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The Agate Gate
🕑 Added 2021-06-22 00:29:09 +0000 UTCA small temple of Avánthe along the Rananga River stands almost solitary about a tsán (1.33 km) away from the nearby Sakbe road. Run by The Girdle of Purity Society, mostly members of the Standing Pinnacle clan, this small temple is dedicated to Kshésa, Avánthe’s aspect as “the knower of cycles” and is a heavy stone-block affair around a pair of shrines to Avánthe and Kshésa that are thick with incense and the smell of fresh fruit sacrifices. A secret door in the shrine opens to a stairway heading to a much older construction.
Most of the substructure dates back to the late Bednálljan era, and was built up around a cross-dimensional nexus point that has been stabilized into an agate archway some 30 feet across from inner edge to inner edge. The substructures can be broken up into four main areas.
First is the loop, a 20 foot wide corridor that completes a full circle and is used mostly as a walkway among disciples and guests for long walking conversations about nature and the natural cycles and nexus points of Tekumel.
The loop crosses through a pair of nearly identical chambers about 15 feet above the floor of these chambers with stairs leading down to them. In turn these chambers offer access to the gate chamber – a large circular chamber with three four-sided extensions off it and a pair of large pools of a swirling pearlescent fluid. The agate gate itself is on a large dais looking over the chamber with one pool behind it.
Finally there is a smaller hexagonal chamber of contemplation set off from the loop with a small pool of the pearlescent fluid again. Unknown to most, this pool is also a nexus point to a temple of Dilinála (Avánthe’s handmaiden) in distant Béy Sü, openable to those with the right spells.
The agate gate itself can only be opened at the beginning of the harvest season and remains openable for 16 days exactly. The gate has been opened from the other side outside of this schedule only twice to the knowledge of the scholar-priests of Avánthe, once releasing a number of water spirits in the form of wisps of fog into the temple, and once for a combat-weary squad of hulking reptilian shén warriors who sealed the gate behind them with a mysterious artifact and then pushed their way out of the temple and then southeast towards the Forest of Gilrayá.
The 1200 dpi versions of the map were drawn at a scale of 300 pixels per square and are 11,100 pixels (37 squares) wide. To use this with a VTT you would need to resize the squares to either 70 pixels (for 5′ squares) or 140 pixels (for 10′ squares) – so resizing it to either 2,590 pixels wide or 5,180 pixels wide, respectively.
https://dysonlogos.blog/2021/06/21/the-agate-gate/
