SECRETS OF GETHAMANE
From Thirdexalt
Contents |
SECRETS OF THE TEMPLES
The source of the chants and mandalas is obscure but not unknowable: The liturgies are in High Holy Speech, the language of the Dragon Kings. The temple walls portray members of the Pterok breed of this ancient, nearly extinct race. The inscriptions found in the chambers used by the hunters and gatherers are likewise written in this obscure tongue. The priests’ mandalas, however, come from the practices of the Mountain Folk.
THE GODS OF GETHAMANE
Each of the three temples houses a god of air (Reshan of the Inward Breath), sky (Metheris of the Still Sky) and flight (Tribbua of the Outward Breath). The Solars who built Gethamane recruited these three small gods to circulate the city’s air and keep it fresh.
When the City of the Mountain Gateway died, the gods lost all their worshippers. They found no help in Yu-Shan, for the other gods were preoccupied with the Usurpation and losses among their own worshipers. So the three gods waited. Alone and slowly going mad, they sat in their empty temples and kept the winds moving through Gethamane, ensuring that there was fresh air even if there was nobody left alive to breathe it.
The gods try to touch the minds of sleepers and help them with their problems, but they aren’t very good at it. Some dreamers catch a bit of the gods’ insanity and feel compelled to serve as their priests. Others receive the gods’ memories of the First Age city’s extermination by Vodak. This drives them mad with the need to flee.
When Gethamane was first hollowed out from the depths of the mountain, the Solars realized that they would need some way to circulate air throughout the mountain. They called on three small gods who were worshiped by local tribes, gods of air and sky and flight. The Solars promised these three gods temples and worship inside Gethamane, if only the gods would ensure that air kept circulating throughout the mountain. The gods agreed, and even when the petty barbarian tribes who had worshiped them previously died, the gods themselves survived and grew stronger, supported by constant prayers and ritual.
When Vodak swept through Gethamane and devoured everything and everyone within, the three little gods were not strong enough to stop him. They could only watch, aghast, as their worshipers were swallowed up before their eyes, screaming for help. The gods sought assistance in Yu-Shan, but all the other gods were preoccupied by the Great Usurpation or the peril of their own worshipers, and nobody would help them. Left alone and half-insane in an empty mountain,
When humans returned to Gethamane, some of them slept in the empty temples, and the three gods attempted to contact them in their dreams. A few were touched by the deities’ insanity and became their priests, tending the temples and worshiping as best they could. A very few are seized with memories of Vodak’s attack on Gethamane and relive it in their minds constantly. These poor souls become desperate to escape the city, screaming in terror while lost in panic, and, if restrained, often injure themselves in their desperate attempts to flee. If they manage to leave the city, the memories slip from their minds together with the touch of the gods, leaving the sufferers with nothing more than nightmares and a deeply rooted terror of Gethamane.
The three gods’ mansions in Yu-Shan have stood empty since the Usurpation. Few have bothered to investigate, however, since those gods had reported directly to the Solars after the building of Gethamane and all those Solars died in the Usurpation. Indeed, the deities whose portfolios related to Tribbua, Reshan and Metheris are all too happy to ignore their absence, as it allows them more scope to expand. It would take a significant audit in Yu-Shan’s bureaucracy to discover the existence of these small gods in Gethamane and trace what happened to them.
The three little gods of Gethamane hold their priests in common and are worshiped equally by the priesthood, though the mortals don’t know their true names or the differences between them.
Sanctum: The three gods’ sanctums all exist within the bejeweled carvings in their individual temples.
Each god can summon a large stone maul out of thin air at will and use it to defend themself.
THE MISSING ENTRANCES
What happened to the eastern and western entrances to the City Under the Mountain? They still exist. Landslides covered them long ago, but the early explorers soon found the passages to them. Some settlers proposed excavating these entrances, but the Gethamanians eventually decided to leave them hidden. In fact, they walled off the tunnels and plastered over the walls. Only the Mistress and members of her advisory Council know about the spare entrances. If something should prevent the Gethamanians from using any other exit from the city, they can excavate the buried gateways in a matter of days. 38 inscriptions in a script unlike that found anywhere else in the city. Centuries ago, a visiting savant of the Realm identified it as the High Holy Speech of the Dragon Kings, and chiefly consisting of heretical prayers to the Unconquered Sun.
