1644 Underkeep Massacre
Give Me a Slice of that Old Time Religion
There was not much that could bring together the fanatical Babkhi Zurvanists and the devoutly pious Cedrists, but the opportunity to eradicate enemies of their respective faiths had to be one of them. Neither group exactly held out much hope for receiving the lavished attention from this new Kaiser Aurangzeb that his predecessor the late Kaiser Dominus had doled out so generously. Although born into the ancestral faith of the Babkhi race the 'learned Doctor' Tokaray al-Osman had been instrumental in the establishment of the atheistic Coordinated State in Elwynn, and the revival of Cedrism was a policy favoured by that same Thorgils in whose disappearance and purported demise the new Kaiser was so heavily implicated. However, what they did have was mutual enemies. For the Babkhi the Liches and Deep-Singers of the city were an abomination, noxious creatures of the lie and the spawn of Ahriman, while for the Cedrists they represented a manifestation of Minarborialism, a heretical perversion and repudiation of the hallowed faith – and the Kaiser had declared war upon them as his first act. For those who had ever felt cheated or slighted, marginalised or merely repulsed by the inhuman creatures living in their midst, the day for a glorious reckoning had finally arrived.
The Babkhi of the city, influenced by the Mobads and the agents of the Dark Orchid Society, rose in a spirit of cruelty against the Liches and the Deep-Singers, who were scattered throughout the city in many of the tenements and backstreet slums. A massacre began at dawn on Market Street, within the sight of the ziggurat-like Esagila of Raynor and the appropriately named Retribution Park. The liches were dragged from their homes and one by one decapitated until an officer of the City Guard drove by and reminded the Babkhi that if the body of a Lich is destroyed they will regenerate at the next Lichmas. After this the Liches were instead blinded and had their hands and feet cut off and burnt in the vacant sight of their gouged out eye-sockets.
When the Deep-Singers saw this cruelty, about two hundred started to flee towards the bridge to Lichkeep, but the Babkhi and the City Guard discovered them and, having trapped the Deep-Singers against the segment of the bridge which had been removed as a security precaution by the Lichbrook Dragoons during the night, began a great slaughter, which would not have left any of them alive had not a party of the Landsraad Guard, on a free-roving hunt for the City Guard, chanced upon the scene of the massacre and opened fire.
Others fled to the Underkeep, the mysterious subterranean structures beneath the Brrapa Lu Eraro Grand Central Station and the beating heart of the Deep-Singer colony in the city. Here too they found the descendants of the Incarnates in a state of considerable alarm. A sudden raid by surface dwellers had the abduction of one of the young from a broodchamber. Each man and woman of the community, unless already blessed with quill or stinger or poison sac, armed themselves with their weapons in the station building, and there marched onto the surface to do battle with the riotous humans who had assailed them. They fought bravely and well, and slaughtered a great many, but the enemy by numbers alone overpowered them and forced their way onto the station concourse. There the battle ended for the moment for the humans dreaded to go below the ground which had been all but ceded to the Deep-Singers, who in turn knew now that they would be exterminated if they attempted to come back to the surface. A stalemate would have ensued only the rumours of a detachment of loyalist Scholae legionaries advancing on Raynor Park caused the rioters to retire westwards and to devote themselves more profitably to looting and ransacking abandoned commercial premises.
The daily ritual of Cedrism, conducted at the Temple of Mors in the north of the city, began on this day with a novel and subtle innovation that was the cause of much rejoicing. The ritual began, as it always did, with the entrance of a purified priest into the sanctuary. He made his typical prostrations and mumbled prayers before rising to light a censer of burning incense, with which he processed about the temple cleansing the darkest, most sacred recesses. Next, he approached the shrine holding the cult statue of Mors and broke the seals upon that shrine, drawing the bolts and opening outwards the doors and in so doing unveiling the dreaded god of death to the world.
“It is done. Blessed be the Lord of Death and Truth.” the priest cried out in the darkness. This solitary call was met by a great shout and acclamation from without. The noise born of the cheers and cries of a vast multitude. The Children of Mors, the professed devotees of that dark god's cult, had wasted no time in assembling their acolytes and devotees for the day's great celebration. The Thrones had decreed that the passing of their benefactor, the Kaiser Dominus, should not be met with sadness but rather with joy, for truly the wise lord was now in the company of the gods. Moreover, there would be no more pleasing way of celebrating the apotheosis of Dominus but with a cultic sacrifice in his honour.
