The Jorid

Mesrá Kælis, The Occult City of the Keepers

One could not really talk about Mesrá Kælis without ending up talking about the group known as the Alienomancians. Most of the city, starting from its vanishing walls to the ornate glazed ceilings, and the tiled marble floors borrows much from their extensive knowledge, and the passing down of this knowledge in arcane matters.

Let us first clarify something about the name I’m using: Alienomancians, as you may have guessed, isn’t really the name they use to call themselves, but I and Georges have become fond of it, despite its being hardly pronounceable. As they often appeared to us as cloaked seers and dusty travellers divining future events from gazing patterns in the sands, we started calling them Alienomancians, or scryers of Alienor. In a sense, it would be quite accurate a description, and I am positive they would appreciate it.

Nevertheless, they mostly call themselves Amshrêt Kæen, which is probably not much easier to pronounce, but gives us interesting clues as how they view themselves.

Kæen in High Lan’orkian means something close to brood, or family of sorts —but a family whose ties would extend farther than those of the flesh and blood. Alienomancians would be considered as a sort of cult by our standards, although their higher purpose is more focused on gathering knowledge than on communion with the divine. The same root is found in the very name of Mesrá Kælis, Kælis being the community, in the highest sense of it.
The other interesting part of that terminology is Amshrêt, meaning roughly meteor, or shooting star. It is believed that their knowledge came from the stars, and as a matter of fact even predates the arrival of the Guardians on the Duane.

While they mostly where nomads at the time, Mesrá Kælis, their first and only city, was founded just before the Era of the Twelve, when the Guardian’s presence flourished on the Duane. It was founded by Barath’Dum, as legend says, one of the wisest and more prominent figure of their community, revered and invoked in decision making of the Alienomancians even to this day. Legend has him cheat death by bargaining with Lejüs, the god of Forgotten, in exchange for Barath’Dum’s knowledge of his precious symbols, which were then forgotten to all (as well as their creator’s destiny thereafter).

At the time, Guardians and Alienomancians shared a mutual fascination for each others’ secrets (which were not actually seen as “secrets” by themselves, but were definitely beyond each other’s comprehension at the time), and Mesrá Kælis was meant initially as a sort of safe ground: a school, or forum where the best of the two worlds would meet, exchange, and above all, keep and archive. With the sudden disappearance of the Guardians who had left the face of the Duane (all but a few of them), turmoils, suspicion and retaliations succeeded and the City soon became the Occult City, the knowledge of which quickly disappeared, as well as its visibility.
In truth, it continued to strive, but apart from prying eyes, safely hidden by enchantments, inside the immense flank of a cliff from the edge of Mt Elok’ram —tunnels courtesy of the Guardian’s technology.

From Amshrêt, the Alienomancians had also kept a tradition of tattooing themselves; or more precisely, of drawing patterns on their bodies with a special powder coming from a wild plant which used to grow in the Southern Deserts but they’d learnt over the years to grow in the hanged gardens of the inner city. They were said to draw power from those special patterns, and it could be fair to say that some of the Jorid’s tiles are heirs of this tradition, and partly inspired from their techniques.

·:tags:· duane, alienomancians, alienor, city