"As I sit here amongst the accumulation of a thousand thousand years of knowledge I can't help but feel there is some work left to be done."

-Title inscription of Rüs Dür's Treatise on the natures of Temples: Vol 1

Temple of the Wind

This legendary home of the spirited winds has occupied my thoughts for some unmeasurable time now. Few but the Cloudlings have ever seen its walls and even fewer laid wing or finger to its atlas approach. But I have seen it, sure as the Nor'wester blows through Zhivia I've been there. I've heard the breeze-bellows fill the endless skies abound. I've been tricked, tarried, and thrown by all manner of godling winds each with their own blustery face.

Mark my words when I tell you that my every step was pure chaos. On the ascent to the entrance no amount of good luck, skill, or planning can prepare you for your path. The winds whipped wildly one minute nearly tearing you from your bones and the next it was languid and sweet. A shrieking razor thin gust gives way to a vortex of weightless bliss. All were speaking to through articulated poetic movement, each their own unique soul.

My life was never in danger I believe, though there were moments that gave me the gods-fear. I was treated like a long-absent friend, talking my ear off, trying to pull me in every direction to ask how I had been living. As all winds do they finished their catching up with hurricane speed and I was left at the gateway.

The sprites whistled as I entered the air-smoothed sandstone, the long hallway was just the largest wind eroded pathway. Peppered throughout the entire structure were long winding tunnels some no larger than a speck of dust and others the size of humanoid proportion. My footwork took some concentration on the floors. Each surface had the look of a frozen river surface in the first flows of spring.

My ears were then privy to the most anointed of songs. All instruments require the wind and air for their music to travel, but this was the primal music of the world. Each tunnel acted to create its own resonant tone adding to the choir of a million voices. Every fiber of my being was reverberating the heavenly melodies and harmonies. The very substance I breathed was sound and tonality. I resonated with the ancient song of freedom only the unbound skies could understand.

I stood in a grandiose sphere of sand-carved rock. I pondered how it might have formed from a perfect confluence of air streams to trap it in an eternal journey around this ever expanding hall. Nothing was impossible here it seemed. Then I saw my first resident float through the ventral opening. They carried a woven basket filled with fine fabrics and silks, evidently one of their exports.

It was curious to see yet more of these inhabitants, there were not as I had first presumed. Only a small population of the peoples living and working in this aerial fane had physical wings. The rest seemed to hail from what I now know are the Cloudlings. Fickle beings that are perhaps related to the air giants in form and not function.

Nevertheless they were pleasant to me, but took little interest in my comings or goings. They went about their daily tasks hovering and swooping throughout their habitation without a care to burden their flights. The looms held within the lower chambers were incomparable to any earthbound I had witnessed. The complex tapestries crafter were masterworks in precision and artistic genius. It took a large contingent of priest to each weave their thread through the loom and around each other. The coordination and grace was a dramatic masterpiece in itself.

I was loathe to leave the performance, but the winds had suddenly changed, the North wind was ruminating. I knew better than to overstay my welcome, especially if it were to be a gale of reckoning. I made my way back down the steps unmolested by the myriad winds this time. They were seeking shelter elsewhere I imagined, clever of them.

I looked back at the now distant Temple and gazed just a moment longer, I knew I would never visit these halls again. I turned from the gathering storm heads and down to the open sky once more. 

"Hopefully the clouds will be softer this time."

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The Temple of the Wind is dedicated to the worship of Tezzracca, God of the Sky and Holder of the Domain of Air. Most sentient winged things pay tribute in some way to the Lord of the Skies. With the Aarakocra being particularly fond his worship. It has been noted of their being winged Dragonborn paying homage as well.

Those that sail give equal respect to him if they are wise while on the waters. For if so inclined the Lord of the High Places may let the fury of a hurricane have free reign of the seaward skies.

Many who worship him know their Lord to be aloof and unconcerned with the troubles of the world beneath him. Preferring to let his element govern itself, he has been known to offer helpful winds to those that show either proper reverence or a fair amount of entertainment.

His holy symbol is that of a silhouette of a condor against a white cloud as birds are his sacred animal. The sacred colors are sky blue and silver grey. 

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Temple of the Volcano

Deepling Dwarves had shown me something of great intrigue some time ago. Upon a visit to their great buried city of Emberclave their reclusive archives were laid bare to me. A time tattered scroll of ancient vellum detailed the lost God-hearths of their people. The cooled magmatic plate upon which their timeless fortress was once a churning lake of fire. Rising from the molten depths were towers of soot and ash. The volcanic islands were anchors of reality amongst a deadly churning chaos. And as such the Dwarven diaspora set their roots and fate in stone.

These ancient vestibules of history and religiosity were too tantalizing to leave to my imagination. So I set upon the stone within the forsaken realms of earth. I delved deep, retracing the steps some ancestor kin endeavored on at the beginning. With no shortage of fortune I managed to break through to an ancillary magma chamber. 

Here the the bright sludge turned languid and cooled to a fools semblance to solid stone. The shores were a sharp declination into the cauldron and it was all too easy to slip on the glassy smooth ground. When I reached the edge I found I was perched atop a high cove nestled in a larger chamber. The magma oozed off the edge as a lazy waterfall to join a seething ocean.

There like blemishes upon its surface sat pinpricks of black and ash-soaked brown. Each belched soot and ejecta to form a miasmic storm of gloomy clouds above. A steady downpour of debris then melted amongst the magma and was then released back into the atmosphere like some parody of waters natural cycle. 

