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Kadar Profile: The Pale Temple

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A decade had passed since the crash. With the needs of the people beginning to exceed the ship’s power output, Ellinon tasked Fel with venturing deep underground where ship scanners had detected an energy source. Volunteers and drones dug day and night for nearly three weeks before finding a partially collapsed tunnel already set up, one large enough for giants. With sphinx security and a team of off-world engineers who had pledged their services, Fel led the trek for another day. Eventually they saw a brilliant light at the end of the tunnel.

As the team delved deeper, the stone of the walls began glowing brighter; some mineral veins even took on limited phosphorescence. If one stared long enough, they’d swear they were pumping like the blood vessels of a body. However, before the team could investigate, Fel urgently ordered everyone to disarm and surrender themselves. Unsure of his intent, the team trusted their leader and threw down their arms and bowed their heads in surrender. Not a minute afterward, glowing men garbed in white, ranging from three to thirty meters in height, emerged from the white rock and captured the team.

The glowing men called themselves Paladins, warriors of the Keepers of the Pale Temple, or just Keepers as they came to be known. The Paladins had tethered the team using energy whips shot out of their hands. Some of the sphinxes struggled, but their bonds were unbreakable. The Paladins asked why giants were escorting smalls through their tunnels, but were surprised when Fel was the one to answer. He told them of the things he and Ellinon had accomplished, of the diverse Felaryan races living together in a peace never seen before. Intrigued, the Paladins offered to escort Fel’s team to the entrance of their home, but only Fel was allowed to enter.

The entrance to the Pale Temple, as the Keepers called it, was a massive wall lined with symbols Fel could not read, but strangely found familiar. The entrance opened up to a hall large enough to hold a large village, which it did, and promptly closed again, leaving Fel at the mercy of his captors. The Keepers had built a community of fifty thousand strong, called Sanctuary. Their architecture favored geometric shapes, but mostly spheres and hexagons stacked on top of one another. If you could stare at it long enough to distinguish one piece of white metal from another, it’d look like a city made of puzzle pieces. At the far end of the hall was a structure of seven connected, increasingly large cubes leading up to the back wall. They called it Bastion, defender of Second Gate.

Inside Bastion, Fel became the first outsider to bear witness to the inner sanctum of the Keepers, many of the details of which were never revealed out of respect for their order. Fel only said that the halls were lined with men and women meditating and that light reflected off the walls like rainbows off a prism. The further in they went, the larger the people became. At the end of the hall were the largest creatures Fel had ever seen, the one in the center over a hundred meters tall while sitting in lotus position. Master Keeper, who had long forgotten his own name, looked upon Fel with ancient eyes. A woman next to him told that Master Keeper had also forgotten how to speak, offering herself as intermediary as he told the story of his people.

The Keepers had once been a tribe of ordinary humans come to Felarya through a great cataclysm. His people were unprepared for the brutality and ravenous appetites of the predators of this world, and so sought refuge underground. The lands were different half a million years ago, so the Pale Temple was easier to reach. The deep soil seemed fertile enough for few crops, but enough to live on, and the then smaller tunnel made the perfect defense against most predators.

Master Keeper was the first child conceived and born in the light of First Gate, which was still closed at the time. Growing up, many considered the boy to be mad with the way he always spoke to himself and paced in front of the Gate, rather than play with the other children. His was the most extreme case, but other children of his generation also displayed odd behavior, such as sleep walking, the occasional seizure, random outbursts of what was thought to be nonsense language, and peculiar dreams that left the children in a sweat even though they claimed the dreams were nice. On the day of his twelfth birthday, Master Keeper sprung from his bead, screaming bloody murder as he ran through the village towards the First Gate. There were those who had had enough and spoke of putting the boy out of his misery and leaving this place before they all fell to the madness. Master Keeper ran full force into the main gate, chipping most of his teeth. By the time the villagers arrived, the First Gate had already opened.

With the First Gate opened, Master Keeper said his mind, and those of the other children, finally began to calm. He explained that the Temple had been communicating with him and the others through dreams. It was trying to teach him the mindset necessary to open the First Gate. It wanted them to come in. Time passed and his tribe learned to love their new home. The light of Sanctuary burned their skin pale, but also endowed them with miraculous strength and greater understanding of their own latent magical powers. They moved large quintiles of dirt and metal into Sanctuary where it was used to plant trees, crops, provide grazing land for animals they had herded down, and grant them lasting building materials. This mining of the tunnel for dirt and metals was what resulted in it widening enough for giants.

All this activity would not go unnoticed as a gang of bandits took interest in the Temple. When the scouts reported intruders were spotted near the First Gate, the tribe reflexively went for gardening tools and other weapons with which to defend themselves, but then stopped. They stared at the tools for a good while, then at each other. They had the looks of children proud that they had stopped from doing something stupid before it was too late. They asked themselves if violence was really the solution. Many of the elder generation, those who had been born on their original world, claimed that the rest had succumb to the madness of the Temple and that they needed to defend themselves, taking up arms and leading the charge, never to be seen again.

In the time it took the bandits to reach the First Gate, Master Keeper had organized the village into their own manner of defense. Then thirty years old, Master Keeper towered over his parents at seven feet tall, but was only slightly larger than the average of his generation. He showed them the means to conjure the energies the Temple had blessed them with, that they may follow the teachings of peace. Their energy whips were strong enough to keep the bandits at bay, but gentle enough to cause no harm.

