The Spire
The Spire is a granite fortress at the heart of Pelonastra that for centuries served as the most infamous prison of the Mill Lands. Though the prison was constructed fifty years after the martyrdom of St Stephen, the Archimandrite of Dancare who first brought Aruhvianism to the Mill Lands, the great tower that lends the fortress it’s name is said to date back to the early Vannic Period, predating the establishment of Pelonastra by over a millennia. Archeological surveys conducted by Pelonastran Chapter of the Hipostics have revealed that the inner stonework of the tower is Golan in origin, suggesting that it may have been one of the great Nurhag’s that served as the focal point of worship for the mystery cults that dominated Aestis before the coming of the Van. Each stone of the original nurhag was inscribed with Proto T’Zanic script that remains untranslatable, but is thought to be magically imbued since all attempts to destroy the original nurhag by Aruhvian iconoclasts resulted in failure.
Prior to the conversion of the Mill Land’s to Aruhvianism the Spire served as the most sacred site of the Aelsang religion, and was thought to have been consecrated by the great skaldic hero Svan Hyrikson, who according to the collection of T’Zanic sagas, known as the Hyrikhai, killed the Hearth of Ulinast in a trial by combat by uttering a single verse before the Hearth could raise his sword. That verse is inscribed above the tower’s entrance, and according to legend will strike dead anyone who enters the Spire with the intention of desecrating it. The few remaining disciples of Aelsang in the Mill Lands still maintain that the martyrdom of St Stephen at the hands of the Emperor of Del’ Marah testifies to the lasting power of Hyrikson’s verse, which wrought a terrible vengeance on Stephen for his attempts to destroy the Spire. Since the Aelsanger skalds were massacred by the Hipsotics on the orders of the chapter’s first Cephale, the puritanical zealot Chamont Arast, and no written records were kept by the skalds that presided over it, the significance and function of the Spire in the Aelsanger religion is a matter of scholarly contention.
According to the chronicles of the Mordikhaani monk, Eserbius of Kharis:
The Pelonastran chapter of the Hipostics is one of the oldest and most autonomous of the entire order. It was founded in the years following the conversion of the Mill Lands to Aruhvianism at the behest of St Stephen of Dancare, and comprised primarily of Arclanders and Del’Marahans, sent to eliminate any lingering traces in the old Aelsanger religion, and to preside over the order until it was deemed by the Archmandarite of Dancare that the people of the Mill Lands were theologically reliable. Consequently the first Cephale of the chapter, Charmont Arast, was a pedantic dogmatist, disciplinarian, and cold blooded pragmatist, who set about expanding the chapter into theological bureaucracy, securing a mandate to root out heresy in the Pelonastran government, taking advantage of the weakness of Pelonastra’s young king Simik III, known as Simik the Feeble.
For over a decade Arast became the de facto ruler of the city, building a parallel administrative organisation overseeing every branch of Pelonastra’s government, reporting exclusively to him, until Simik was strangled in the bathtub by his bodyguards, who were drawn from the youngest sons of the prominent Rever and De Hauer families. As Simik was being murdered, Arast and the leading members of the Hipostics were arrested at a banquet held to celebrate the feast of St Stephen, who had been martyred just a few years before by the Emperor of Del’Marah. The few Hipostics who did not attend the banquet fled the city with many finding sanctuary in Dancare. What followed was a violent inquisition that spread throughout the city known as the Malifican Reckoning. The Rever and De Hauer forces ransacked the city hunting down the remaining Hipostics, using the chaos sown by Simrik’s death to eliminate their rivals and consolidate their power. A series of trials were convened and the Wayfaring Justices were summoned back to Pelonastra to preside over the them.
The Archimandrite of Dancare moved quickly, sending emissaries demanding the release of the Hipostics, it was impressed upon the emissaries that Arast had alienated Pelonastra’s most prominent families and that a trial of the Hipostics could very easily be seen as a trial of Aruhvianism given the order’s instrumental role in defending the faith in The Mill Lands. Realising that imposing Aruhvianism on the Mill Lands from the outside could spark a Aelsang revival, and a wholesale rejection of Aruhvianism as an instrument of foreign interference, a compromise was reached whereby the Archimandrite would excommunicate Arast and the other principle defendants for simony in addition to treason, effectively signing their death warrant by waiving the ecclesiastical privileges which prevented their execution. In return the Rever and De Hauer families wrote into the Oath taken by the newly created position of Lord Elect that they must subscribe to and defend the Aruhvian faith, and agreed that the rank and file members of the Hipostics were to be given an amnesty provided that they publically swear an oath of loyalty to the Lord Elect.
