that’s a long walk uphill. Planewalkers should note that no map of Venya shows the Wells in the same place twice. The chant goes the springs appear only to cutters who are ready to become whole, which means many pilgrims who seek simple absolution never find them, while a half-ruined berk with no words left but honesty may stumble onto the first basin by accident.

Entry and the Laws

No petitioner, mortal, celestial, or fiend may be forced to enter a spring by force. To compel immersion would violate the Wells’ whole purpose, because completion that is coerced just generates another kind of spiritual damage. Each visitor must surrender three things at the gate: their weapon, their name, and a falsehood. The weapon is placed in an alcove of stone; their name is written into a ledger and returned when the visitor leaves—whilst in the Wells, a visitor is addressed only as navar; and the falsehood must be spoken aloud into a shallow bowl where the water clouds, darkens, and then clears. Some are turned away. Not because they are too wicked, for there is no such thing, but because they still seek the absolution of the Wells as a hiding place from justice. Haurvatat’s servants insist that restoration must never be a dodge from consequences.

The Acolyte-Attendants

Don’t think of this place as a spa though cutter, the Wells of Completion are more like a monastery, only steamier. The ordinary attendants are lantern archons, halfling petitioners from the Green Fields, and gentle servitors known as the Cup-Bearers, who carry steaming ewers and ask gentle questions with terrifying kindness. Old Tannivet (halfling petitioner [she/her] / LG), formerly from Marston-on-the-Water, manages the outer bathhouses and gives better spiritual counsel over a hearty bowl of soup than most priests do from a pulpit.

Hound archons patrol the outer ridges and approach every visitor on their approach. Higher administration falls to a small collegium of tome archons on loan from Xiranthador, because every healing here generates records, and potentially ethical disputes. The current high-up is Relinquished Concerns (planar tome archon [he/him], LG) a sympathetic tome archon who has seen it all before and is hard to shock.

A higher order called the Attendants of the Last Cup serve Haurvatat directly. These cutters can taste a single drop from a traveller’s canteen and tell whether its owner suffers from guilt, enchantment, soul-fracture, breached oathes, possession, despair, or simple cowardice masquerading as repentance—before assigning them to the relevant spring to use to heal which distinct forms of incompletion: mending broken vows, smoothing over divided minds, washing out spiritual contamination, dissolving despair, erasing scarred memories from the Lower Planes, and expunging bodily suffering that has been carried into petitioner form. Rather than acting like simple curative magic, the waters seem to reveal to a person what is missing in them. Bashers emerge thoughfully speaking truths they have dodged for years, since lies are literally unable to hold their shape in the steam.

The Penitent Marilith (planar marilith tanar’ri (she/her) / N), who is never named in polite company, is a recurring visitor to the Wells. While she is certainly no longer wicked enough to be called a fiend, she is still a disruptive presence here, and has started at least three minor diplomatic incidents in Venya in the last few years.

The Seven Springs

Each of the Wells is a different temperature and balance of magical minerals. The Wells themselves are usually counted as seven major basins:

• The First Cup receives the newly arrived, easing bodily pain, plane-sickness, hunger, and the shock of long torment
• The Basin of the Cleared Name strips away aliases, imposed identities, cursed masks, and possession until the bather can speak their real name without fear
• The Spring of Mended Oaths restores broken moral coherence; promises cannot be sworn lightly here, because the water remembers
• The Tarn of Sorrowful Memory returns only the memories a soul is capable of bearing, often in dreams spread over several immersions
• The Pool of Unsundering heals division between conviction and action, which is why hypocrites dread it more than fiends do
• The Vigilant Bath does not soothe at all; it forces the bather to witness the consequences of their past acts as if standing among those they harmed
• The Final Well, called Fulfilment by the faithful and the Deep Quiet by everyone else, can be entered only by invitation, and no one speaks clearly of what occurs there except to say that what emerges is no longer inwardly at war

Around the springs, grow fruitful orchards fed by runoff water, herb terraces, medicinal groves, and white flowers that blossom in delight when a soul has completed a stage of healing. Haurvatat herself dwells in a manor house far above the springs on an impossible-to-clim section of the mountain. It is called the House of Converging Streams, and is a hanging palace of pearlescent stone, white travertine, and gold-rimmed channels where waters from dozens of heights flow outwards before cascading down into waterfalls which blend together and scatter rainbows around the valley, symbolising shattered lives made whole. Her throne chamber is not a hall at all, but a circular basin under an open dome, where moon-bright water hangs in the air as floating ribbons around her.