My approach to the volcanos was arduous at best, solid ground would coalesce just as quickly as it dissolved away. It made each step an exercise in divining the will of chaos. The first step upon that blessed ashen ground made me exclaim in exultation. But that was a meaningless joy compared to the moment my eyes lay upon the Temple.

It was a cathedral of obsidian and harsh basalt. The windows polished so keen and thin that through it appeared only a hazy shadow world. The rough hewn structure appeared to have been crafted by tools unknown to me. No volcano could naturally produce the soaring buttresses and vaulting archways. Reverent hands built these halls, it was evident in every careful detail within the rock. The holy inscriptions within were a litany of prayers whose chanting was done with the chisel rather than the words.

I found the tenants of this place not long after traversing their sulfurous parish. They appeared as a snapshot of legacy, their features stern and patrician with the characteristic tone of faded ash. They moved as individuals on their unrelenting path through their daily life. Each a perfect leader and champion of their own ideals. No hierarchy was present to my penetrating observation, their roles seemed to be based on need and merit at any given moment.

They worked in the abundant metals harvested from the primordial sea. Their teams of craftsman were comprised of all professions of metal: jewelers, engravers, weapon smiths, armor smiths, architects, and even tinkerers. Each item forged in the life-blood of the earth was unique and equal parts beatific and efficient.

Before long my lungs were failing beneath the suffocating weight of the air. I had to leave these artifacts in the distant past once more and return to the habitable surface. I scaled the high bedrock walls at the edge of the sunken caldera and looked back one more time. The faint glow underlit the volcanic Temples like candles burning against an inferno.

"I may never see you again, but I will still marvel at your works"

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The Temple of the Volcano was constructed to the service and worship of Wrothdrull, the god of ambition, potential, and fire. He is revered by spell casters and intelligent creatures of flame. 

He is the patron of anyone with the will to change, be it revolutionaries or craftsmen. His temples are set in volcanos upon a vast subterranean magma sea, as his worshippers credit him with the taking up the earth to forge mountains and islands.

He is close friends with Tezzracca and is the lover an consort of the god of earth and metal, Yaantanigond. It is through her love that the raw material for his change is provided.

He cares not for the intent behind the change and creation he sponsors, only that there is change and creation. His sacred animal are fireflies and his holy colors are orange and black. His holy symbol is that of a silhouette of a hammer against a backdrop of flame. 

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Temple of the Sand

The tales told of the deserted Temples are plentiful as the grains of sand who inhabit them. But contrary to popular folktales there are beings still to be found in windswept halls, though I would hardly call them residents. Their presence in those cursed places are an affront to the very god they worship.

Among the tumultuous dune-sea there is nestled an ancient vestige of antiquity. Buried though it was, the liminal nature of the sands betrayed its location before long. I stole into a briefly cleared entrance to rest in the safe harbor from the harsh sun. The razor winds still howled at me from without, a baneful message to an intruder.

The walls were faded as if their inscriptions were not worthy of being seen nor spoken. The winding passageways snakes like dune-spines frozen in rock. The echo of my voice helped me navigate to what looked like the central chamber deep within the bowels of the labyrinthine tunnels.

There descending into pitch darkness was what looked like an amphitheater to the lowest hell. Each step a ring upon another leading to a destination deep beneath the shifting sands held at bay. I saw only one other living soul during my brief inquest, as well as the soulless. They came to greet the hermit pilgrim wrapped in tattered fabric of their own to mirror their visage.

Deaths heralds they were, emissaries of their life-loathing Lord of dust. In wind scarred voices they intoned their blessing and asked for the pilgrim to join them in undeath. The pilgrim refused by leaving with their vitality intact, leaving their renunciation for another day.

They did not ask such a thing of me, though I sensed their animosity at my existence. Not merely my presence in their unhallowed fane, but my existence as a fact. I would tarry no longer if it meant seeing the depths of their tomb, so I scuttled back through tortuous paths to find the sun once more.

I headed back East then to once again find the gateway oasis to this heart of the desert. There I could wet my lips and savor the feel of mist across my bone-dry skin. The only mummies in this place chose it willingly after all.

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The Temple of the Sand was erected in the worship of Xerezo, Lord of the sand and the first child of Fire and Earth, blessed with freedom by his godfather Air.

Though he always returns to his mother his godfather picks him up and dances with him in the winds. When Xerezo is angered he calls upon his godfathers blessings to whip a furious sandstorm and dust devils down upon those who displease him.

Of all the gods he is the least concerned about mortal life, seeking solace in the dance of the elements rather than flesh and blood creatures. So much so that Mruthull, God of Waters put oases in his vast deserts out of spite. Thereafter no matter where he would go Xerexo would never be far away. It is said his is still rage filled that Mruthull made it possible for mortals to despoil the sands.

He is the god of freedom and spite and his followers are said to be hermits that likewise are reclusive in the face of their hatred for others. His most blessed clerics pass on to become mummies to continue spreading the harshness of the sands long after their demise.

He is also the patron of those seeking freedom from all but themselves. Bandit lord sand anarchists pay lip service to the Lord of Sand and Dust.

His symbol is a bleached skull against a backdrop of whipping sands. Usually resembling the shape of a dust devil. His sacred animals are locusts for they help him purge the sands of the settlers he despises. His sacred colors are gold and white.