Trophy: Barsul Prison

The few prisoners who had met Warden Ghael always said she had a sense of humor. Those criminals who made guards run to apprehend them were often confined in cells so small they could do nothing but stand, unable to even lift their arms to their mouths to eat. Those who hid were stored in cages so tiny that the prisoners resembled nothing so much as balls of flesh … but this made imprisoning them simple since these cages could be stacked on each other. A sufficient bribe at the right moment might mean a prisoner was placed on top of a stack instead of the bottom.

Every prisoner at Barsul knows the condemned never escape, even after death. Their howls and wails float through the halls when night falls, seeking those who do not yet fear enough.

There is no surviving Barsul - there is only enduring it. Those precious few who committed crimes trivial enough to eventually warrant their release emerge and lose their vision in minutes after living in such darkness for so long. They hobble, muscles permanently shortened due to the conditions of their confinement and atrophy. And their hands? Those are the most visible sign of a prisoner sentenced to Barsul. If they still have their fingers, every bone in them was broken and never set, not even by prisoners. The hands of someone freed from Barsul look like the roots of a sickly tree, desperately searching for water.

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An infrequently used path to shortening one’s sentence is to agree to serve as a sorrow-horse for one of Ambaret’s perfumed and puffed up thespians. A few actors a year offer the warden “donations” in exchange for time with a prisoner, hoping to learn to ape the prisoner’s slumped and dejected carriage, begging them to dwell on their deepest sorrows so they may mirror the prisoner’s genuine despair when next they appear on stage.

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If you listen closely you can hear the stone’s whispering their small secrets. For all the blood and filth spilt upon their forms, the stone’s whispers are happy ones. No matter the torture and suffering, the stones know that for a prisoner at Barsul, their daily living misery is as good as its going to get.

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A disgraced monk occupies the most solitary of cells within the prison. Every former cellmate he has had has died with no trace of injury or harm; the other prisoners believe him to be syphoning their life and the common belief is that he has been in the prison for 80 years.

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The length of the internments of murders sentenced to Barsul Prison are determined by the Archdruid of The Rose. The prison stay is equal to the number of years the Archdruid feels were stolen from the victims.

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The cruel joke about Barsul Prison is that the sentences there are the shortest and the longest at the same time. Shortest because the tallest cell is only 12 hands high. Longest because the tallest cell is only 12 hands high.

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The Shivering Cell. There is a cell in Barsul Prison with neither bars nor door, a small, wooden stool with uneven legs and a splintered seat its only furnishing. Every inch of stone in the cell is covered in markings, the signs and symbols and prayers of a thousand former prisoners etched with nails and teeth and bones. None can say whether it is the stool or the carvings that drive prisoners mad–but all, regardless, leave the Shivering Cell shaking and glassy eyed, muttering unintelligible mysteries.

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