Alanik - Tainted Hand Capital

Alanik is the capital of the Tainted Hand: a brutalist theocracy built to extract corrupted truth and convert it into law. The city does not feel “lived in.” It feels administered. Streets are narrow and over-shadowed by monolithic, decayed structures that seem designed to silence the body - high walls, blind corners, heavy arches, sealed bridges, and towers that block the sky like verdicts. Every route leads past a checkpoint, a tithe mark, or a ritual threshold. In Alanik, faith is not a comfort; it is a procedure. The economy is indistinguishable from doctrine. Alanik exports silk, sacred paper, and bone incense, materials treated as holy infrastructure. Silk becomes scripture and restraint: woven into ritual tapestries, veils, binding cords, and oath-bands. Sacred paper is manufactured to receive soul-ink seals and self-erasing ciphers, used for trials, decrees, and “memory revisions.” Bone incense burns in vents, braziers, and wall-shrines, saturating districts with a metallic sweetness that clings to skin and makes breathing feel like participation. The city smells like sanctified rot—beautiful, controlled, and wrong. Governance is immediate and visible. Trade points enforce a 10% religious tithe as a public act of submission, often collected under carved arches where scripture is etched into stone so deep it looks like wounds. Heresy doesn’t go to court. It is extracted in ritual chambers, or silenced in alleys that were built to hide screams. During sanctioned vow-weeks, speaking aloud is punished, and the city’s quiet becomes aggressive. Footsteps, cloth movement, and prayer chains replacing conversation. Even the art is hostile: encrypted murals, veiled songs, and Wailing Portraits in civic halls that shriek when a marked heretic draws near. At the heart of Alanik rises the Spiral Sepulcher, a monumental, downward-spiraling sanctum where spiritual infection is studied, weaponized, and “purified” through ritual collapse. Its geometry is deliberate: corridors that repeat, stairs that loop, chambers that feel slightly mis-measured, designed to make visitors lose orientation and eventually certainty. For the faithful, the Sepulcher is proof that suffering has structure. For everyone else, it’s a reminder that the Tainted Hand doesn’t just punish bodies. It edits identity. Alanik produces a specific kind of fear: not the fear of dying, but the fear of being redefined. In this city, memory flows upward into authority, every confession, oath, and failure becoming material the Order can reuse. People don’t disappear in Alanik. They are repurposed. Visual / Atmosphere Anchors: Silk Scripture Infrastructure: huge woven tapestries stretched between buildings like suspended laws; wind makes them “breathe.” Incense Vents + Bone Smoke: thin smoke leaking from wall seams and street grates, marking ritual districts like invisible borders. Tithe Architecture: carved arches and toll-gates where payment is a public ritual, not a transaction. Landmarks / District Hooks: The Tithe Arches: main trade checkpoints; coin + confession collected together. Silken Scripture Mills: looms operated like temples; workers speak in chants or not at all. Black Paper Foundries: sacred paper drying racks like hanging skins; soul-ink stains embedded in floors. The Wailing Gallery: civic corridor of enchanted portraits; silence is enforced by sound itself. Hand-Cleansing Baths: purification stations for Tainted Hand members to delay madness.