The Catacombs of Paris are the ossuary beneath Uchronic Paris: a labyrinth of Templar bones packed into niches under the city’s paving, where the Master Hugues de Payens died. A single bomb episode defines them, lived twice: in Antiterra in 1898 A.D.A. and as an echo in the first level of the Inferno.
| Type | Place |
| Surface access | Les Halles |
| Templar name | Labyrinth of the Ivory Templars |
| Houses of the Cycle | ☷ House of the Descent · ☯ House of the Twin Cosmos · ⛓ House of the Band |
| Spanish entry | Catacumbas de París |
Description
Les Halles, the great central market of iron and glass, is the lid. If the old plans are right, one of the major passages to the ossuary opens beneath its main pavilion. The catacombs have mausoleum-style stairways, fifteen-foot ceilings, a main entrance on the side of the market and a secret passage known to few. The Templars called them the Labyrinth of the Ivory Templars; the Master died at its heart after a combat the Templar records do not detail. The ossuary holds centuries of dead.
History
Surface: Antiterra, 1898
Five Pyrexian cultists, with bronze braziers and columns of green smoke, prepared the detonation network from a map of Paris 1898 marked with five red crosses on the ossuary’s nodes. Ärsvan, by then a Time Bandit, placed with others an explosive of pure chaos under the Cathedral. Ariadna, at the gates of the Labyrinth, was about to touch the sphere of obliteration offered by Being and Non-Being. Ärsvan touched it first and was obliterated. The explosion sank the Cathedral, freed Ariadna from the labyrinth and opened Paris to the Regulators.
Echo: first level of the Inferno
In the descent through the Dantean circles the episode recurred, not as an exact mirror. Part of a cathedral stands inside the Temple and Place of the Just, where the group was under attack; beneath it another group entered from a witches’ plane — the singing three witches inspired by Macbeth’s — again convinced it carried bombs.
- This time Ärsvan stopped it, confronting the bombers; the bomb did not go off and the trap was disarmed.
- Ariadna, a once-irredeemable demon who had found her way out through Ärsvan, could not bear the bombs’ closeness. She took a scythe and tried to destroy him. Wounded, he said: “¿Qué te pasó, bella?” (“What happened to you, beautiful?”). They later reconciled; the couple remains complicated.
- The witches tempted Sven — the barbarian Lost One, condemned facet of a former Norse child of Antiterra, now a brutal axe warrior — with the chant “Sven, no pierdas el tren, tren, tren” (“Sven, don’t miss the train, train, train”), urging him to destroy everything along with his companions. The suggestion nearly took hold; the group held.
After the cycle
The catacombs presumably remain a sanctuary, guarded by the shades of Ärsvan and Ariadna. The stone of the ossuary holds both memories, the real one and the Inferno’s.
Gallery
