The Arena’s Crown: The Great Hades
At the poisoned heart of the Arena rises a structure so vast, so senseless in its ambition, it bends reality around itself—a gargantuan Circus Maximus, chartered centuries ago by the usuprper Yoric I who constracted a the Mad Architect. He called himself Leonidas, imitating a quaint historical legend, , just a title. A man who saw not empire in war or glory, but in spectacle.
This Maximus is not merely an arena. It is a walled city within the slums, enclosing both a robust-sized Colosseum and an adjacent expanse equivalent to three Colosseums in area, where once stood gladiator temples, palaces of bone, and barracks that trained flesh into killers. That space is now an open forum of chaos—half battlefield, half marketplace, one third meat grinder.
The Maximus itself is twice the length of the historical Roman original, its track wide enough to allow fifteen chariots to race abreast. Its four-story tiers, once marbled and majestic, have decayed into suspended slum terraces, their underbellies colonized by the unwanted. These tiers are stacked with makeshift dwellings, scaffolds, and dens, strung together by hemp, rust, and desperation. What once echoed with cheers now drips with sewage. Every gallery is a canyon of rusting pipes and flammable clutter.
The entire structure is now a hollow hive of misery.
Population and Stratification
Roughly 150,000 beings inhabit the Maximus and its immediate surroundings. The southern curve, closest to the older Arena quarters, is mostly human—grimy, desperate, violent, but recognizably mortal. They run the food routes, maintain illicit trade routes to the Outer City, and cultivate rot-farms on rooftops.
But northward, the gene pool warps. These are the Freak Rows—a vertical labyrinth of mutants, beastlings, cursed bloodlines, and post-human revenants. You’ll find limbless prophets suspended in bird cages, entire families fused by birth, warlocks with faces like molten brass, and manglers—once-humans whose limbs twist and regrow with each moon. Pig-faced children, eyeless twins, and sapient mold-colonies ply the alleys like vendors. Entire sections are ruled by hive minds, some fungal, some psychic, all territorial. Here, nature itself has surrendered and taken up new arms.
Mortality is unthinkably high. Violence is constant. Disease is endemic. Structural collapse is seasonal. Firestorms come quarterly. Cults burn each other out monthly. And yet the population grows, fed by a steady stream of the desperate, the exiled, the curious, and the damned.
Function and Madness
No one controls the Maximus. Not anymore.
The Colosseum within it hosts blood sports of every persuasion—from organized gladiatorial leagues to spontaneous riots sold as divine prophecy. The northern lot, the Dead Paddock, is where condemned beings are left loose to fight, breed, or rot, and where soul chemists and pit surgeons harvest what remains.
It is said that once, the Maximus was lit with a thousand lanterns and played music in seven languages. Now, only the drums remain.
And the screaming.