home of Chaos

If Tut' Tel was the tyranny of order then Jenida was the paradise of chance. Inside the walls were lush gardens, clean waterways, and well organized layers of housing up the side of the cliffs. Fresh water cascaded down the buildings dotting the entire city in little spots of green where the fruit trees grew. Everyone was well fed and the area between the city and the fortress walls that would originally have been used for drills and training was converted into farmland. There was nothing extravagant and nothing lacking. The city was able to sustain itself modestly in what should have been an incredibly hostile environment.

Besides the blood sphere there was only desert sands beyond the walls of the city, so much like, and yet so different from the city of Tut Tel.

Alex was not brought to see the Avatar on the first day of his visit, nor on the second. By the third day he discovered the city libraries and began to pass the time with the books of Jenida. They were all mostly mundane in nature, but Alex was surprised to see a collection of books written by the Avatar chronicling various events of the past. Demon took an intimidate interest in these books since most of the events recorded landed between her imprisonment and Alex's birth. A first hand account of events that she didn't get to see was the genuinely rare knowledge she didn't already have.

On the fifth day one of the Avatar's concubines came to fetch Alex and take him to see the Avatar.

The Temple of Chaos wasn't particularly outstanding from outside, even thought there was an obvious set of columns with ornate carvings into the arches it was all made of the same stone as the rest of the city and the cliffs themselves. There were no dedicated stairs or even a dedicated waterway feeding into or out of the temple, it was simply a larger, slightly more grand, entrance among many in the cliff-side city.

The overall shape and structure of the city was that of artificially created alcoves into the mountain, no doubt the stone that had been removed to make the hemispherical indent, and the terraces, and the inner rooms of the buildings were also used to make the massive fortified wall that completed the circular construction of the inner city. There was also a lower outer rampart that was much less of the smooth wall and provided a great many bastions that provided cover against any attempts to **** entry through the outer defenses. The fortress itself hailed to an age and way of warfare that Alex had never seen.

In his youth Alex had read about the massing of armies to face off against each other in the open field, or the depictions of siege machines to break fortress walls. But those days were long behind the humans, and siege machines were not a tool used by the orc tribes who were the only race Alex knew that still employed full armies in wars.

In human cities now there were only the city guards, and in the wild one might find highway men and bandits, but rarely ever did human lords go to war with each other. Why would they when it was easier to send a hero or mercenary to make a mess of the other's estate with very little in the way of personal cost. Beyond that there were greater threats from a random dragon searching for new hunting grounds if it was too young to face off against another dragon for territory in the mountains.

Dragons who had ruled the peaks ever since they nearly annihilated the last great dwarven civilization that had lived there, driving the small folk deep underground where they sought to rebuild their civilization, but were now in perpetual struggle with the goblins who also dwell in the deep and seem to exist without end.

So the age of wars and fortresses which needed to be this grand were long in the past, and the intimidating walls of this city were made even less necessary by the existence of the blood sphere which had even successfully repelled both a power hungry demon lord and her minions, and a crusade by the sun god.

The city was far more serene than than any beyond the sphere would imagine. And yet it was also the home to a god almost universally recognized as evil. At once Alex had believed him so as well, but 10 years and a great amount of need have changed his opinion there. The world acknowledged Pyrotheo to be evil, neutrally oppressive at best, but Shershi was mostly just apathetic. He didn't care about the state of affairs of the world so long as he was entertained, Shershi did however keep a very comfortable house and his devoted followers where noticeably more blessed here than any human was by their gods, and the closest to matching Shershi for his benevolence to his faithful was the Elven moon goddess, Bendis.

The elves too were clustered into a single city, built around the Pool of Bendis, where they lived quietly in practical seclusion. According to legends they were once a great thriving civilization, but long before the dwarves crawled out of the caves and upto the mountain peaks, but they were nearly driven to extinction, and due to every aspect of their lives taking eons by comparison to the shorter lived races. An elf was only fertile once a year, and would carry a child for three before it would be born, and almost a century before that elf would reach physical maturity and be ready to join the population in their efforts to restore their numbers to greater than an endangered race. Because of this the elven women who were either trying to conceive a child or were carrying a child would bate in the pool on the first full moon of spring when the blessing of the goddess of hunt and fertility was at it's peak for the beginning of the lunar new year, the most important festival to the elven people.

There was a note in one of the Avatar's journals where Bendis had come to Jenida in person to declare her people would be non-aggressive to all followers of Shershi in thanks for him having saved the elven people from extinction. How Shershi had saved the elves, and why he had were not mentioned, but apparently the elven goddess hadn't even taken umbrage that one of her priests had chosen to serve the god of chaos as his avatar. Then again, Alex thought, maybe the avatar being an elf might have had something to do with why Shershi had chosen to spare the elves the fate of nonexistence. Either way this was the first time Alex had been given any clues as to why only the church of Bendis forbid their inquisitors from pursuing chaos priests, when Alex had asked a priest of Bendis about it the priest didn't have a clue, only knowing that disobeying this divine edict resulted in awful punishments long before a chaos priest could be interrogated or dispatched.

So for whatever reasons this fortress had once been built it no longer served that purpose, now it was simply the safest place in the world to raise children. The irony was not lost on Demon as she didn't stop chuckling to herself watching the children playing in the most cursed at city in the world.

Alex on the other hand kept finding his thoughts returning to Tut' Tel and the problems there as contrast to Jenida. The more he saw here the more his resolve to remove the authority of the oppressive cult currently running the city grew. And as he mounted the final steps into the temple of Chaos he set that thought aside. Right now he had a more pressing issue and a less despicable god to speak with.