Temple of the Dead Gods

Orianna gazed up at the towering structure before her. Easily a hundred yards across, and nearly 60 yards high, the stone monolithic temple with its ancient Boravian colonnade ran across the elevated floor. She looked toward the steps; there were dozens leading up into the temple, and the staircase itself radiated some great foreboding. Surely this was in her head? Surely the environment is making it seem more imposing than it should? She looked at Winston and Snout, the two of them uncertain about this journey from the beginning. Their trek through the Land without Men left them with a great sense of unease. While none of them were humans themselves, they each felt what must have been the weeping of those dead who lay deep within the earth. The barren, desolate landscape, devoid of trees, bearing the desecrated marks of the Prophets' Tears lay all around them. Orianna had come all this way for a reason, though she suddenly wondered why. Magi, brave soldiers, noble men, heroes and kings of old, many had come unto this temple to consecrate its once sacred grounds. All had gone, and all had failed. She examined the scythe in her green, insectoid hands, and stiffened her four legs to carry her forward. She walked slowly toward the steps to the Temple of the Dead Gods, her friends in tow. She set her foot on the first step, and remembered no more...

Purpose / Function

The Temple of the Dead Gods was once the High Temple of Timora, the Time Goddess of the old kingdom of Boravia. After Boravia was conquered by the Empire of Wardenheim shortly after the beginning of the Long Twilight, the temple was desecrated and transformed into a prison for religious and political dissidents, as well as users of magic, and students of the arcane, occult, and other vocations deemed dangerous by the Imperial government. After the Empire of Wardenheim's first collapse, the temple fell into a far greater state of disrepair and decay. Maintenance of the facility even as a prison had come to a halt, and there are some who say that the magic within the temple had only then been truly allowed to fester and take on its current malignant form.

Alterations

The building itself is a massive stone structure, beneath which is a vast network of tunnels. Some of these tunnels were originally used for the archives of the Church of Timora, and to record the history of the Boravian people. Since the conquest of Boravia by Wardenheim, the tunnels were either artificially expanded or renovated into cell blocks and chambers for a variety of purposes,* their original contents being either destroyed, displaced, taken, or lost.
Its most recent alteration occurred upon its abandonment by the retreating Imperial government in the second century of the Long Twilight. After the temple was abandoned a dark cloud began to form over the structure. The cloud has magical properties relating to the arcane Fonts of Death, Heat, and Sky. No wizard, however, has managed to precisely pin down the cause of the cloud's formation, nor its seemingly perpetual growth. It grows at a slow and steady rate, and has taken over much of the countryside of what once was Boravia, including the great city of Cassia, whose ruins now lie a few miles away from the temple itself. The spread of this black, pestilent fume has killed the plant and animal life beneath it, and the sun seldom shines in its shadow.
*Torture foremost, among other things

Architecture

An immense structure of granite built hundreds of years ago, once painted and adorned with symbology from the Church of Timora and the Kingdom of Boravia, it hosts an elevated platform with an internal set of walls surrounded by an outside colonnade of square, stone pillars, each carved with intricate detail depicting scenes from Boravian life, and images of the Boravian pantheon. Many of these sacred images have been worn away by time or by vandalism, leaving much of the stone structure eerily smooth.

RUINED STRUCTURE
Year 3781 of the Long Twilight

Type

Temple / Religious complex