Varaar Colosseum
| Type | Arena |
|---|---|
| Ruler | The five gangs |
| Notable sites | The ring, the ground floor, the stable |
| First appearance | Sacred: Eslura's Calling |
The Varaar Colosseum is the arena at the centre of Varaar, where the city's five gangs hold their games. It is the one place the gangs take their prisoners, who are put into the ring against whatever creature has been riled up for them.[1][2]
The building
The colosseum stands in the middle of the canyon city, ringed by a honeycomb of streets and buildings, and it is near enough to every part of Varaar to be around the corner from all of them. Its tiered arches tower hundreds of feet into the air, orange flags jut from its awning, and five great statues stand along the top of its wall with their eyes plated in gold. They are the five gang rulers who put the place up, and Tabitha Glowdish spat on the ground and raised a finger at them.[3]
The ring
The arena is circular and floored in sand, its seats angled down toward the centre. Decorated box seats hold the heads of the five gangs, each under its own sigil engraved in stone above it.[2] Beneath the sand is machinery. A giant rusty crank, dragged out by six of the guards and cranked until the noise makes half the crowd cover their ears, drops away one half of the floor and raises a maze of stone walls out of the sand, complete with pits, spike traps and low archways. The guards go about in full plate with spears about two heads taller than themselves, and the crowd is handed baskets of half-green, half-red fruit to throw.[2]
The ground floor and the stable
The ground floor is stalls and cages with name plates tacked to the bars, and it doubles as the holding area for prisoners.[2] At the back, a stable is joined to the colosseum by a bridge. Its pergonzia stalls are tight, the feed buckets are set beyond the doors out of reach, and the manure goes unmucked in the heat. Aloeissa, a night hopper too large for a stall, was kept there in a cage chained to the wall by a spiked harness rigged so that any movement drove the spikes into her chest.[3]
Government
Varaar was made by its gangs rather than watched over by a Sacred Ruler, and the colosseum is theirs. Tab holds that for all the gangs claim independence they still fall under the Rulers, being part of Eslura like anywhere else.[3][2] Inside the building the gang heads are the whole authority: one of them, draped in orange, opened the games from his box with two claps of his hands and ended them by calling for the beast.[2]
Notable events
- Tabitha Glowdish and Reagan Hideaway broke into the stable through a side window to steal a mount. Tab made a basket of her hands and lifted Reagan to the clasps on the wall, and Reagan clicked them loose one at a time until the harness fell off Aloeissa's chest. A bearded keeper burst in and Tab disarmed him and pushed him out at knifepoint, and the two took a pergonzia and left.[3]
- The Rewakan gang brought Aero Ellisvat and Reagan here from the Avonbourn. Aero was blindfolded and bound in the maze with a lion roaring into a megaphone at him, while Reagan called directions across the arena under a hail of fruit; he came out of the exit as the last sand fell in the timer. The gang head then had Aloeissa loosed on the pair. She recognised Reagan, took them both onto her back and carried them out through the gate into the plaza, while Tab and Fawn shot the guards off them from the second floor.[2]