The night-time raid on the Underkeep had been a harrowing affair, carried out in the darkness but aided by the disordered withdrawal of the Kampioens. It was the first of many such actions, and while the smallest of the incursions it brought back the token of great symbolism. A specimen of daemonic spawn – a child, if that was the word, Deep-Singer – to fulfil its part in the ritual.
At the ebbing of the cheers, a blast of trumpets echoed and the vast bronze and ebony doors of the temple were swung open. Entering into the temple were two figures, dressed in the crimson hooded robes of executioners from the House of Betrayal, whose speciality was murder in the service of the divine, together dragging in their wake a smaller, much smaller, sobbing and naked creature. The sacrifice was brought into the temple.
The child, was broadly humanoid in form, ostensibly female, and almost human in its tearful and heart-rending sobs of distress. Only its crown of tendrils in lieu of hair, unblinking eyes and protruding neck bile sacs announced for all the world its inhumanity – not a human child after all but a cursed abomination, a perversion of science and a crime against nature. It's fate then was not to be pitied but to be revelled in. The gods willed it, indeed they demanded, that it be the first of many. Or at least that is what the crowd would have so.
The creature was dragged before the Shrine of Mors and hauled off her feet, sprawling onto the floor, by a sharp vicious heave on the rope by the two executioners. As she struggled to regain her footing and stand, one of the executioners stepped in and delivered two vicious downward punches in swift succession that knocked her prostrate to the ground, her body shuddering between sobs of pain and terror.
The priest carrying the censer, wearing the faded purple of the House of Tears, continued the ritual as though nothing were amiss. The priest prostrated himself before the god, kissing the ground before the statue. After raising himself, he chanted greetings and praises to the god, while offering precious spices and oils to the statue. This being done he turned to the two men dressed in crimson and nodded.
Using the ropes that formed a halter around the creatures neck, the executioners hung the young Deep-Singer from one of the cedar beams buttressing the temple ceiling. As the rope slowly strangled her, the girl's face turning an asphyxiated shade of purple that almost matched the colour of the officiants robes, the two executioners drew their obsidian blades and stabbed her repeatedly in the abdomen, sending blood gushing to the floor until one of the hooded figures had the presence of mind to step across and take up the tin bucket that had been provided for the purpose and held it underneath the creature to collect the spilt offerings.
The bleeding out did not happen quickly but once the life had flowed from the sacrifice, the two executioners butchered her like a sheep.
The purple robed priest meanwhile set aside his censer and removed the figure of Mors from the shrine, cleaning and purifying the image before ornamenting it in fresh linen, oils and cosmetics. After being purified a second time, the statue was returned to the shrine. The priest then invited the Mors to inhabit his statue.
The executioners had during this time unslung the lifeless carcass and set it down upon the butchering table. The liver and entrails were cut out first, using those same obsidian knives. One of the executioners had the task of shaking the dung out of the spooling reams of steaming guts into a waste bucket held, reluctantly, by the other. The executioners then gathered up the liver and entrails which they placed onto a silver tray which they carried, along with the bucket carrying the cooling blood spilt from the sacrifice, to the shrine, before which they laid the offerings on the ground with low bows and reverent prayers.
The officiant priest now offered to the statue of Mors the liver, entrails and blood of the sacrifice for sustenance. After chanting additional hymns, the priest closed the doors of the shrine, resealed it, and removed the offal presented to the god. The offal would be saved for the meal of the senior Paines and Thrones of the Cult of Mors. By consuming a meal of flesh and blood dedicated to Mors they would imbue sanctity and mana.
The executioners meanwhile returned to their work of butchery. They quartered the carcass, cutting off the dainty feet at the ankle joint, and slung a severed limb over each shoulder before walking out into the temple courtyard. They were met with acclamations and shouts of joy amongst the laypersons who had assembled there to witness the first sacrifice of a Deep-Singer in the recorded history of Cedrism.
A lottery was held to select those who would participate in the feast, it was felt that the invisible hand of Mors would chose the most worthy of his followers to join the priests around the cooking fire. The head and hands were thrown into the fire, and when they were roasted, they chewed off the palms and sucked the flesh from the finger bones. One old crone, a lady of the House of Despair possessed of ancient memory, declared the flesh of a deep-singer to be quite the most succulent meat she had tasted since back when Safir was still on the menu. A priest had then used a silver-tipped mallet to crack open the skull to allow his fellows to greedily scoop out with their fingers the baked grey curdled mess contained within. In jest one of the celebrants remarked that the char-roasted tendrils actually tasted like calamari. That earned a rueful chuckle amongst those waiting, with salivating hunger, for the haunches of meat to be sliced, cooked and passed to them on a tin plate.
