the Academy of Pain
A location sketch.
Magic academies. They span the multiverse. Pain is just one of the darker versions — much darker, if rumors are to be believed.
Deep beneath the earth, a city glows through smog-misted streets. The air is foul. The river that twines its serpentine way through the jagged spires rolls like a slow-moving muscle, squirming dark and heavy. To one side of the city which knows neither East nor West, a crown jewel hangs, chained by thick bands of merciless metal. The jewel is a dagger, the hilt its jagged crown, an edifice of torture and wisdom. Through smog and night, its towers glow, tempting residents of the city to impale themselves upon its cruel mechanisms, its bloody magics. It is a place of learning, an Academy of Pain, and in this lonely world, there is only one.
- Anonymous
Pain feeds on the terror of its students. The Headmaster, a dreadful fellow, dislikes chaos (an odd thing, for a magician). To promote order, he developed a nifty system by which students develop into full-fledged magicians.
They ate him. They smoggin’ ate him.
- Student
Business as usual, in the realm of madness incarnate — of the dark corner of a vast realm, cleaved from reality by the summoners of a dead portal. The portal is long since lost, but the city of Unrest and the twisted remains of the academy linger like the omnipresent Smog that smothers the city in silence.
Not to be dramatic or anything, but the city probably has less than a century left before it crumbles to the degenerate scum running the place. Only the Book, which contains all that ever was and all that will ever be, holds the place together. The Book carries the city — and thus, the Academy — on the worn spine of its leather back, in the square of a shadowed plaza, in the dim fog of a dying sewage city lit by a thousand hanging lanterns.
There is a story there, somewhere.
Location sketch, the Academy of Pain, 2022.