Watching from afar, Mater Keeper observed that the bandit leader was possessed by a demon. Master Keeper reached into the man’s soul and plucked the vile creature from its depths. The bandit leader ordered her men to stop, despite the demon’s protests. They did, and all watched as Master Keeper ripped the demon asunder, then go to the bandit leader and embrace her. Disheartened at the loss of their leader, the bandits threw down their weapons and surrendered, eventually being accepted into the village. The woman speaking on behalf of Master Keeper confessed that she had loved him ever since.

The people of Sanctuary declared themselves Keepers of the Pale Temple, pledging to forever guard its secrets. Time passed and the Keepers continued to grow beyond their natural ability. They ate the food of the land but eventually stopped hunting the animals, allowing them to roam the forests freely. The immortality granted by the natural life-giving energies of Felarya went well with the Keepers’ laid back lifestyle. Population growth dwindled to only a couple children every decade or so.

It was ten thousand years before contact had again been made with outsiders, by which point the Keepers had become an entirely new race. Infants born were twice the size of humans, and adolescence was not reached until age twenty when the average height was a little over two meters. After that, growth was not a matter of age but enlightenment as only meditating on the message of the Temple would result in absorbing more energy to grow in size, leading to some elders who had found themselves content at only four or five meters tall. The order of the Paladins had been established as Sanctuary’s sacred protectors. Alas, outsiders were only granted audience with the designated leaders of the village, children of little more than a century old. The elders preoccupied themselves with meditating on the message of the Temple and unlocking additional gates.

The woman speaking for Master Keeper concluded by saying that they had reached Fifth Gate, which offered a prophecy. It told of two beings falling from the sky, one incased in light and the other in death. The entity encased in death was to bring an end to the age of peace while the entity of light would guide them back to the sun, a thing not seen by Keepers in thousands of years. These beings would be identified by their intent to destroy the order of Felarya and would arrive in a time of blinding. A great light had already encompassed the whole of Sanctuary, rendering many of the inhabitants temporarily blind. That had been a ten years ago, the day Ellinon came down from the sky.

Fel claimed that Ellinon was the entity of light because the light of the Pale Temple had cast upon her to slow her fall. He remorsefully confessed that he was the entity of death, for needlessly causing death since his own fall from the sky many years prior. He also said that Ellinon and he were destroying the order of Felarya by convincing beings that would normally be predator and prey that they could live in peace. While the much younger Paladins reacted with understandable apprehension, the elders merely remained focused on Fel. They asked him to prove he was who he claimed by opening Fifth Gate. Fel agreed on the condition that his team be released and allowed to return to the surface so as not to cause alarm.

His people safe, Fel was escorted by the elders through Second Gate down into the depths of the Pale Temple. Unlike Sanctuary, the rest of the Temple was comprised of extensive rooms and winding hallways. The colors did not glow nearly as bright and came in a variety of hues to distinguish different types of things. After a year of exploring the Kadar, Fel recognized the configuration rooms as that of some sort of ship. The elders admitted it was possible, confessing that while the younger generation was fascinated with exploring the secrets of the Temple, they were content with simply meditating on its message.

Some elders had meditated in rooms in front of devises and structures they did not recognize, hoping the Temple would eventually reveal the truth to them. For instance, one room past Fourth Gate on the fourth floor held a holo-projector, showing a map of the Pale Temple and the Kadar ship resting above it. It appeared as though the Temple had a total of twelve Gates, but everything below Fifth Gate was dull and without life. Similar reading came from Kadar in rooms that had not been activated.

The exploration team returned to the surface and told of what they found, a race of humans that had been blessed by the Pale Temple and became giants. Ellinon recognized the descriptions of the Temple and photographs of the markings confirmed it. The builders of the Temple were supposedly the first sentient beings and creators of Existence. Ellinon’s people worshiped them as gods. (While the name of Ellinon’s people is known among the Kadar, it is rarely mentioned to outsiders.)

After seven days and nights, Fel emerged from the tunnel with an escort of Paladins. He declared Ellinon and himself as prophets foretold by Sanctuary to bring an end to the senseless slaughter by giants of those they considered their food. A new age of Felarya had begun. The rest was spoken privately to Ellinon, including why one of the smaller Paladins had a black eye.

Today, Bastion and the elders have moved down to the opened Twelfth Gate, guarding the Temple’s most precious secrets. Access past Second Gate is still heavily restricted to scientists studying the mysteries of the dead gods. Sanctuary has retained much of its independence, acting as a vassal state to Kadar. Though its elected representatives are welcome at government meetings, they rarely do more than observe, preferring to stay out of matters of the material world. Instead, the Keepers have taken on the role as spiritual leaders.

Having finally seen the sun, the Keepers erected temples in each of Kadar’s cities, and even a few allied cities. Their message of peace and enlightenment has become the dominant religion of Kadar. Sanctuary’s population has grown considerably since contact with the surface. Their main trade is the food grown past First Gate, which has become a delicacy enjoyed by the rich and other nobility. The Paladins, as soldiers forbidden from killing all but the most evil of creatures, remain a relatively unused Special Forces group, only going on missions that, more often than not, never officially happened.
And so we continue with the second part. In hindsight, all of this really isn't all that crucial to the history of Kadar as the other parts, but I wrote it so you get to read it.

Surprisingly, Felarya belongs to :iconkarbo: but Kadar, the Pale Temple, and all characters are mine.

Early History Kadar Profile: Early History

The Pale Temple
The Solkane War Kadar Profile: The Fairy War
The Twelve Cities www.deviantart.com/lordmep/art…
Geography
Government
© 2014 - 2024 lordmep
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Karbo's avatar
The pale temple and the keepers are intriguing and well thought of. it's a nice piece of mythology you have created here ^^