First appearance: Coriander Society - Fate of the Faithful Part 2 (A Crossover) · watch it on YouTube
The Tumult is what’s left when something divine dies and gets dragged into The Void: the calcified, planet-sized corpse of an ancient titan or god, now a landscape of purple rock with its blood still flowing through it as glowing teal mist. It lies west of Prexmarin, and during the Faithful’s struggle against The Arbiter it became the hiding place of a magical silver ewer that both sides wanted badly. Smugglers love it, pirates love it, and almost nobody stays long. The blood has a way of changing people.
Description
The Tumult is very purple and very teal. Its ground is the ancient body of some divine figure, likely big enough to have been a dead god from the astral plane, long since turned to purple stone and overgrown with bizarre plants. As the saying goes, if you’re heading somewhere spiritual and otherworldly, “it’s usually teal.” The terrain follows the shape of the corpse. The high ground sits “where the sort of the rib cage falls off,” and lower down, inside the chest cavity, lie “the real swamps of the Tumult.”
Through it all runs the titan’s blood: radiant, ectoplasm-like and ethereal, flowing like waves of light and mist. One of its features is an ethereal waterfall of that blood, a “very scenic location” with a ruin that once toppled over the side and now lies at the bottom of the falls. The blood is easy to find inside the Tumult and rare anywhere else. Some people harvest it, but it is unpredictable and hazardous to handle.
Smugglers, pirates and people with good reasons to disappear have built fortresses across the body. Even so, “there’s a lot of chaos” there, and residents tend not to linger, “lest the blood of the Titan begin to change him.”
“It’s not every day you’ve got a dead titan laying around.” — Kenny
History
Fate of the Faithful Part 2
The Tumult first came up in Coriander Society - Fate of the Faithful Part 2 (A Crossover), when the Faithful learned that several people had been asking after a magical silver ewer lost in the Tumult. John worked out what the ewer could do. When poured out, it opens an ethereal curtain once a day, wide enough to carry a whole strike team into the Ethereal Plane and back, walking through walls and slipping past defenses. That made it a very dangerous thing to leave lying around in the Tumult. Kenny had been asking about it too, trying to find where in the Tumult the titan’s body lay.
Later, John laid a hand on the Seer’s shoulder and reached for “the wizard sight that he used to have back when he was a fucking wizard,” and both men’s eyes swirled into silvery, milky vortexes. Through the vision John learned that the ewer was a replica with no magic in it, made to be swapped for the original and keep the real one out of nefarious hands. He also glimpsed the Tumult itself and pieces of Kenny’s secret mission to find it. The Seer admitted that his own sight had been clouded of late, and John may have suspected Ralzamon was behind it.
Fate of the Faithful Part 3
In Coriander Society - Fate of The Faithful Part 3 — A Crossover, Kenny laid out the whole picture. The ewer was “in the Tumult,” a giant body “the size of planets,” with “an ethereal waterfall of the blood. And you need the blood to do the teleporting.” Lyrus agreed that titan blood was “very, very rare. Very, very important.” Kenny had got his information by infiltrating the Children of the Void, the Arbiter’s people. He spent weeks deep undercover getting them drunk and doing “a little friendly gambling.” By his account, the Arbiter knew the general area but not the exact spot, and Ralzamon, “the Arbiter’s general,” didn’t have the location yet. Kenny wasn’t laying a trap. He just wasn’t a very good spy. John decided that if it was a trap, it was a trap, because it was the only lead they had.
Kenny cheerfully pointed out how rare the blood was outside the Tumult, and John offered a comparison that didn’t land:
- John: “About as rare as fries at McDonald’s.”
- Kenny: “What’s a McDonald’s?”
- John: “It’s a guy’s name.”
- Kenny: “Sounds like an idiot.”
Circe placed the Tumult west of Prexmarin, and Kenny’s investigation, helped by Lyrus, turned up four ways in. The first was the front gate, a tunnel burrowed through the dead titan’s body and sealed with a guarded door. The second was a channel of the ethereal blood itself. The third was the cliffside above the waterfall, if you could fly. The fourth was a secret tunnel through the mountains and cave systems.
There was a small embarrassment along the way. Asena had been carrying a drawing she took to be “a dead purple rock man.” Lawrence recognised it at once: “This is the Tumult… the area of the Void that’s made from the broken body of this dead entity,” and a pretty good map of the whole place, ruin at the bottom of the falls included. “Sorry, Kenny,” said Lyrus. “There was a map.” Lawrence took it away to study.
The party then set out for the Tumult and saw it for themselves: purple rock, strange plants, pirate fortresses, and radiant blood flowing like ectoplasm through the bones of a god.
Fate of the Faithful Part 4
By Coriander Society — Fate of the Faithful Part 4 (A Crossover), the Faithful had escaped the Tumult. “A couple of nasty customers” had been there looking for the ewer as well. Kenny’s knowledge of secret passageways and side alleys got the party out, and they returned to the Faithful’s home base.
Notable Figures
- Kenny: the goblin who went undercover to track down the ewer and knew the back routes in and out.
- Lyrus: helped Kenny find the ways into the Tumult.
- Asena: unknowingly carried a map of the Tumult, believing it was a drawing of a purple rock man.
- Circe: placed the Tumult west of Prexmarin.
- The Seer: shared the vision that revealed the replica ewer and glimpses of the Tumult.
- Ralzamon: the Arbiter’s general, who didn’t yet have the ewer’s location.
- The Arbiter: knew the general area where the ewer lay but not the exact spot.