Connects to: 13.17, 18.11, 26.20, 26.20.08 and 26.20.02.
Overview
Shara, the founder of Pontgate (26.20) and companion of Ban the Clever, was one of the last priestesses of the old religion of Thring. Before Duke Ulthar the Loved tore off their crowns and replaced them with lead diadems, Thring was ruled by a gaggle of petty kings and behind each king was an earth whisperer. These priestesses, transformed as they were by their worship of The Pacharia, would lie with a king at the beginning of his reign and lay their knives across his throat at the end of it so that the land would be the king and the king would be the land. Long after the earth whisperers had been driven from the castles of Thring, their voices could be heard in its caves and hidden valleys, but their numbers dwindled with the passing years.
Shara of Pontgate, seeking to reverse this trend, laid plans to build a temple to the Pacharia and called the witches of the wild woods to join her there. She promised her four companions that their fields would always be fertile as long as the pews of the temple were full of the bodies of worshippers. The other four accepted on the condition that the temple be built on a nearby island rather than within the city.
The standing stones of Shara’s temple stood on that island until the men of Shuttered came. The five lords of Blind Midshotgatepool made no attempt to defend it and the invaders swarmed over it, searching for loot. It was then that the island sank beneath the waves with incredible speed, leaving behind a whirlpool that did more damage to the Shuttered armada than the five lords managed to. Neither the sailors nor the temple’s priestesses were ever seen again.
After the signing of The Treaty Savage, the local people investigated what had happened to the temple and found it sitting undisturbed at the bottom of The Keening Sea. Fearing that their crops would fail if the temples pews were ever empty, the lord of Pontgate rounded up every criminal that he could lay hands on and chained them to its watery pews. Since then, every time a corpse rots away and slips its chains a new “worshipper” is sunk down to replace it
The temple is small but the fish of the Keening Sea are hungry and new victims are constantly needed. Some of the other lords resent Pontgate’s insistent demands for new victims and the people have grown fearful knowing that stepping afoul of the August City’s morass of laws means being manacled beneath the waves.
Connections
- The earth whisperers are responsible for several seemingly-bottomless pits at the outskirts of the city (26.20.02).
- According to legend, the matriarch of Castle Karandur called upon the Pacharia to be transformed into a woman (13.17).
- Henry Yaboon (26.20.08), a man of power in Blind Midshotgatepool has taken over the possessions of the priesthood of the Pacharia as his own.
- Some of the old ways are kept in the far north of Thring (18.11).
Hooks
- What is the Pacharia anyway?
- How did worship of the Pacharia transform its/his/her/their(?) priestesses?
- What did it mean for the king to be the land and the land to be the king?
- Where did the priestesses go after they sank it beneath the waves?
- Does the August City really need to keep chaining people under the sea to keep the crops from failing?