Following the execution of Arast and his foremost knights by hanging, drawing and quartering, it was agreed that the Lord Elect would have the power to appoint the leader of the Hipostics. He appointed Idris Enos, an esoteric scholar with no interest in political machinations, as Cephale of the Hipostics. He, along with the rest of the order retreated into the Spire, concerning themselves with arcane scholarship, and research into the discoveries of the Aelsanger skalds who built it. For the most part following their retreat into the Spire during Enos’ leadership, the Hipostics all but disappeared from public view, appearing only a few times a year at official functions. During this period the Spire developed into an arcane centre of learning, strictly sealed off from the lay people of Pelonastra. This retreat from community life was greatly welcomed by the Aruhvian clergy who believed that the inaccessibility of the Spire under the Hipostics would begin to erode its place in the culture of the Mill Lands as the centre of religious life.
For a time the bones of St Stephen were housed in its lower chambers. A Sepulchre to St Stephen was built to house them, with construction beginning on the twenty fifth anniversary of his martyrdom on Enos’ orders. Enos believed that the Spire had become infused with the power of the Aeslanger skalds, and contained an indelible imprint of each skaldic verse that had been recited in its walls. Unable to destroy, dampen or control the power, which on occasion would manifest in overt and inexplicable ways, Enos sought to camouflage it. Any magical occurrences or anomalies in the Spire’s vacinity would be interpreted by the people of Pelonastra as miracles testifying to the holiness of St Stephen’s remains, allowing the Spire, and by extension the Pelonastran Hipostics to escape censure from the more inquisitorial branches of the Aruhvian Church, which were gaining ascendency in the wake of the schisms that inevitably followed from the collapse of the Vannic Empire and the gradual weakening of Arc. This gave the Pelonastran Hipostics the pedigree of sanctity, increasing their influence throughout the Aruhvian Church as the guardians of an important relic, making it much more difficult for the Archimandrite of Dancare, who was the ultimate religious authority in the Mill Lands, to control the order.
As the Sepulchre of St Stephen became an increasingly important site of pilgrimage for the Aruhvian faithful, the wealth the Hipostics acquired from the sale of relics, icons, and indulgences, lead to the expansion of the Sepulchre into a grand mausoleum, hubristically referred to be the Hipostics as the Conclave of Eternal Wisdom. Firg craftsmen from Drake were commissioned, and immediately set about immuring the original structure of the Spire, obscuring the Proto-Tzanic script that adorned its walls with frescoes depicting passages of the Aruhviad, interspersed with frescoes from Nicodemius of Aranth’s hagiography of St Stephen.
The Jubilee of St Stephen
Though the Spire, the reliquary, and the domed gallery were completed, construction was indefinitely postponed following Enos’ untimely demise under mysterious circumstances. Though the inquest to his death was inconclusive, it is known that the ostentation of the planned mausoleum complex attracted the jealousy of Pelonastra’s most prominent families, the Revers and the De Hauers, who were increasingly threatened by the ecclesiastical and economic power the Pelonastran Hipostics derived from the Pilgrimages to the Sepulchre. Moreover, the Mill Lands’ uneasy peace with the Haachi, weakened by years of complacency, was starting to erode and falter. The Lord Elect of Pelonastra was faced with the prospect of Haatchi raids along their frontiers. Unwilling to turn to the Firg, who would at the very least demand shared control over Mont Inaer, and unable to raise an army with the experience to successfully route the Haatchi, he saw little choice but to turn to Dranian mercenaries. Though the Mill Lands had some reserves of coin from pilgrims passing through en route to Dancare, its local economy was for the most part predicated on informal credit agreements, ratified by making notches on tally sticks, which were then split lengthwise by each respective party. The Mill Lands did not strike their own coins, but instead used old coins from the Vannic Empire, or sometimes Arcish currency, almost exclusively to trade with merchants making port in Pelonastra (for more on modern currency in the Mill Lands go to Currency in the Mill Lands). Hiring Dranian soldiers required gold, and since Pelonastra had never been able to build up a sizable gold reserve, it turned to the Hipostics.