LOST MAGITECH
For an Old Realm metropolis, Gethamane shows a distinct lack of Essence-powered conveniences. Only the light-crystals and the Gardens remain, for only they were both durable enough to resist Vodak’s passage and impossible for the Shogunate to remove. (In the centuries when the city was sealed, creatures from the underways might also have scavenged the city.) Nevertheless, the city is woven with hidden Essence accumulators and conduits, which all still function. Of the tens of thousands of jade-alloy plugs that once dispensed the Essence, only a few hundred remain (mostly in the Temple District and Garden District). These can still power any magitech device capable of connecting to them, as if each was a onedot hearthstone. Essence-channeling people cannot use the plugs: They function only for devices.
THE YU-SHAN GATE
In the underways, perhaps half an hour’s journey from the entrances into Gethamane, lies a gate to Yu-Shan. The gate has no guardian on the Gethamane side, but is watched on the other side by three Celestial lions. The Sidereals know about the gate, as do some of the Lunars and Deathlords. While the elders of the Mountain Folk know of the gate’s location, they also know that Vodak is down there, so no Mountain Folk would ever go near Gethamane — unless, of course, the situation was desperate. Anyone investigating the gate’s location would find it surprisingly clean and well-tended, showing the marks of occasional use.
SECRETS OF THE UNDERWAYS
The underways are not entirely natural. The Mountain Folk used to inhabit the upper layers, and someone familiar with the Jadeborn can recognize the workmanship of these tunnels and chambers.
Early Gethamanians learned this the hard way.) Many of the artifacts found in the underways are Mountain Folk workmanship.
Races and creatures of which humanity knows almost nothing, such as the centipede-like and savagely bestial cthritae and the eldritch underfolk, shaped other parts of the underways. Most of these “darkbrood” are more or less hostile to humans while entities such as the Leech Gods are utterly malignant. Vodak’s presence subtly draws the most malevolent of these creatures and inflames them with hatred of Gethamane; but most of the gems and ores found by explorers come from mines initiated by underdwellers.
REALITY ENGINES
Back in the Old Realm, a perceptive geomancer might observe that the City of the Mountain Gateway’s combination of a high peak, a connection to Heaven and alignments to the cardinal directions appears at one other location: the Imperial Mountain, the axis of Creation itself. This was no accident. Deep in the highest-security areas of the city—areas never shown on any map, hidden with the help of the Maiden of Secrets herself—the Deliberative emplaced 25 reality engines. These devices, the height of Old Realm magitech, emulate the Elemental Pole of Earth by stabilizing reality against the Wyld. If some unimaginable catastrophe overwhelmed the Blessed Isle, these engines could turn the mountain of Six Gates into a replacement Elemental Pole of Earth, around which Creation could regain its stability. More than half the population of Six Gates was Dragon- Blooded or God-Blooded. A great many of them functioned as guards, whatever their official duties were. Neither the Mountain Folk nor anyone else was supposed to know what the small city held. These reality engines still exist in a ring between the Garden District and the underways. The entrances are virtually undetectable and open only to a Solar’s anima. Further defenses protect the vaults of each machine.
THE ULTIMATE HORROR
The second secret of Gethamane began with the Primordial War. When the first Primordial died, its dying Essence and alien ichor generated a new entity: a hekatonkhire, or ghost-behemoth. Most hekatonkhires dwell in the Underworld, but the one called Vodak exists simultaneously in the Underworld and Creation. Vodak took shelter in the underways. Every few centuries, Vodak woke to prey upon the underdwellers, destroying whole cities’ worth of the Mountain Folk and other races. When the blood of almost 300 Solars fell on Creation’s soil, the Essence-taste of its progenitor’s killers roused Vodak from slumber. The Mountain Folk conceived a desperate plan to trap the hekatonkhire. As the Dragon-Blooded and Sidereals stalked and battled the last of the Lawgivers, the Mountain Folk captured numerous Solar offspring. They used the Golden Children as bait, luring Vodak to Six Gates. It arrived hungry. While the monster swept through the city like a silver ocean of death and madness, the greatest savants and sorcerers of the Mountain Folk cast their spells and activated potent artifacts. After six days spent devouring the city’s population, body and soul, Vodak returned to the depths to rest and digest its meal—and found it could not leave. The hekatonkhire now lurks in the deepest caverns below Gethamane, deeper even than the underdwellers know. When it sleeps, its dreams call to the underdwellers and fill them with its own hunger, hate and rage. When it wakes, the terror of its presence drives underdwellers to flee the depths into the city. Sometimes it reconstructs past victims from its own spectral flesh and plays murderous games with them. Vodak refrains from invading Gethamane for now, fearing the possibility of further traps. That may change… especially if Vodak scents Solar blood.
