Idakhan and Marukh
Gathered upon a tall cliff from which descends a stair-road winding up and up and up the black chasm to the peak there sits with sovereignty a spherical building of borun tumor-covered in stone outgrowth and ringed by tents and campfires. Behold Idakhan, Adopt the Weird Cliffs, inhabiting a small, lonely ruin, skirted with an ever-changing population of scavengers whose eyes are set towards Merqual Thar Valley, or the legendary Vasthaar Island, or further north to places ever more heteroclite.
Dust swirls about Idakhan when the sky acidifies from pale rose to a deepening fuschia as the dust storms roll in. These samums are filled with blazing lights that travel ever skywards for dalham after dalham, zig-zagging and descending impetuously back into the infinite gilings with nary a sound. Some scavengers believe in mapping these wil-o’-wisps. It is said that where they land there shall be uncovered from borun prisons artifacts of great make, or roads that otherwise lead to them. And so scavengers set off from Idakhan, having spent a fortnight mapping out these coruscations.
When they do return, they return much like those who followed the dustless lights; warp-scarred, deprived, but whispering of their closeness to artifice unimaginable. These maps are not recorded. The lights change, the roads are lost, and with them their secrets.
Know the il-Sarrum Marukh, Who Purifies the Blood, by the bend in his back, unnatural for a morg, or the swelling of his legs, the paling of his flesh, the strange, light, and Akaran voice that whispers from out his ever-snarled lips. His hooded head bears no hair, and that shuffling body is moved with a nimble grace uncanny for one so warped. Akaran voice aside, Marukh speaks in the morg way; he is measured in his words, picks carefully through his thoughts. He will ask the scavengers what they have seen along their sunless roads and ruminate with them over the details, relating to them any news that has come to Idahkan. In his voice, hear a creature who has witnessed too much and earned from all that pain very little.
If you show or mention warp-scars, Marukh leans in, his mood suddenly changed.
Like an inquisitor does he seek permission to investigate every inch of mutated flesh across your body. Marukh will pull out small glasses that he uses to stare at them with unnerving closeness, like a gemcutter appraising some valueless crystal. Then he offers what he does to all those who come to Idakhan. Should warp-scarred scavengers be close to losing what they are, he can perform with them a ritual only he does know, one of his own make, one that earned him the position of il-Sarrum.
Marukh leads you out into the outskirts of Idakhan. He taps his shardstones with his staff and upon you will that same staff be placed and as your consciousness fades his expands and when you awake in a flash of scarlet light again you will feel lighter, younger, almost as if you were a child again, and Marukh will have purified your blood and removed from you a single one of your warp-scars.
Learn more about Marukh, Idakhan, the outposts, and their il-Sarrums, and our other Torn-natives in our upcoming book, Torn & Beyond!
