Mahâraurava is the home Realm of the Naraka in the Near Dreaming.
Overview[]
Greatest victim of Ravana's death, the naraka home realm's former beauty has forever disappeared. Situated in the Near Dreaming realm which corresponds to Northwestern India, Mahâraurava was at ground zero when the Hidden Ones deployed their spirit-bomb. Few other creatures have ever visited this realm with the possible exception of the acheri. Changeling legends claim the region was once the most beautiful and cruel of realms, consisting of great jeweled mountains where even the smallest stone was worth a duke's ransom. The naraka, part of a faerie race called the Asuras, lived in civilized, if cruel, splendor, residing in vast palaces carved into the gleaming mountains, lolling in their fruited gardens perfecting the arts of music, love-making, and pain. It was their job, so say the legends, to punish wicked human souls, boiling them in the region's rivers of molten copper.
Mahâraurava now hosts a dark, blasted wasteland. The Samvarta, or Doomsday Cloud, vents its fiery, ash-laden anger upon the land. Hung heavy with fragmented parosemes and solimonds, it vomits forth lightning, black rain, and tar-like hail stones. A great red and black fiery vortex has appeared in the sky and seeks to gather the entire realm into its great mouth. Some say it leads to a realm called the Lemniscate. At night, the vortex turns blue and great spider-like phantoms ride the howling air-trods which surround it, attacking those foolish enough to be outdoors, dragging their screaming victims to an unknown fate. The molten rivers, once reflecting a golden, mirrored sheen, now choke with blackened ash. The jeweled mountains are twisted spires of blackened slag. Pieces of the realm's former beauty appear hear or there, but Mahâraurava is a dead land. Some naraka, driven insane by pain and their lost memories, still haunt the ruins. Most prominent of these is Udri, a king of the Southlands who still lives in a castle of jeweled slag and sacrifices trespassers to the Samvarta, which he believes to be a god. Other naraka fled through fiery portals to the far corners of the Dreaming, bringing death and destruction in their maddened pain. Some of these have found places among mercenary armies on the Red Plains of Kureksarra while others, less mad, seek out their lost origins. Of those who now haunt the waking world, some seek a way to recreate their citadels of beauty and pleasure while others single-mindedly pursue rumors of those who destroyed their home.
References[]
- CTD. Denizens of the Dreaming, pp. 28-29.