Vodak is a hekatonkhire, a creature of death. It and its spawn hunt the Gethamane of the Underworld. There are no patrols or Guards there to drive the monsters back into the deeper passages, and they raven freely in the lightless tunnels. Rumors of treasure or a shadowland within the hollow mountain draw the occasional foolish ghost from outside, but very few of them, no matter how well prepared, return.
VODAK
Description: A force of incalculable malice and insatiable hunger dwells in the silent crevices under Gethamane. The Mountain Folk call it Vodak in the language of a longextinct race, a name they dare only
whisper in dread and hushed awe.
Every utterance of its name is a warning and a horrified prayer. Few know its nature or appearance, as all Mountain Folk flee before ever Vodak could come into sight, but they know it is inescapable death to all who behold it.
Vodak is a hekatonkhire, a behemoth of Malfean Essence. When the first Primordial perished at the hands of the Exalted, its dying blood seeped into the earth. The titan’s last breath animated the flowing ichors with its own vitriolic hatred, transforming the mass into a nightmare of bubbling and writhing quicksilver. At first, it flowed mindlessly, devouring all life it could find. The tortured and half-digested ghosts of its absorbed prey swelled its mass and cunning, gradually expanding Vodak into an undulating lake of necrotic power. In addition to its nearly indestructible form, the hekatonkhire can extrude congealed masses of its Essence to replicate any living being it has ever absorbed. These simulacra are corporeal beings with the semblance, the Traits and even the memories of their former selves up to their deaths. They almost indistinguishably mimic the original beings, save that they remain helplessly enthralled to their hideous maker and instantly dissolve into silver ash if they are slain or touched by sunlight (or if Vodak withdraws the committed Essence sustaining their existence). These copies have no Essence pool and none of the replicated beings’ non-physical supernatural powers (if any), but the copies can easily mistake themselves for the beings they emulate if Vodak gives them that illusion. The hekatonkhire uses its slaves as bait and hunters, luring prey into its glittering depths. It is possible that other Primordials spawned similar monsters throughout Creation when they died, though no such beings have ever made themselves known in the Ages since.
Storytellers should keep in mind that a being of Vodak’s age and power does not necessarily need statistics, nor should the following information provide anything more than a rough guideline. In most cases, this
being will function as an alien evil in the background, never entering scenes except through enslaved proxies. Vodak is currently mostly inert beneath Gethamane, choosing to merely lure prey with its proxies or devour other creatures wandering the underways. If the hekatonkhire rises, or if the wards that keep it under Gethamane are broken, it may mean the destruction of all Gethamane for a second time or the freeing of Vodak to travel throughout the depths of Creation.
Some of the creatures that attack Gethamane, however, are underdwellers slain and reconstructed by Vodak. The hekatonkhire itself created the soulsteel found in certain underways, as the intensity of its necrotic Essence transforms veins of iron ore when it passes.
While the people of Gethamane are aware that dark creatures roam the tunnels below the city and devour anything that they can catch, the people are ignorant of the true horror that lies below.
Those elders of the Mountain Folk who know that Vodak is bound beneath Gethamane are not going to reveal the matter. They are aware that Vodak may rise and devour again but consider this comparatively unimportant, given that it can’t escape. The people of Gethamane are sitting on a potential disaster and have no idea how bad it is. They are also unaware of the Yu-Shan gate below the city, as the secret has been lost to antiquity. Only the Sidereals and a scattering of others are aware of the location of the gate.
