Noggin Hall

Noggin Hall is a rock-cut shrine in the Portside neighborhood of Saltgate. Originally a temple to Athena, it was abandoned and shrouded in mystery by the end of the First Age. But when a Calamity brought a fresh batch of refugees to Eden in 114 and a trio of Earthling sisters took shelter inside the temple, the purpose of the place would change for good and all.

Purpose / Function

Over the years of its existence, Noggin Hall has served four distinct functions:

1. During the First Age of Eden, it served as a house of worship.
2. From 114–135, the family of Melinda Ursula Faulkner called it home.
3. Following the death of Melinda and her sisters in 135, it became a shrine to them.
4. In 263, following the coronation of Frieda Jacobs as the first Queen of Hearts, the building was given its current purpose: to serve as a gallery for severed heads magically turned to stone.

For more about these distinct phases, see “History” below.

Architecture

The building was modeled after plans found in the Edenian Athenæum for an early-Romanesque church found in the city of Hildesheim, Germany in some iterations of reality. It features a cruciform ground plan with a long nave flanked an aisle on either side. The altar sits beneath a domed aspe.

History

The cavern that would become Noggin Hall was found almost by accident. The first settlers of Nymph’s Neck, the peninsula upon which the city of Saltgate would be built, were camped along rocky southern shore when they caught side of a faint blue light slipping through a crack in the cliffs. They had no equipment for excavating with them, so they had to leave and come back. But come back they did.

Once the cavern was excavated, those early settlers decided this was the perfect place to build a temple. Trouble was that they couldn’t decide which of their gods to dedicate it to. Poseidon seemed the most logical answer, given their proximity to the sea, but there more than a few among them who were devotees of Athena instead. She’d seen fit to give them the wisdom to carve this place, and they swore the mysterious blue light of the place was making them wiser by the minute. And so, the conflicts over Nymph’s Neck began.

The Athena worshippers eventually drove the Poseidon worshippers out onto the Sea of Tears. Then, they got to work on building the temple as they saw fit. Of course, it wasn’t long before the sea god’s people were back with an army, which meant that construction halted for a bit. And then there was the Horde War, which drove everyone away for a spell. But eventually, by the end of the First Age, Athena had herself a temple.

Then, everyone went ahead and disappeared—everyone but the halflings, who worshipped other gods entirely.

By the dawn of the Second Age, when human beings had returned to Eden, the building was abandoned. Melinda Faulkner and her sisters only entered the old temple because it was the closest shelter they could find from the storm which had brought them here. Already in the grips of Edenian Amnesia, they didn’t understand what the place was and didn’t think twice about using it for their own ritual. And it was that violation which gave new life to the long dormant Athena.

Athena tried to curse the sisters to get them to leave, but it didn’t work. Soon, they were using the powers given by the curse to make ends meet—doling out justice to the unfaithful and offering grace to those who were truly penitent. Only an attack by a Headless Horseman could undo all that they had done. But even then, Melinda’s daughter was too fierce for that fiend and it took Athena’s intervention to put a stop to the girl’s rage.

For a time after that, the temple stood empty. Then, when Melinda's daughter married the young king, she took it upon herself to make a shrine out of the place she, her mother, and her aunts had once called home.

In 263, Frieda Jacobs—a descendant of Melinda’s—discovered that the severed head of her ancestor had been preserved in a hidden compartment of the hall, even though the rest of her body had long since turned to dust. She also learned that the magic of Melinda’s eyes had persisted even after death—and that, luckily, the immunity to said gaze had passed down through the generations. And so, Frieda decided to put that magic to good use by preserving the heads of both the wonderful and the wicked in a shrine dedicated to the history of the city she now called home.

Type

Shrine

Parent Location

Portside