Less than that... (Wermspittle)

Even the dead go armed in Wermspittle. Few are so foolish as to think themselves safe in a place as infested and squalid as this festering mass of ruins, heresies, and outcast remnants from a thousand decaying or extinct principalities. Damnation and revelation walk side-by-side through the rubble-strewn streets of Wermspittle, Beauty and Terror hold court within the burned-out shells of crumbling palaces, Genius and Madness dance wantonly across the ruins of places where no one dares go any more.

Wermspittle is a hot-bed of marvels, wonders and Prodigies both oracular and all too human in nature. Judgement has long ago come and passed, much like the white-hot irons of the Iron-Masked Inquisitors and the still-smoldering wrath of the Puritans who will never be free of their guilt, their fear, their lingering, poisonous doubts...no matter how many of the damned places they try to burn away under cover of the night. Their masters have already ridden off, leaving them behind in this accursed place, to rot and to die and to be reborn among the corruption for they have been found unworthy. Their prophets no longer speak to them, their scriptures are obliterated in blood and ashes, their gods no longer answer. But it is foolish to look to unforgiving gods for forgiveness.

Puritans and Dogmatists rage and hew and burn their way through the heavy patina of phantasmagoria and the elaborate detritus of uncounted dreams that have accumulated, coagulated, taken root or festered within the dark spaces and closed-off sections. They are ill-suited to navigating the in-roads and by-ways of a composite reality that is far too negotiable, all too malleable, changeable and inconstant. Where others once grew gardens, they now sow thorns and ashes. The Forking Paths and Cold Roads mock them in their exile, their fall from grace, their damnation that they would inflict upon others rather than face in the silence of the night.

The Patriarchs of the South once declared that the very Road to Hell is to be found in Wermspittle, but the particular Encyclical in which they condemned Wermspittle has been removed from circulation (in some cases by theft, in others by assassination), and only three known copies exist, all three in the hands of librarians or book-sellers in Wermspittle. In the case of the Puritans, Dogmatists and their ilk, perhaps the Patriarchs were far too prescient, all too accurate in their condemnation.

They came here, astride black-iron steeds in search of heresies and blasphemies they could scarcely imagine without sternly punishing themselves. They came to Wermspittle seeking to exact penitence and to scourge the darkness with flame, tongs and wrath-runed steel.

What the found was their own twisted visage, glaring hatefully back at them from out the depths of an abyss none of them dared suspect they truly served. No souls did they save. Not even their own.

But what else would one expect from a place kept off of decent maps and rendered officially unmentionable by covert decree within the Ecclesiastical States?

What indeed.