Estelle’s account of what the sanctums are: the doors to the prisons of the great angels who followed the Deceiver into rebellion. This is the party’s first substantive answer to the question Uncle set them, and the Church would almost certainly call it heresy.
The Story, As Estelle Tells It (S5)
- The Deceiver had six — perhaps seven — great angels who followed him into rebellion: the Six Voices, or the Six in One.
- Named: Dawn, Day, Dusk, Moon, Stars, Silence. Possibly a seventh, Throne — though Throne may be the Deceiver. The Voices spoke for the Maker to the peoples of the world.
- They were not cast down into hell — the infernal realm where the unfaithful servants of the Maker who followed the Deceiver were banished — but rather imprisoned.
- The sanctums are the doors to those prisons. Six, possibly seven of them.
- They sit at confluences of magic (Leylines) and predate the Empire, the Church, the Old Elven Empire, and any known history.
- They may be themed to their Voice — or may not.
Estelle is explicit that her answers are only as good as her scholarship and divination, and may not be correct.
Known and Suspected Locations
| Voice | Location | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Dawn — Sethariel | High desert north of Halwa | Entered by the party (S5) — Sanctum of Sethariel. Door battered open, gem broken, chains broken. |
| Stars | The wastes south of Cardacci | Matches sanctum #3 from The Recovered Documents |
| Moon | Somewhere south of Hazad, likely nearer the coast than the mountains | Estelle is unsure. Possible lead, flagged by the party (S7): an old Auvernian pilgrim’s account describes a site by a mirror lake “where you can see the glory of the moon,” in the south of the empire — with a journey description. In the Balventia library; nothing yet confirms it is the sanctum — see The Orders of the Five Courts. S8: found on a Menenia map; the party is on the pilgrim’s road. S9: at the end of that road, under a buried religious complex by a lake, an octagon like the Dawn sanctum’s — six crystal shards laid out in a star, a living keeper (Mirriam), and Corrupted at the door. Confirmed as the Moon sanctum (Aaron) — see The Mirror Lake |
| Day, Dusk, Silence | Unknown | — |
| (Throne) | Unknown; may not exist | — |
Note the arithmetic: the Order of the Owl found three sanctums — Halwa, the Averoigne mountains, and the badlands south of Cardacci. Estelle knows of three — Dawn, Stars, and maybe Moon. The Averoigne sanctum is not on her list, and the Moon sanctum is not on the Owl’s. Between them the party now has four candidate sites, not three.
The Court Problem
Compare the Five Heavenly Courts of The Faith of the Maker: Dawn, Day, Dusk, Star, Moon.
Estelle’s Voices are Dawn, Day, Dusk, Moon, Stars — and Silence. Five of the six are exactly the Courts of orthodox worship. Estelle herself picked her star imagery because “the Star Court is the court of knowledge.”
Speculation
Either the Courts are named for the angels who once spoke for the Maker — meaning every devout follower of the Dawn Court has been venerating the theme of a fallen thing chained under the desert — or Estelle has built a heresy by mapping the Church’s own structure onto an old story. The odd one out is Silence, which has no Court. A rebellion with a sixth member the Church does not name is the sort of gap worth pulling on.
Speculation
The Monastery of the Dawn followed the Dawn Court and was built over the Dawn sanctum. That is either the strongest confirmation of Estelle’s account the party could ask for, or evidence that the monks knew exactly what they were sitting on and called themselves jailers in polite language.
The Court Problem grew teeth (S7). The Balventia library shows the Church’s institutions were once Court-named too: emperors patronized “the Holy Orders of the Five Courts”; the Phoenix was “once founded as the order of the day”; an order of the moon was declared anathema with its head Aurelius Balventius; the early Owl revered the court of Stars; and a pilgrim once visited an Order of the Dawn. Whether the Courts named angels, or Estelle draped an old story over old furniture, the furniture is now documented — see The Orders of the Five Courts.
What Broke at the Dawn Sanctum
Per The Abbot and Estelle’s gloss (S5): the red star rose, intruders broke the doors, killed the monks, broke the chains (possibly the bindings of Sethariel), and broke the gem — a gateway from the physical to the spiritual. The abbot then “touched the divinity,” and it broke him: encountering a fallen servant of the Maker can leave a mark on the soul.
If that is what happened, then a hundred years ago somebody deliberately opened the Dawn prison — and the party has no idea what came out, or whether it is still in there.
And a second broken crystal (S9). In the Moon sanctum’s octagon under The Mirror Lake ruins: six shards, about two feet each, a brighter purple than the Dawn gem (Aaron), laid out with intent in a star, reading as overwhelming evil and overwhelming magic. When it broke, and who arranged the pieces, is unknown. The party has now seen two of these chambers and has yet to see an unbroken gem.