Temple of the Dragon Waters
The Temple of the Dragon Waters is a rare site in Scarterra, it is a place of healing consecrated to Greymoria.
One of the many relics of the First Unmaking is a lot of sites of geothermal activity, often marking spots where fire elementals and water elementals battled.
One valley in what is now in the borders of Swynfaredia is famous for having several hot springs that are consistently warm but never dangerously hot.
There are many hot springs pools around the grounds, but the largest has a temple built around it.
For centuries, maybe millennia, mortals enjoyed bathing in the therapeutic waters. The site has passed through many owners over the centuries. The current owners are the Children of Swynfaredia.
The site has no significant magical healing properties though a small but steady supply of reagents can be harvested here. Visitors to the hot springs find them a relaxing relief to stress.
Most visitors just want to relax and destress but some visitors are actually sick or injured so the Children keep magical healers on the site to offer their services to visitors for money or political favors.
The temple grounds house an ancillary building that is an alchemists laboratory. While the Children are famous poisoners they tend to make their more nefarious concoctions off site and focus on healing potions and non-magical herbal remedies here.
Alterations
Somewhere between year 100 and 200, the construction build by Vladimir the Conqueror was dismantled brick by brick and the rubble was re consecrated as a memorial cairn to the people who fought and died fighting Vladimir's army.
About 1000 years later, time and erosion practically turned this cairn into gravel, so the Tender's constructed a more permanent monument, an obelisk.
The original temple of Mera was constructed by the Walchese Tenders and decorated with dog and hippocampus statues and given water and hearth based carvings along the walls.
When the Swynfaredians took over, they kept the frieze mostly unchanged except for the most overt Mera iconography, but replaced all the statuary with dragons and then added more statues.
When the Children took over, they magically removed every iota of decor that the Tenders created iconography except for the memorial obelisk where they merely replaced the Mera symbol with the generic symbol of the Nine.
They magically altered the frieze to have a few understated Greymoria icons but be mostly spartan.
They kept the dragon decor.
History
Before the Feudal Era, the history of this site is largely unknown.
Vladimir the Conqueror awarded this land to a human vassal who pleased him, but the vassal ended up murdered on this land by one of Vladimir's many enemies fairly shortly after receiving the land.
After Vladimir's death, the newly appointed king of the area ceded the land to the Tenders as a bishopric who built a temple to Mera here called the Hearth Water's Temple.
Centuries later the kingdom was annexed by Swynfaredia. The king of Swynfaredia dissolved the Mera bishopric and claimed the temple and land as part of his personal demesne using it as a luxury site for him and his favored agents remaining a royal perk for a great many years. The Hearth Water's Temple was rechristened the Dragon Water's Manor and given a lot of rennovation and redecorating.
Later a different king ceded the land to the Children as a Greymoria bishopric in exchange for services rendered. The Children were naturally thrilled to have a bishopric that was for all intents and purposes stolen from Mera. The site was renamed the Dragon Waters Temple and faced more redecorating and renovation.
As a condition for creating the bishopric, the Children were required to let Swynfaredian nobles continue to use the hot springs in exchange for fairly modest monetary donations to Greymoria.
At first the Children balked at having their actions restricted in their own temple in exchange for pittance donations, but later they realized they had something better than coins, they now had secrets.
The site is heavily warded against magical eavesdropping but more than a few Swynfaredian sorcerers are fairly lax about guarding themselves against mundane eaves dropping. The acolytes that tend to the spa goers are trained to keep their ears open and not draw attention to themselves.
More than a few of the guests of their hot springs like to talk politics while relaxing and the Children can overhear all sorts of interesting information.
Comments