Rainoga

The Water Queen’s House, Baldur’s Gate’s oldest and most foreboding temple, is dedicated to the Bitch Queen Umberlee. Anchored to a decrepit pier on the harbor’s edge, the structure appears less a place of worship and more a barnacle-crusted threat—its barnacled stone and weeping salt-stained walls descending into the brackish depths. Led by the cold and commanding Allandra Grey, the temple’s waveservants are reclusive and feared, composed mostly of women shaped by loss at sea. Offerings are made with caution; few dare cross its threshold. Worshippers ring a salt-rusted bell and present tribute at the door, where the waveservants enact brief rites before vanishing again into the damp shadows. No one outside the temple knows what becomes of the riches—some whisper of submerged hoards, others of divine consumption beneath the waves.

Gulls circle and shriek above the temple’s listing pier, their cries swallowed by the crash of waves below. The Water Queen’s House rises like a rotted tooth from the sea, its stonework slick with algae and wrapped in tangled nets, fish bones, and iron windchimes that clatter like distant screams. The air reeks of salt and decay, thick with the cold mist of the crashing surf. A titanic fountain shaped like a half-sunken galley dominates the pier’s end, gushing water high into the air only to fall in curtains that slap against slick stone. The main doors are adorned with barnacles and weathered depictions of drowned sailors. Few people linger near; the wind here cuts sharper, and even the river seems to flow slower, darker, as though wary of what lies beneath.