House of Violence

It sits on the high cliff with a good view of Maelstrom, on the line between wind-whipped crags and dark indigo turmoil of the waves below. House is of dark green stone, of carved ornaments and of wrong sense to it – the lines, the shapes, and the volumes it defines are just out of proportion with regular human use of space: the corridors are too narrow, the terraces too curved, the rooms are too wide and low or soaring in high and narrow wells. It is big enough to host a village but mostly empty, although signs of previous occupation – trophies, censers, training idols, old weapons – pop in many abandoned rooms.

The House of Violence was built by a demon, once drawn from Maelstrom itself. As it was assembling its identity it created this place as external evidence parallel to what it was tasked to do – with faces of demon's long forgotten targets are still strewed into walls, and each little piece of the place is said to reflect the flow of its movement as it approached said targets. Once fully finished, the demon came to its house to meditate on a nature of violence and came to conclusion that it is good and blessful thing. Once fully free, she gave her house to all who would think the same.

House of Violence was destroyed many times – by philosophy, by righteous strength, by infighting, by peaceful neglect –  but as the demon still exists safe in Maelstrom, the house continues to exist forever looking into it, and sooner or later a mercenary in a search of shelter from a rain, or a serial killer running from justice, or a youth, seeking strength from old myths to exact vengeance come here, and the House comes back as it was never gone.

In times past it was everything from refined school to a prison to the center of nation-spanning religion as baroque as it was bloodthirsty, but nations come and go and House remains as it is, here to host adherents of violence regardless of all other things. Currently it is mostly forgotten after it was destroyed in a holy crusade, and with the earth salted and cursed around it, it is serving as an obscure inn to those few who know the way.