GHOSTS IN GETHAMANE
Few of the materialistic Gethamanians become ghosts after death. They never last long if they do. Vodak spawns numerous smaller versions of itself that sweep through Gethamane’s counterpart in the Underworld, and immaterially through the city in Creation. Those with Essence senses (such as All-Encompassing Sorcerer’s Sight) occasionally see a wash of silver move swiftly through a room or corridor. The rush affects nothing in the material world, but any immaterial creature is most likely doomed. In the Underworld, Vodak’s spawn devour any ghost within minutes.
VODAK AND THE REALITY ENGINES
The Mountain Folk had few options in binding Vodak: They decided that nothing less than a city could distract the hekatonkhire long enough for them to cast their spells, and few cities connected to Creation’s underways. Storytellers might decide, however, that it was no coincidence the Jadeborn sacrificed a city stocked with reality engines. Conceivably, the Mountain Folk knew about the secret devices, used Vodak’s attack as cover to seize them and re-tuned them to supercharge their spells. Characters who discover the reality engines and remove them to use against the Wyld could unwittingly release Vodak on Creation. Storytellers might prefer instead that the Mountain Folk did not know about the reality engines. In this alternative, if the Mountain Folk had conferred with the Solar Deliberative, they could have lured the hekatonkhire into a trap: Once Vodak was between the reality engines, these mighty artifacts would have created a space that was too real for the spectral horror to exist. But that didn’t happen, and Six Gates died because of the bitter history between the Jadeborn and the Sun’s Chosen. Either choice presents opportunities for Storytellers. Decide for yourself which (if either) is true.
THE FIRST AGE
Gethamane was originally called the City of the Mountain Gateway. The Solar Deliberative ostensibly tunneled a city within a mountain as a trade and diplomatic nexus with the Mountain Folk and other strange inhabitants of the caverns far below Creation. Indeed, a great deal of contact with the underdwellers took place there. The Deliberative chose the location because of the Celestial Gate to Yu-Shan lodged in the underways beneath the mountain. As a bonus, a colony of Pteroks—a winged race of the prehuman Dragon Kings—lived on the mountain’s heights. The subterranean metropolis was also called Six Gates. In addition to the Celestial Gate, the city held a black jade portal to the tunnels of the Mountain Folk and four immense doors of jade and orichalcum steel that led into the mountain from north, south, west and east.
Nothing exciting happened at Six Gates for more than a thousand years. No Solars were in town when the Usurpation began. The Dragon-Blooded easily blocked any contact
with the rest of Creation. By the time any loyalists in the city might have objected, most of the Lawgivers were dead. Only the Pteroks knew what was happening, and they flew
away and out of history.
Shortly thereafter, the City of the Mountain Gateway died. When the founders of the new Shogunate realized that their conspirators in the city had not restored contact, a Dragon-Blooded team investigated. They found the city’s gates sealed but everyone gone. Not even corpses remained. So, a group of Sidereal Exalted came to Six Gates. Neither Charms, sorcery nor the Loom of Fate gave any clue to what happened. The city’s past seemed as thoroughly eradicated as its inhabitants.
The Shogunate stripped everything valuable and portable from the City of the Mountain Gateway, then sealed it. No one entered for several centuries and the city was forgotten.
THE BEGINNINGS
Gethamane was one of the jewels of the North in the First Age, a self-supporting city buried within one of the great Northern mountains, with a gate to Yu-Shan set beneath it.
In the First Age, the City of the Mountain Gateway was founded by the Solar Exalted in order to stand above and guard one of the gates to Yu-Shan and to act as a convenient meeting-point for the Mountain Folk who dwelt by that gate. The Solars hollowed out the mountain above the gate, created the sunken Gardens and set the crystal lights throughout the tunnels and rooms of the city so that humans could live there amid the frozen North in peace and comfort. While Gethamane was never one of the Solars’ greatest or most beautiful feats of magic, it was nevertheless a lasting and permanent monument to the Solars’ ability to create structure and transform inhospitable, uninhabitable lands into stable places in which to dwell. However, Gethamane was not a trade city or a tourist destination. It was a place for dealings with the Mountain Folk and a passage to Heaven, and as such, while the Celestial Exalted and some Dragon-Blooded knew of it, Gethamane was not a place that was discussed among humans or was featured in public records. The Mountain Folk walked in its underways, and the Dragon Kings nested in its high places.
