Temple of Darkness

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Warning: This page concerns archaic world setting information from the I.C.E. Age of GemStone III. It is not canon in contemporary GemStone IV, nor is it canonical for Shadow World as the details may be specific to GemStone III. It is only historical context for certain very old parts of the game and these things should not be mixed.

The Temple of Darkness is some unknown ruined temple to the Dark Lords of Charôn (Modern: Lornon) from the I.C.E. Age of GemStone III. It is only mentioned in the Temple of Darkness Poem, where a stanza from it is found in the Broken Lands. In the Broken Lands it is written in Iruaric, the ancient language of the Lords of Essaence, in an alphabetic form which should not have existed in the First Era. The Temple of Darkness was implicitly abandoned by the end of the Wars of Dominion, when the Dark Gods were imprisoned on Charôn or otherwise banished by the Lords of Orhan (Modern: Liabo).

The poem alludes to conditions which would not have existed yet when Uthex Kathiasas was still living. This is especially clear with the stanza regarding Orgiana, the Goddess of Darkness, who is described as silently waiting to take her revenge on the world. This raises a number of major questions about the Dark Shrine, including how it came to be present in both locations and what that really means.

Behind the Scenes

The Temple of Darkness Poem is studied in depth in Research:The Broken Lands. There is a vignette in the Shadow World Master Atlas, 1st Edition (1989), where the Loremasters raid the "Temple of Night" in 450 Third Era and slay a corrupted priest named Nyrdru. This may have been in Gaalt near the Wall of Darkness, and so perhaps related to a surviving follower of Kadaena known as the Master of Malice. The theocracy of Orgiana (Modern: Eorgina) was ruled by V'rama Vair, the daughter of Empress Kadaena, with the "Temple of Burning Night". This was a lesser pantheon of "Dark Godlings", presumably only a sub-pantheon of Charôn consisting of the servants of Orgiana, who were destroyed, imprisoned in meteoric ore, or banished to the Black Hel. These issues are also studied in Research:The Graveyard.