Substantial quantities of gold and silver, as well as precious stones were transported under armed guard by the Firg craftsmen tasked with constructing the Mausoleum. Unable to pay for the expansion of the Sepulchre upfront the payment was underwritten by promissory notes from the Aruhvian Church, with Enos’ daughter sent to Wardenhal as collateral. Thus the Sepulchre presented itself as the only readily available source of gold. Enos was summoned by the Lord Elect and ordered to halt construction and to transfer all precious stones and metals to the Pelonastran Treasury. Enos informed him that since the construction was being financed by the Archimandrite of Dancare that such an order could bring the full weight of Dancaran ecclesiastical power down on the Mill Lands. Enos was placed under arrest for sedition as Rever and De Hauer forces forcibly stormed the Spire, seizing the Firg stockpiles of precious metals and stones, as well as stripping the Sepulchre of all valuable materials.
The Firg, anticipating that the Aruhvian Church would declare the promissory notes void if the Sepulchre was not completed, rioted, killing many Rever and Dehauer men before they were finally subdued. Since executing or imprisoning them could jeopardise relations with the Firg, they were deported. In order to pacify the Aruhvian faithful, who had contributed to the construction of the Sepulchre through a series of tithes, and the Archimandrite of Dran, who feared that failure to pay the Firg would discourage the greatest craftsmen from working with the Church, Enos was released from captivity on the condition that he used his ecclesiastical authority to declare a Jubilee on St Stephen’s Day, remitting sins and forgiving debts. This not only voided the promissory notes issued by the Church, removing the Archimandrite of Dancare’s obligation to pay the Firg but emancipated the Debt Peons of the Mill Lands allowing the Pelonastran government to conscript them into the army without paying off their creditors.
In order to pacify landholders, usurers, and the nobility who derived a sizable portion of their income from the exploitation of debt peons, the Pelonastran government only enforced the Jubilee in cases of conscription. Conscripted peons were required to purchase a set of armour and a weapon, which were loaned to them by their former creditors plunging them even deeper into debt. Though in theory the Jubilee emancipated debt peons, in reality it provided creditors with an opportunity to entrap many more Mill Landers in debt while providing the Pelonastran government with a subsidised militia. The Jubilee was enshrined into the legal code of the Mill Lands, occurring once every twenty five years on the anniversary of St Stephen’s martyrdom. It served primarily as a regulatory mechanism which kept the excesses of the nobility of the Millands in check, serving as a safety value which kept at bay the threat of a popular revolution against the system of debt peonage that had dominated the economy of the Mill Lands for centuries. The Pelonastran government was able to hire Dran mercenaries, warding off the threat of Haatchi raids and providing the chiefs of the main Haatchi clans with a powerful incentive to negotiate a new peace treaty with the Mill Lands.
In order to pacify the Aruhvian Church, who promptly threatened to excommunicate the Lord Elect of the Mill Lands for desecrating a holy site, the Hipostics, now lead by a puppet of the Lord Elect, agreed to bequeath the remains of St Stephen to the Archimandrite of Dancare as a gift, repairing relations with the Firg by hiring them to build the Sepulchre there. In exchange for the bones of St Stephen, the Aruhvian Church agreed to relinquish control of the Spire to the Pelonastran government on the condition that the Hipostics were kept on as custodians of the towers. The Lord Elect, wishing to use the Spire to project his power and authority, elected to transform it into a prison, converting the ruined shell of the Old Sepulchre into a labyrinthine network of cells and dungeons. The Jubilee was secularised as an amnesty of prisoners presided over by the Lord Elect.
In order to reduce the strain of the new prison on public finances the Pelonastran Chapter of the Hipostics assumed sole responsibility for the management of the prison in exchange for the privilege of being able to use prisoners in their experiments and research. Consequently the Spire developed a fearsome reputation. The Parchment Prince was known to visit its corridors selecting prisoners for his own secret purposes that would never be seen or heard of again. It is said that he warned every Lord Elect since the dissolution of the Sepulchre to respect the Hipsotics’ autonomy. Though the Cephale officially led the organisation, it was an open secret among the Pelonastran elite that the Prince was the one who really pulled the strings. Little is known about the activities of the Hipostics following the dissolution of the Sepulchre. Fear of the Prince’s retribution has ensured that the experiments of the order remain a mystery. No chronicle has been written, nor any investigation or report sanctioned.
In the walls of the Spire, the Prince, and by extension the Hipostics hold absolute power. It is less a prison than a state within a state, a place outside the usual jurisdiction of Pelonastran law, which has no weight inside its walls. Though it dominates Yulinast, it is avoided like the plague by most Pelonastrans, who can think of nothing worse than being forced to enter its walls. Such is the fear surrounding the Spire that no Lord Elect has visited the innermost sanctum at the top of the Spire in several centuries, fearful that the secrets they might uncover will make them a liability to the Prince. What little contact the current ruler of Pelonastra Prince Bard has with the Hipostics and by extension the Spire is through Chancellor, the first Spymaster in Pelonastran history to establish a working relationship with the Parchment Prince.
