Ruined Geroni temple

The Ruined Geroni temple is an old, decaying temple of the Geroni in the campaign Yeni Dünya ("New World"). The band arrived in it when the Painting of Avlor Aten drew them in; a ledger found there names it a temple with a great library. Its name is not known.^{1 2}

Halls and statues

They woke in an entrance chamber of stone gone to dust with age. Behind them a doorway held only a blank wall. Before them sat the statue of a smiling girl of thirteen or fifteen, cross-legged with her arms spread, horned like an animal yet not demonic, and later taken by the band for the Wise Child. The art of the place was sharp and angular, unlike the round city of the painting; it had been made with care for worship and then abandoned to rot. The deeper they went, the less worn it was.^{3 4 5 6}

In one room, between ceremonial stone thrones, a realistic lion stood between two statues of men in cloaks and bronze armour; a scar beside one figure's nose seemed a portrait's detail, as if two particular people were shown. A small chapel held an altar with scraps of silk and rotted offerings, with a man in a simple circlet holding a short sword point-down on one side and a woman pouring fruit from a basket on the other; the band linked them with the Father and the Mother.^{7 8 9 10}

The locks and doors were made to keep out vagrants, not to hold prisoners or stand against an enemy. A workroom held rusted instruments of navigation and mapmaking, great stills and a marked worktable; rows of identical unlabelled bottles showed that one potion had been made there in quantity, and traces of coffee bean revealed it as the brew that lets a person work long hours without rest, much like one known from the work of Professor Maverick Galevan. A store behind it held two scrolls of divination.^{11 12 13 14}

The rooms had no window, chimney or vent, which made no sense for braziers and alchemy, and the place felt torn loose from reality.⁶

The ledger and the library

Beside a door lay a large ledger, sound on the outside but rotted within, recording gifts and then the objects that went in and out, above all from the great library. Near its end, twenty or thirty religious and other precious objects had been carried out in haste on a single day. The last note, which Fauna read aloud, was written by someone who pitied those who cast the gods aside for the sake of progress. Nothing like the stone the band had lost appeared among the gifts.^{2 15 16}

The library was large enough for dozens to work in, holding books of city planning, natural science, novels and children's tales beside better-kept religious volumes. On the spines and in the texts, the places where the names of the Mother, the Father and the Child should stand had been erased; see Geroni religious tradition. Some twenty hollowed-out books for hiding things stood empty. On the floor lay the remains of thirteen or fourteen similar bony creatures, struck down by lightning and fire, and on a great altar the chained Book of Names.^{17 18 19 20 21}

The way out

Where a wall had stood in the entrance chamber, a large closed wooden door appeared. It opened onto a street of Avlor Aten, through a temple mural painted on a wall. The seal had been broken by an earlier guardian who broke a door to get out. Someone had come in after the building began to decay, but whether recently is not known.^{22 23 24 25}