Home, Rules, Message Boards, The Parthenon (AIM), The Parthenon (AOL)
Back to World, Ardashir
The Tal Maurin
Relevant Knowledges: History, Religion
The Tal Maurin was one of the great evils of the world. In it, the helpless and outcast were tormented for years while good people looked the other way or even encouraged the torturers' grisly work. Though suffering is hardly rare in a world plagued by demons and dark cults, the Tal Maurin is unique in that it represents one of the few instances where a good society stood by, willfully blind, and lent the power of the state to evil.
It stood in Dahiare, a southern principality of Ardashir separated from the main empire by distance, custom, and the natural barriers of river and jungle. Though blessed with abundant natural resources and a vibrant local culture, Dahiare was so remote from the Court of Glory that its princes were, for better or worse, essentially autonomous. They kept their own armies, levied their own taxes, and enforced their own laws.
Three hundred years ago, the reigning Prince of Dahiare was Ibelis the Huntsman, so named because he had a great passion for bringing lawbreakers to justice and hunted them as other men hunted deer or spotted cats. Despite his efforts, corruption and violence increased tremendously during the early years of his reign. The distance of the central government, and the poverty caused by local unrest, contributed to widespread banditry and smuggling on the roads, thieving and murder in the streets. The people of Dahiare clamored for justice, but the Prince seemed powerless to deliver it.
The Chancellor of the Courts in Dahiare was a noblewoman known to history as Ishrai. She was a Kliastan devotee, and had long used her position to spirit away Dahiare's condemned for her temple. In the principality's turmoil, she saw an even greater opportunity for her faith.
Chancellor Ishrai persuaded the Prince to build a grand prison, which came to be called the Tal Maurin, and place it under her control. Everything from the moment of accusation and arrest to a prisoner's last breath became her domain. From the beginning, it was said that evil things were done in the Tal Maurin, but the Prince turned a deaf ear to such tales. Crime dropped and civil society flourished in Dahiare, and no good citizen cared what was done to the principality's criminals to ensure such peace. The truth of accusations was assured by magic, and since only the truly guilty were punished, no one was much concerned with how.
As the years passed, Chancellor Ishrai's grip tightened. People in Dahiare began to disappear after petty crimes. Pickpockets, drunks, and beggars vanished. People guilty of no greater offense than poverty or madness disappeared. This, too, attracted little comment; if anyone noticed, they thought it an improvement. No one mourned the nuisances of the city.
It might have gone on that way forever if not for the capture of Sahriya Blueveil. Sahriya was a concubine to the Prince, and a foolish, impulsive woman. After a lovers' spat she resolved to run away. Sahriya disguised herself as a beggar-woman and fled the palace harem; but before she left the city walls, she insulted one of the guards at the gates. For that, she was thrown into the Tal Maurin.
She suffered terribly there, and saw many who suffered worse. By the time the Prince found her and ordered her released, Sahriya's beauty was ruined. She lost an eye to the torturers of the Tal Maurin, as well as the grace of her limbs and the sweetness of her voice. Prince Ibelis, outraged, demanded justice; yet as Sahriya had committed the crime of which she was accused, Ishrai denied any wrongdoing.
This was too much for Prince Ibelis to bear. He ordered his soldiers to clear the prison. What they found there, festering in the cells and hidden rooms of the Tal Maurin, sickened the hardest-bitten soldiers in the army. Though the prisoners of the Tal Maurin had been culled from the dregs of humanity, they were at least recognizably human when they vanished. By the time they were found, that was no longer true.
The Prince, ashamed by his complicity and enraged that his concubine should have suffered such miseries, decreed that all Dahiare should know what the Chancellor had wrought. He ordered that the worst of the victims should be laid on pallets all across the market square.
Once the horrors of the Tal Maurin were laid writhing and bleeding before their eyes, the people of Dahiare could no longer claim ignorance. Prince Ibelis declared that Chancellor Ishrai had bewitched him. He ordered that she should suffer the Red Death. Ishrai fled before she could be executed, but many of the Tal Maurin's lesser torturers met that hideous end. The Prince ordered the Tal Maurin dismantled, but vileness had seeped so deeply into the prison's stones that no work crew could bear it long enough to finish the job, and so the prison was simply abandoned.
It is whispered that the prison's shell still stands, somewhere in the jungle outside Dahiare, and that it is a site of unholy pilgrimage to this day. Kliastans across Meditra remember the name of the Tal Maurin, and promise themselves that someday, somewhere, it will rise again.
There are no comments on this page. [Add comment]