The meal had ended with a sermon by one of the Paines in which she had called for a holy war to be waged until there was no more Underkeep and no more Lichkeep, only Shirekeep. That had earned thunderous applause, and the chants of Deii Volt! - the gods will it.
Finally, the purple-robed priest finished washing away the blood and gore, had cleansed the sacred instruments and even swept away his own footprints. With those chores done, he extinguished the candles and torches, snuffed out the brazier and censer and exited the sanctuary.
Underkeep
Produced as a joint venture by the Schlepfilm and LitAF studios which respectively provided its period detail and dramatic cinematography, Underkeep is a retelling of the notorious Underkeep Massacre of 129 AL which precipitated the Second Great Replanting of the Deep Singers to Lepidopterum in the late Minarborian era.
Plot
In the present day, a young Nezeni boy wanders through the leafy lanes of Lepidopterum city and stumbles upon a children's play area in pristine condition, surrounded by well-tended flowerbeds and a picket fence. Confused by the absence of an entrance gate, the boy attempts to climb the fence but is verbally rebuked by a passing elderly Deep Singer who directs his attention to an adjacent plaque, reading "For Those Who Never Arrived." Upon the child asking who never arrived, and from where, the old Singer's squamate eyes glaze over and he begins to tell a tale, serving as sporadic narrator through the rest of the film.
The scene cuts to the Singer - revealed to be one Navan Til - as a child, walking through the streets of Shirekeep with his mother and younger brother, Kuzen. Although nearby news stands announce the recent usurpation of the Shirerithian throne by Kaiser Aurangzeb II, Navan's mother - a Shirekeep resident of some years - explains that this is not an unusual occurrence and definitely will not present an obstruction to their planned day out in the city; indeed the other inhabitants of Shirekeep are seen going about their normal business and most stores remain open. The family stop at an ice cream stand and the children are having a mirthful experience of proboscis-freeze when another Singer, a young male with a seeping facial wound, runs up to the stall in a panic and implores the family to get to safety underground; a violent mob is approaching, attacking any and all transhumans in their path. Within seconds, the becudgelled horde is seen advancing up the street, breaking into a run as they spot the fleeing Singer and Navan's family. The Singers begin to run away whilst the mob briefly content themselves with verbally and then physically abusing the ice cream vendor for consorting with the 'greenskins'. While a portion of the mob kicks over the ice cream stand and summarily lynches the hapless vendor for species-treason, the rest resume the chase of Navan and his family. Eventually they catch up, forcing the wounded Singer and Navan's mother to turn and confront them. When the wounded Singer is beaten down and hacked apart with bladed implements, Navan's mother cries for the assistance of a half-dozen approaching men of the Shirekeep City Guard, who briefly calm the altercation while the Singer family backs away. Instead of apprehending the assailants, however, the Guardsmen engage in amiable chatter with them and money is seen to change hands; some of the Guardsmen suddenly slip away while the rest remove their insignias and headgear to join with the mob, which promptly resumes the chase. Forced to defend her children alone, Navan's mother experiences a brief coughing fit before a long pair of fangs, which her children did not know her to possess, spring from her mouth. Screaming at her children to run, she piles into the mob alone in a venomous fury.
By now the family have retreated to the gates of Brrapa Lu Eraro Grand Central Station. From the Underkeep beneath - the focal point of the city's Singer community - a cohort of male Singers emerge to confront the attacking mob with a bodily assortment of stingers, claws and spines. They extract Navan's mother, now heavily wounded and unconscious, and she is carried underground to where a single overburdened woundmender has established an ad-hoc field hospital, flooded with injured Singers from all over the city. It is here that Navan and Kuzen discover the scale of the event; several mobs are attacking the city's Singers in coordinated unison, and all of them are converging on the Underkeep. As chaos rages on the surface and below, Navan and Kuzen try to attract the attention of the blood-spattered woundmender to attend to their pale and unresponsive mother. When the woundmender eventually does arrive, he can do little but close the lids of the mother's dilated eyes and utter a terse apology before moving onto new patients; nothing can be done for her.
