"Mi Amore Kagome... a thought has just occurred to me. Did you find it interesting the decor of the level where the demon was found. I have known many women, and laid in many parlors. I have ventured the far expanse of the inner sea and paid my respects to all sorts of churches and temples. That level of the Crow did not seem to me to be like a temple."
Turning to Gareth, "You know that the place we have been wandering through is really old (I mean REALLY old), and the other runelords have been dead for almost 10,000 years, so nobody knows what they really looked like, right?"
"Krang, isn't it true that statues that have been found in other places depict Alaznist as a beautiful, yet enraged human woman with long hair, flowing robes, and wielding a thorny ranseur." Alejandro pauses to mumble something about carpet and drapes under his breath. "Isn't that’s what the mural that was here and is now gone looked like, and so did the statue where we fought the abyssal larva."
Looking back to Kagome, "Which leads me back to my initial thought. As I think about the depictions of Alaznist that we have found, I get the feeling that they aren't so much of statues in temples or places of worship. They feel more like family portraits, or personal memorabilia. All of this seems to suggest that perhaps this wasn’t just an outpost of Alaznist’s followers, but a redoubt of the Runelord herself."
"Krang, what do you know of this runelord? All I know is that Alaznist is said to have been impatient and impulsive, caring little for magical research, and preferred modifying her many troops by magical means. Gareth, do you think this has any relation to these 'sinspawn' that the professor asked us to get samples of?"
Garath nods thoughtfully. “The pictures and statues we have seen are similar to other works of art linked to Alaznist. And yes, the sprawling area below the Crow did seem more like a dwelling or lair than some kind of shrine or memorial. Maybe it was one of her seats of power at one time? Scary thought, given what we are learning about Runelords.
ReplyDeleteIt looks like the Tower Girls cleaned out all living things up to those fire doors, and Zugga seemed to run things on the level immediately below that. Below there, the layout seems to have been rooms for quarters, cooking, storage, etc. No idea what used to live there, but it’s mostly just occupied by those bugs we saw now. Also, there were those rooms of cages. Not sure for what. Prisoners? Sinspawn experimentation? For now, the most interesting level would be the one we just left. I studied demons some at the Acadamae in Korvosa, but this is the first time I’ve seen them up close.
I do recall reading that Alaznist is said to have been a worshiper of many kinds of demons, because they practically worship violence and destruction, like her. But most important to her was pure anger. Wrath. To make use of the Wrath in her subjects, she built magic devices called Runewells. They absorbed the souls of wrathful mortals in order to further her power and create sinspawn. From what Dr. Landis told me, sinspawn are literally the embodiment of a sin made flesh. Sentient abominations of distilled ectoplasm, imprinted with the soul-images of slain creatures that possessed an abundance of a particular sin. In this case, Wrath."
((PS Garath meant devils, even if his scribe got it wrong. Not demons.))
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