When the Usurpation struck Creation, there were no Solars currently present in the City of the Mountain Gateway and only a few Dragon-Blooded. It was easy for the Terrestrial Exalted to keep the city peaceful and to issue general orders that the population should remain calm until matters were sorted out, while suppressing news from elsewhere about the bloody massacres and wars taking place. Unfortunately, this lack of news worked against the city in a more dangerous way.
At this time, an ancient hekatonkhire named Vodak had woken from its temporary somnolence. Vodak is a behemoth of Malfean Essence, created when the dying blood of the first Primordial to perish at the hands of the Exalted struck the Earth. The titan’s last breath animated the flowing ichors with its own vitriolic hatred, transforming the mass into a nightmare of bubbling and writhing quicksilver. Now that the Dragon-Blooded have slaughtered their superiors and Solar blood has fallen on the thirsty soil like rain, Vodak moved in the depths of Creation and became hungry.
The Mountain Folk who dwelled beneath Creation were troubled by this, knowing that they would be among Vodak’s earliest prey. They resolved to lure the hekatonkhire to a convenient location and trap it there. The City of the Mountain Gateway was perfect. It was near Vodak’s current lair, and it was an enclosed area, with a population that would not be able to defend itself; the city was currently unobserved by any Celestial Exalted who might disapprove of the Mountain Folk sacrificing a whole city full of humans to save themselves. (While the Sidereal Exalted had grown aware that Vodak was stirring and were debating how to handle the matter, they were at that time too busy coordinating the massacre of the Solars to be able to spare any attention to Vodak itself.)
With a combination of tactics and using several kidnapped Golden Children as suitable bait, the Mountain Folk led Vodak to the City of the Mountain Gateway. The hekatonkhire’s hunger awakened by the blood of the Solars’ children, Vodak swelled up through the mountain in a great wave of bubbling famine and insanity, devouring everything organic it could find. The Dragon-Blooded led the humans in resistance for as long as they could, but ultimately, they had no chance. They were swallowed up, one and all, and Vodak washed through the chambers of the city like an insane silver ocean.
While Vodak was occupied, the Mountain Folk in the tunnels beneath set great wards around the mountain to prevent Vodak from escaping through the deeps of the earth, however far down it might go. Then, they fled, leaving the mountain to Vodak and the ghosts of the dead.
The hekatonkhire raged when it found it was trapped but could not escape. In the end, it sank as deeply as it could go and brooded there, digesting its huge meal. And the City of the Mountain Gateway stood empty in the middle of the Northern wilds.
TO THE PRESENT
Gethamane grew slowly but steadily. In time, it formed relationships with other Northern societies, usually with the Guild as go-between. In RY 586, this policy drew Gethamane into a trade war with the nascent Haslanti League. On the whole, though, Gethamane enjoyed a remarkably placid history. Its people have no desire to conquer others—that would mean leaving the mountain. No one else, not even the Empress, ever found an effective way to attack Gethamane.
The disappearance of the Empress and the rise of the Bull of the North troubles some Gethamanians. The current Mistress of Gethamane, Katrin Jadehand, and her advisors draw up contingency plans for situations ranging from an attack by the Bull to a takeover bid by the Guild. Most Gethamanians, however, figure that the city can ride out any crisis the way it always has before: Expel any troublesome outsiders, shut the impregnable doors, live off the Gardens and wait a few years. They don’t like to remember that the greatest threat to Gethamane has always come from the endless dark tunnels underneath.
Six Gates was a lot more than a trade nexus between the Old Realm and the underdwellers. Its true purpose was one of the most closely guarded secrets of the Solar Deliberative. The city’s connection to Creation’s underways, however, brought about its doom. By now, discovering the truth would be extraordinarily difficult.