As the Mill Lands become weaker and its vulnerabilities are exposed to a rapidly changing world, the spell of secrecy surrounding the Spire is starting to lose its potency. Bard is compelled to look to the Spire and the Hipostics are compelled to look to Bard. Most Pelonastrans have forgotten the prehistory of the Spire, the lingering power that no renovation, extension or addition can diminish or displace, fear has compelled them to forget, to recoil from the thought of what lies inside. Power cannot be hidden forever, sooner or later it makes itself known.
"The Aelsangers convene at the Nurhag of Yulinast, known to us through the sagas as Hyrikskaal or Hyrik’s shout, not according to any phases of the moon, or the solstices that for millennia have held in their grasp the heathen mind, body and spirit, but to anchor or bind the unceasing poem every Breaorach (Aelsanger skald) vows to weave. The Breaorach1, like the Aruhvian sees the world as Word incarnate. Whereas Aruhvianism sees the Word as consubstantial with The Keeper, Aelsang views Word as an affliction, which entrances and seduces the cosmos with its beauty giving Creation, and everything in it the will to endure the pain of existence. The Nurhag of Yulinast, which the Van call The Spire, is the epicentre of this beauty, and thus the source of all the pain it perpetuates. For the Aelsangers, that which is sacred is that which is deemed criminal by the world. The primordial crime of the Word, the font from which poetry draws its power, is not a crime that can or should be atoned, rather it is the calling of each skald to perpetuate it, in every thought and every breath, for without the pain the Word afflicts on the world, all the beauty of creation will dim and fade into nothing. The Nurhag of Yulinast, which the chroniclers of the Van call the Spire, or sometimes the Spindel, is the sacred epicentre of the Aelsanger’s guilt, a monument to the crime they are called to commit, and the place they must in turn receive and endure the pain their verse inflicts, for by seducing the world from the brink of non-being. Every phase of the moon, the Breaorach gather in the Spire for a series of ordeal, not to atone for their crimes but to render it visible and tangible, both affectively and socially. Each skald must design their ordeal, reciting a verse that gives expression to their guilt as they undergo it. If they cry out or their signs of pain interrupt or in any way sully their recitation, they are pardoned and acquitted of the crime that makes them a Breaorach. To be acquitted is the greatest disgrace that a Breaorach can suffer, for to be pronounced innocent is to be pronounced incapable of communing with the Word and thus be incapable of producing true poetry. St Stephen, on his visit to Pelonastra was particularly impressed with the Aelsanger conflation of the sacred with the criminal. For him the calling of an Aruhvian cleric was not to rid oneself of sin, but to serve as an exemplar that even the Grace of The Keeper cannot extinguish the guilt borne by the children of The Keeper. Grace, for Stephen, far from absolving the Aruhvian allowed them to see their impurity with the eyes of The Keeper. The guilt which accompanies such impurity and corruption cannot be atoned for, rather atonement serves to render one’s impurity visible to the impure, cultivating a desire for purification which entreats The Keeper’s mercy, not to cancel the debt of criminality but to suspend the full force of his judgement. Though he condemned them as heretics, for St Stephen the Breaorach’s heresy was one that worked towards The Keeper, an error that arose from a lack of Grace, rather than wickedness. Thus St Stephen came to Pelonastra armed only with oratory, and argumentation, and Pelonastra was spared the sword"One of the charges brought against Stephen at his trial in Del’ Marah was that he was one of the most vocal opponents of Charmont Arast’s massacre of the Breaorachs, and thus sympathetic to heresies. Though he is venerated in Pelonastra Stephen’s defence of the Aelsangers ensured that his writings are still burned in Del’ Marah. Following Arast’s death it is thought that the Pelonastran Hipostics drew heavily for the rituals and studies of the Breaoarchs devoting themselves to uncovering much of the knowledge lost during Arast’s tenure as Cephale of the Order. It is thought that the later construction of the fortress and prison that surrounds the Spire was motivated not only by the practical need for a infamous prison, but as a means of providing subjects through which the Hipostics could explore and study forms of magic which relate to guilt, and thus grow closer to understanding the powers the Aelsangers were able to uncover and tap into. The Hipostics of Pelonastra
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