#148 The Wheel (Aeon Bay Prison)

Age: 400 years

Hidden or Lost?: No

History: For centuries the jailers at Aeon Bay Prison have claimed to be able to reform even the most deranged convicts and criminals, but very few inmates have ever been known to survive a single turn on the ‘Wheel.’

Aeon Bay Prison is better known to most simply as ‘The Wheel’ thanks to its unique configuration. The prison is built around the edge of a deeply sunken bay and a half-ring of rocky tower islands that jet up from the waters below. Inmates sent to the Wheel progress through a series of holding facilities arrayed in a circle around the rim of the prison’s borders, often spending years to complete their sentence (if they survive at all).

The first stop for most inmates is a simple cube of metal bars atop the nearest island tower known as the Cleansing Cages. Open to the winds and freezing sea spray, inmates are left among the exposed cages until they perish or submit to the Omniwarden, an all seeing aeon of justice. The Omniwarden is said to roost in the central Panopticrown, which oversees the entire prison, although none have ever actually laid eyes on the being.

From the Cleansing Cages inmates move through a series of ever-crueler holding locations during their sentence. There is The Cords, a collection of tall coffin-like cells that force inmates to stand for days or weeks on end until their muscles and spirits atrophy. Then there is the Market of the Lash, a comparatively comfortable jail, where everything from food to sleep to words themselves come at the price of licks from the guards’ barbed whips. Or there are the mysterious Solitaries, five isolated cells that are said to hold immortal inmates too powerful or cruel to be broken.

Those few who manage to survive a trip around the Wheel are given a choice: they can either walk free and return to the world or they can take up residence in Absolution, the small village that acts as both the first and last stop for the prison. Populated by bully gangs of roving guards and blank-eyed reformers so traumatized by their trip around the Wheel that they now live as unthinking thralls to the Omniwarden, Absolution is a hellish prison all its own.

The most anyone ever sees of the Wheel are the rehabilitated zombies populating Absolution, but the cruel crimes within the prison continue on unseen.