The Jennine Wekipaijua

From Almeopedia

In the ruined Wede:i city of Jennine, on the banks of the Ran, lie a group of what seem to be grassless hills, their sides carved by gullies formed during the area’s infrequent rains. But in fact these are the remains of one of the strangest structures or monuments of ancient Xengiman, the Wekipaijua. Something between an architectural folly and a cult, the Wekipaijua is darkly intimated to have played a role in the destruction of the city.

Origins

The very name evokes dread, roughly translating as “Fangfear”. In our earliest sources (preceding -500 Z.E.) it had a happier name, We:komodau, the Great House City, or the World City.

Among the practices of Mešaism in this area, called Ranjavi (modern Rajjay) after its chief city Ranji, was the making of small clay models of gods and men, sometimes as idols, sometimes as a way of achieving magical power over the thing depicted. Lords and kings had models of palaces or entire cities built, as impressive conversation pieces or to commemorate their earthly glory.

The Wekipaijua was no less than an attempt to model the entire cosmos (the ‘Great House’ in Wede:i). Its scale was appropriately gargantuan: the original structure, later outgrown, was a plot of land 150 meters square.

The essential pecularity of its foundation was that it would be built by the entire population (minus the inconsiderable commoners). Any noble, cleric, or official had the right to add to the structure, in any way he saw fit. He would create a brick, sculpted or inscribed to represent some salient aspect of creation, and add it to the proper sector of the Wekipaijua. Anyone else had the right to remove the brick and substitute another. The end result would be a collective consensus, celebrating individual brilliance, yet denuded of selfish or antagonistic individualism. A single builder’s mere vandalism or vanity would soon be punished by the other builders.

And indeed, within just five years the Wekipaijua was the largest building in Jennine, and perhaps in all of Rajjay. Men would travel from other cities merely to marvel at it, and perhaps learn the secrets of its miles of incriptions, its thousands of tiny statuettes, its walkways, galleries, and caverns.

Trouble

The founders of the cult, the Daukan (‘whales’, numinous creatures in Mešaic lore), insisted that any brick added to the Wekipaijua, rejected or not, was holy and could not be destroyed. Indeed, an idle young man could fill bricks with obscenities— and many of them did— and the results must be kept, and records maintained of the location of each. Considerable effort by silent, efficient monks went into warehousing and cross-indexing the results of such vandalism.

Inevitably there were serious disputes about construction: should a new wall be built here, or a door opened there, or an existing structure reworked to better reflect the structure of the cosmos? The Daukan approached the problem in a startlingly whimsical and yet self-consistent way: they decreed that the debates would themselves be conducted with bricks and mortar, in new wings of the Wekipaijua. Entire walls of inscriptions were thus devoted to discussions of the architecture of other parts of the holy structure.

The original goal being universal— to reflect the entire world— there were naturally builders who took this as reason to create models of themselves or their families, or to devote bricks to popular temple prostitutes, to minor godlings, or to the legends and myths of the Čerengri, one of the preceding cycles of the world. Others felt that this was in bad taste, or outright blasphemous; this was after all a religious project, not a child's toy.

Scholars from the more sophisticated cities of the Xengi valley sometimes came to Jennine to view the Wekipaijua. Some were entranced (and even added bricks of their own), but most snorted, and asked what was wrong with conventional tablets and scrolls, or a solid temple built by one talented, trained architect. The huge statues of the gods crowning the Wekipaijua might be admired; but was it truly an honor to the gods to share their place with self-portraits of forgotten monks, carefully saved bricks bearing scrawled obscenities, and enormous archives of adobe debate?

Fall

The later history of the Wekipaijua is obscure. A schism in the cult resulted in the foundation of an entire separate Wekipaijua some blocks away, with the identical goal of modelling the entire cosmos, and differences of method outsiders were unable to penetrate. Productive work elsewhere in the city seemed to halt, as Jennine devoted itself to the addiction of endless elaboration of the Wekipaijua. Houses and palaces were destroyed in order to free up bricks to add to the structure, now a campus of connected buildings, towers, arcades, vaults, and catacombs. Children dreamed of the day they would be allowed to add their first crudely modelled brick to the holy building; old men used their dwindling energy to knock down each other's feeble additions. And always the vandals came, sometimes now from other cities, knowing perhaps that the defenders would eventually tire out or die off, and the last brick of every visible structure would show nothing but incoherent scrawls.

Jennine did not survive the Ezičimi invasion (from -325). Perhaps it was simply another casualty of those brutal times, its people run down or enserfed by cruel horsemen who cared nothing for this divinely motivated attempt to reduce the world to clay blocks. Or perhaps the city was abandoned decades before-- or torn up, brick by brick, sacrificing its life-blood to its sublime, sprawling, chaotic temple of knowledge.

Now people of a different culture and different languages wandered the ruins, puzzled and awed at the acres of inscriptions they could not read, and which they could never reach the end of if they tried. Were the ultimate secrets of the world written, carefully catalogued, in some back chamber of the Wekipaijua? Or perhaps the gods of wisdom here descended only into madness, gibbering out inscribed clay bricks which now, over the long slow centuries, the rains wash into a lumpy mass, silent as the moons.