A once-respected monastery near the free city of Halwa, whose inhabitants mysteriously died out ~100 years ago.
What We Know
- Old and well respected for a long time; likely founded at a site of religious significance — per Master Humron. (S3)
- Old writings say they held Church artifacts, details unknown — per Master Baram. (S3)
- May have received a significant gift from a surviving prince of Averoigne after the Third Crusade — identified in AHU library research as a magnificent jeweled orrery. (S3)
- Their disappearance (~1639) was “perhaps kind of sudden”; no known church records explain it. (S3)
- AHU library research found multiple mentions over the centuries of important people making pilgrimages there. (S3)
What the Party Found (S5)
The site was reached with Mamud — two days north into the high desert — and it is the Sanctum of Sethariel, sanctum #1. The monastery is a temple carved into the wall of a 200-foot chasm, and it did not “die out”: it was stormed. Doors battered in with a siege weapon, flagstones crushed by something heavy walking through, altar smashed, about two dozen monks killed and left unburied long enough that a later party’s attempted cremation was burning old corpses. Beneath it, past a wall smashed a century ago, a freezing tunnel older than the temple leads 100 feet down to an octagonal chamber holding The Abbot — still speaking, still hostile — and the shards of a purple gem.
See Sanctum of Sethariel for the full survey and the dating of the two separate incursions.
Why It Matters
- One of the three sanctums from The Recovered Documents is “north of the Circle Sea near the free city of Halwa” — likely no coincidence. See The Sanctum Investigation.
- Full analysis: The Monastery of the Dawn and the Orrery.
(Naming: session notes use “Monastery of the Dawn,” “Temple of the Dawn,” and “order of the dawn” interchangeably; this wiki treats the site as the Monastery and its inhabitants as the Order of the Dawn.)