Quoted By:
<span class="mu-s"><span class="mu-b">Winner:</span></span> Blend of Drunk and Professional (Brandy Kicks In)
Naturally, before you can even think about bathing in the thermae, you and Fiona need to cleanse yourselves. That tradition survived the fall of the Gardeners and into the modern day, where it remains a sensible and sanitary practice. You don't enter the public bath covered in the sweat and grime of the day and make a mess of everyone else. Even someone like you, who prefers to bathe in the privacy of your own home, knows that much. After all, there have been times where you simply could not afford to refuse an invitation to the Thermae.
The tower's thermae is set up like any other bathing house of the Gardeners, albeit on a smaller scale than those found upon Caer Stamen.
The entrance of the thermae lay behind a pair of changing rooms, one for men and one for women. Normally, the walls would have been lined with chests or lockers for the bathers to store their clothing, but after being turned into a den of demons the decision was made to burn all of the wood and cleanse the rooms with fire. Now all that remain are the stone shelves up the walls, and the benches where people could sit as they stripped down.
Incidentally, the room you burst into when breaking the cult's hold upon the tower was the men's room. Stonemasons from Eren's clan will be arriving to restore it to its former glory, as for the foreseeable future this tower shall be the base of operations to scour the Briarcrown of the Dark One's taint.
At the end of each room lay a hall for cleansing oneself before entering the thermae, tiled with a pattern of blue roses upon a field of white. Unlike the thermae of Caer Stamen, the showers here are not divided into individual booths. Brass heads jut out from the ceiling, hanging at a height that would have seen your father bump his head. When you first saw them, they had been corroded, but now they've been polished off to a glimmering golden shine, and water once again pours from them like a heavy rain.
Past the showers, a pair of doors lead out into the bath. Above each of them are marked the runic signs you see upon all Gardener bathhouses, so common that even an ignorant girl like you can read them. On the left, the door is marked for the wyf's bath; on the right, the door is marked for mixed bathing.
Naturally, you have no desire to provide a certain heretic with materials for his pornography, so once you've stripped down and showered, you head to the wyf's bath.
The pool reaches all the way to the cliff upon which the tower sits, a series of old khemical runes engraved upon the edge to rebound anyone who might fall out back into the waters. Below, you can see the waters of a nameless lake whose waters should eventually feed into the Ivystem, the river that serves to separate the Rosland from the Daffodil Kingdom. Small islands dot the lake with long fields of trees and grass, old growths that have not seen a human touch for a thousand years at least.
