The Temple of the Titans

Description: The Temple of the Titans stands prominently on the block that houses it. Rising up prominently from the mass of other large buildings around it, it dwarfs many of the other impressive Lady’s Ward kips. From a distance, a body can spy an enormous red globe hanging ominously in the air above the impressive structure. As a body stands before the temple, she gets a feeling that it is both malevolent and beautiful and that before its massive structure, she is anything but significant. It’s a hard feeling for most bashers to stomach.

Fifteen broad, cracked, marble stairs ring the circular open-air temple, it’s smoothly polished marble exterior, Grecian-styled pillars and vaulted ceiling showing a fair amount of weathering, even for a kip in the Cage. The stairs lead up and into the temple, but are mirrored by similar steps that are inverted and move upwards along the ceiling. These ‘inverted’ stairs lead up to the top of the Temple, although where the ground would normally be in relation to a set of stairs, there hangs the mysterious red orb; hovering there like the eye of an baleful titan. All around the perimeter of the temple stand twenty feet tall statues of each titan, their names in Greek (a long lost and little known tongue of the Prime Material Plane) inscribed on their crumbling bases.

The interior is austere and as plain as the wind-blasted layer of Minethys; above and below the symbol of Chronus is repeated in ever-interlacing patterns that twist a body’s eyes when she looks at them. Scattered and sparse furnishings, with their chipped gold-leaf brocade are a testament more to their disuse than their functionality. Oddly, there seems to be a defined absence of priests, which strikes a body as unusual, even in this empty, forgotten place.

The Dark: As most cutters well know, deep beneath the streets of Sigil are things both unknown and ancient, structures of unknown origins and buildings of times and purposes long forgotten. It is here, in this dark shadow of Sigil that the Temple of the Titans has its beginnings.

It seems that some cycles back, a blood by the name of Porthis (a known Anarchist and native of Carceri) was trying to slip the blinds of a Harmonium patrol when he discovered a previously unknown entrance to the dark passages beneath the Lady’s Ward streets. Stumbling in pure fear of the leafless tree, the basher soon found himself lost in the winding rat holes and sewer tunnels and knew that if he did not find his way out soon that something much worse than the Harmonium would soon find him. After what seemed like days of wandering the twisting and topsy-turvy tunnels, he finally came upon something that no blood had seen in a very long time.

Being a native of Carceri, Porthis quickly twigged to the fact that this was no regular tunnel complex, but rather some sort of ancient shrine once dedicated to the Titans, now fallen to ruin. Knowing that this sort of chant would fetch a fair amount of jink back on the Red Prison, Porthis was now more determined than ever to make it back to Sigil’s sooty streets.

And so he did.

Soon thereafter, the Cage saw a large influx of bashers spouting the creed of the Titans, and as any blood could guess, soon a temple appeared. It seems that the worshippers of the Titans lanned to the darks that beneath an area of the Lady’s Ward was a huge tunnel complex - in fact, a temple commemorating all of the Titans: Chronus, Crius, Typhon, Mnemosyne, Oceanus, the whole lot of ‘em! The Titan worshippers decided that they needed this complex, but had no easy manner of accessing it. Thus, they cut a deal with Harys Hatchis and A’kin ‘the Friendly Fiend’ (who apparently owned adjacent plots of the Lady’s Ward property) and built a temple on the streets above.

To hide their secret, they created a complex magical ward (the symbols of Chronus) as the key to entering the lower, secret complex. The red stone orb that hangs above the Temple was painstakingly mined and carved from the surface of Orthys (first layer of Carceri) by petitioners under the Titans’ rule. It’s magic, which was said to have been some of the last vestiges held by the Titans, keeps most anyone from finding the secret of the symbols of Chronus and what they hide.

Further discoveries were made within a few years of the opening of the Temple: a section of the subterranean temple actually had portals (both shifting and permanent) to Carceri, Olympus, The Grey Waste, and many Prime Worlds connected to the Olympian - Titanic myths! Thus, the worshippers of the Titans slowly began building their own personal army, a group of priests, warriors, assassins, and mercenaries that would make the Hardheads tremble if their true numbers were told. Their purpose is dark to all but the high-ups of the Temple and the Titans. But even an addle-cove with an empty brain-box could see that the Titans might have finally found their foothold out of Carceri. Woe would come to the multiverse if they were finally able to escape the prison that has held them for so long.

Perhaps their time has finally come.