A commotion erupts from the surface entrance; the defending Singers have been overpowered and the attacking horde, now liberally covered in blood and viscera, streams in among the wounded and begins to slaughter them where they lie. Kuzen succumbs to shock and cannot move until Navan drags him from the scene, joining a party of assorted Singers as they retreat toward the city subway tunnels. The mob pour after them in phalanx formation and occasionally lunge forward to drag a Singer in among them, never to be seen again. In this fashion Navan and Kuzen's companions are steadily picked off one-by-one, until Navan himself is forced to swing at the attackers with a length of broken drainpipe. Kuzen remains dazed and stumbling, still holding onto his ice cream as if to preserve the peaceful world of an hour before. The last few Singers eventually reach a subway train, already packed with others of their kind who are about to flee. As Navan shoves Kuzen into its doorway he spots another Singer child on the platform, struggling with an attacker who is trying to tug him into the mob. Navan lunges at the man, smashes his wrist with the drainpipe and drags the child to the train, only to notice Kuzen has disappeared. Turning, he sees Kuzen bring dragged away and hoisted aloft by the celebrating mob, the boy's ultrasonic screams of terror audible above their cheers. Navan dashes forward but is hauled back by other Singers onto the train, which begins to pull away from the platform. A montage then follows of the ritualised slaughter of Kuzen by Cedrist and Zurvanite clerics in its fullest gory detail, alternated with Navan's drained and expressionless face pressed against the back window of the train, then of straps being tightened on his rucksack by adult Singers, then his long march with them along the roads of Southern Benacia, then the hand of a Minarborealist cleric upon his shoulder, the inner death of his expression unchanged through all of these times.
The scene cuts back to the present day, of the elderly Navan in Lepidopterum. Now understanding who 'did not arrive' in the most excruciating detail, the Nezeni boy asks if such a thing can happen in this time, in this place. Nevan hesitates in his reply as the boy becomes increasingly anxious and frightened, but he eventually answers: "well, it depends." The boy asks "on what?" Nevan hesitates again and sighs, his eyes settling sternly and directly into the camera. The credits roll without music, accompanied by the distant echo of Kuzen's ultrasonic scream and the lingering cheers of the Underkeep mob.
Reception
Despite the Underkeep Massacre's status as the second most salient event in Kalgachi folk memory behind the collapse of Minarboria, and the profusion of references to the event in popular and official discourse, it was this very gravity around the subject which delayed its cinematic treatment until some 71 years into Kalgachia's existence. Although scripts at varying levels of completion had been circulated around Kalgachia's film studios for most of this time, the subject was considered too sensitive by studio exectuives to approach in the form of popular entertainment; but as the 210s AL saw the return of the massacre's survivors to the surface at Lepidopterum after their underground war with an invasive crystalline fungus, and the simultaneous emergence of the Black Legions in perilous regional proximity, a change of thinking occurred in the deeper strata of the Kalgachi state and something resembling a direct order from the DEO was eventually issued for one or another of Kalgachia's film studios to "illuminate the event in such a way that its direct relation to the perils of the present situation is seeded firmly within the mind of the viewer and that citizen and soldier alike, building upon the experience of the Urchagin, might be fortified with the inexhaustible will to stand in defence of the Garden in any coming confrontation."
The finished production was, in the opinion of some reviewers, as fatalistic as it was fortifying. Those in the Lieutenancy of Jollity were particularly unsettled, noting that only two minutes of the film's running time - between the purchase of ice creams and the arrival of the first fleeing Singer - could be considered to have any kind of jollity about it. As with other dark productions, many parishes in Jollity banned Underkeep's screening but the film's distinctive cinematic touches won praise from others - particularly the lingering close-up of the ice cream vendor's blood swirling into a puddle of his melted product in the manner of strawberry sauce, the slightly desaturated colour of all the Shirekeep scenes (shot in heavily set-dressed segments of Katarsis City for the surface scenes and Lithead for the underground portions) and the montage of Kuzen's slaughter with Nevan's migration. Some highbrow commentators criticised the plaintive ending as "patronising" although the KDF reported a sudden spike in recruit applications to the Lithead Division and Reserve Army South after the film's first public screenings, as did many of the Church of Kalgachia's partisan detachments.
A comedic outtake from the film has circulated on the black market depicting one of the gore-spattered attackers sat on a flight of steps, attended by film crew and make-up artists, taking a lick from Kuzen's ice cream and offering a sinister wink to the camera - the actor responsible has not been seen since.
