dysonlogos
patreon
The Whispers from the Abyss
🕑 Added 2025-03-27 01:20:09 +0000 UTCCenturies ago, a secret temple was constructed to revere Xal’keth, a God of Shadows and Secrets. The clandestine cult obsessed with unraveling forbidden truths and harnessing the power of shadows to manipulate reality quietly constructed it deep under the City of Cries. Their belief was simple – all knowledge, no matter how dangerous, must be unveiled, no matter the cost.
Many strange rituals were performed here over the years in utter darkness. However, the cult’s hunger for forbidden knowledge led disaster. A catastrophic ritual to summon Xal’keth’s essence into the material plane went awry, unleashing a wave of crashing energy that consumed the cult and shattered part of the temple where the ritual was performed. The temple was abandoned, shattered and broken, the horrors within left to fester in silence.
The chamber where the fateful ritual was held is long gone, an abyss leading down into the depths below the ancient city. The entrance to the temple collapsed along with these ritual chambers, but a small crack opened up leading to the dry sewers of the City of Cries, damaged and empty from the earthquakes that rack the desert here.
A few lingering souls of the destroyed cultists still wander the temple as shadows trapped in torment. They are mindlessly angry at all who trespass here. The chamber with the stone ring hums with residual energy from the last ritual – a fragment of Xal’keth still trapped within it. This shadowy power might be tapped by those who figure out the cult’s secret rituals… or this may re-trigger the horror of the cult’s doom.
But deep below the temple, down into the abyss, there are much more ancient ruins to be explored – hopefully containing treasures from truly ancient empires.
This map was drawn for the Gaxx Worx adventure “Wrath of the Sea Lich” (based on an earlier map from one of the Gaxx Worx Chentoufi adventures). The text and descriptions in this post are unrelated to that work, and are based on ideas that struck me while I was drawing it.
https://dysonlogos.blog/2025/03/26/the-whispers-from-the-abyss/
