Prexmarin

First appearance: Coriander Society, Fate of the Faithful Part 1 (A Crossover) · watch it on YouTube

Prexmarin, the Hanging City, is one of the great cities of The Void. It is a stack of neighborhoods dangling from colossal chains that vanish up into a fog-filled sky, and nobody can say what they hang from. Prexmarin has sent volunteers to a rebellion, sheltered spies in a shadow war, served as a backdrop for one champion’s fondest dreams, and lost a perfectly good Radio Shack. It is also, as visitors found out, sitting on top of something that really should have stayed asleep.

Description

Prexmarin floats within the Void around The Dread Fortress. It is built “stacked upon itself layer by layer… each neighborhood hanging from these enormous chains that go up into a fog-filled sky, hanging from what? Who knows?” Some districts rest on mounds of earth and some open straight down into nothing, which earned the city its best description: “a cosmic hanging plant.” Wooden bridges cross over the districts below.

The city has an upscale market district and a market circle of marble and metalwork, along with a shop called the Archive and a chapel of Mammon. Lower down, the city gets seedier. The low-hanging districts are full of hustlers, three-card monty and assorted scams, and the place was summed up as “a wretched hive of scum and villainy, so you should fit right in.” At the heart of one such district stands the Roundhouse tavern. Nearby there is a jailhouse with a trollkin guard, mostly for troublemakers and drunks, and a bank or treasury that keeps records of troop movements and debts. Below lies a district whose chain broke long ago. It sits tilted and mostly abandoned.

Prexmarin also belongs to its stray cats. They climb the chains to places nobody else can reach, and they would eye a newcomer like Chester as an intruder in “the City of Chains.” Getting in and out can be strange. There are “planar back roads” into particular quarters, and there is at least one waygate, a keyed portal that runs “from one crappy alley to another.” No wizard made it. It is one of the odd things that happen when two places in the Void fall into synchronization after “enough dirty dealing.” To use it, you flip a copper coin, slap it on your hand and walk into the alley. The swampy region of The Tumult lies to the west.

History

Skypiercer Part 2

Prexmarin’s history reaches back to the age of The Shadow King. In Skypiercer Part 2, while Kaja taught mages and Atalantos drilled about 500 troops, Elusia wrote letters and decrees calling for allies. People poured in from Prexmarin and from undiscovered lands until her forest camp of Atheranon had grown into a city in the woods a mile across.

Fate of the Faithful

Centuries later, Prexmarin became a battleground in the shadow war between the Faithful, who fight on the Grandmaster’s behalf, and The Arbiter. John Carmichael and Asena had chased their arch-nemesis Ralzamon into the Void, and they ended up in the Hanging City. There they met Lyrus, a leader of the Faithful. In Fate of the Faithful Part 1, Lyrus introduced the place with a tour guide’s breeziness: “By the way, this is Prexmarin, the Hanging City. You might come here for some shopping later on.” Then he sliced open a portal to the Faithful’s headquarters outside the city, warning them that it was “not the most comfortable means of travel.”

The shopping did not stay peaceful. In Part 2, it turned out that the big fight in the upscale market had happened because someone was hunting Kenny the goblin, a Faithful agent working undercover in the city. He had been trying to learn Ralzamon’s plan to get a silver ewer that pours ethereal waters. It would let the Children of the Void slip into the Ethereal Plane, walk through walls and assassinate people without the Arbiter opening portals for them. Kenny was pinned down in a thieves’ safe house that was said to be safe even from Ralzamon’s psychic presence. Meanwhile squads dressed as the Grandmaster’s soldiers, who were really the Arbiter’s agents in disguise, kept making arrests and hounding him. Armed with a replica ewer from The Seer, the heroes slipped into the lower districts along Lyrus’s back roads on “a dark and stormy night here in the Void.”

In Part 3, Prexmarin’s oldest secret woke up. A roar deep enough to feel in their bones rose from beneath the city. Something huge, shackled in chains, was writhing and straining below. This may have been the reason the city hangs at all: to keep it clear of “the ancient wrath of a creature that has slept ever since this place was drawn into the Void.” Kenny had found the coin-flip waygate back to the Faithful’s home city, but that did nothing about the Beast. Then the Beast Below snapped its chains. Its tentacles rose through the lower districts and tore enormous chunks of Prexmarin apart, crushing the ground right behind Lyrus. John grabbed his forearm and swore, “If I go, you go,” adding, “We go together, right?” The city’s lower sections were left in ruins. With the chase moving on, Circe pointed the group toward the Tumult, west of Prexmarin.

Into the Mirror

In Into the Mirror, Session 1, Prexmarin appeared twice. In Flynry’s dream, his son Orin arrived at the celebration “all the way from Prexmarin,” dressed like the accomplished politician he had become there by his mid-twenties, and toasted his father as “one of the best leaders and men and examples that a son could ever have.” Later, in reality, the party travelled through Prexmarin and many other cities on the road to the Dread Fortress, which stayed on the horizon no matter which way they turned.

The Shadow King’s Errands

During the Shadow King’s second reign, Prexmarin turned out to be one of the few places he had ever bothered to go. In S4E9 — Shootout, the match between Stanley Second Life Gibbs and Gideon Regalis Electus Gregorius the 537th, he explained that he had bought a new console at Best Buy only because the Radio Shack in Prexmarin was closed. The Grandmaster was not impressed:

The Grandmaster: “That Radio Shack has been closed for 38 years.” The Shadow King: “Well, I’ve been in the box for 700 years.”

Two episodes later, before Sprinkles’s bout with Nigel, she asked whether he had ever travelled the land he ruled. He admitted, “I’ve been to the Shadowlands and Prexmarin and not too far beyond that. Why would I?… There’s nothing out there.”

Notable Figures

• Lyrus: a leader of the Faithful who guided visitors into and out of the city.
• Kenny: a Faithful goblin spy who hid with local thieves and found the alley waygate.
• Ralzamon: the villain whose scheme for the ethereal ewer brought the shadow war to Prexmarin.
• Orin: an accomplished Prexmarin politician in Flynry’s dream.
• The Shadow King: a former Radio Shack customer, apparently.

Appearances

• Coriander Society, Fate of the Faithful Part 1 (A Crossover)
• Coriander Society - Fate of the Faithful Part 2 (A Crossover)
• Coriander Society - Fate of The Faithful Part 3 — A Crossover
• Into the Mirror, Session 1 (YouTube Parts 1–6 - Flynry Dies, Flynry Wakes, Flynry Walks, Survivors, Reflect…
• S4E9 — Shootout — Stanley Second Life Gibbs v Gideon Regalis Electus Gregorius the 537th (Greg)
• Skypiercer Part 2
• S7E10 — Thea’s Adventure (Thea’s Revenge, a one-shot)