A branch and the headquarters of the Bleak Cabal.
Head: Factol Lhar
Description: An ancient asylum run by and for the most hopeless sods of Sigil.
Description[]
Located on a slight hill on the very edge of the Hive Ward in Sigil, the massive Gatehouse lies at the end of a curving, elevated road called the Bedlam Run. Once known as the Bedlam Blight, the building’s original function was to house the contagious. Five hundred years ago, the Bleakers took over the asylum, renaming it the Gatehouse (berks in the Hive swear that’s because the building sits at the edge of the Lady of Pain’s Mazes). Since they arrived, the territory surrounding the building’s deteriorated even further, despite the positive influence the faction’s had on the ward.
The central part of the Gatehouse is a tall, semicircular, roofless tower with numerous sprawling wings attached to it. The Bleakers admit to adapting their faction symbol from a design inlaid in the tiled floor of the tower. The entry to the building looks like nothing more than a giant portcullis, but the steel bars are fully 5 feet in diameter. Scholars have long speculated on what the former inhabitants could’ve wanted so desperately to keep out. The size of the gate makes it impossible to move. However, the gaps between the bars are fifteen feet apart, wide enough to allow the thronging poor and the lost inside.
During the last hundred years or so, the Gatehouse has been opened up to the indigent. Outside the headquarters, sods without a coin to their name line the street, waiting for their turn to enter. They’re looking for a hot meal and a bed for a few days before having to return to their slums, and they usually find it in the Almshouse wing of the asylum. But the Gatehouse also holds an orphanage and several different wings for those whose minds have snapped. Many sad parents wait in line with children they can no longer care for, ready to hand them over to the orphanage, and just as many tearful children wait to commit their aging, addle-coved parents to a mental health wing.
Sad fact is, most of the folks who wait patiently to enter the doors are mentally ill. Some seek treatment on their own; others are brought by caretakers as a last resort The Cabal tries to accommodate everyone, but it can only let in 50 sods each day, regardless of which wing they’re directed to. The rest must wait outside, the line of those seeking admittance snaking down the Bedlam Run and back into the Hive. Some parties wait weeks before finally getting inside the tower. Even if a body only wants to ask a Bleaker a few questions, waiting in line is the only way most sods ever get into the Gatehouse. An impatient berk could swap places in line with someone who’s been waiting longer - for the right price. Faction members and friendly high-ups get in without having to wait.
A sharp cutter'll realize that the constant stream of desperate bodies outside the Gatehouse attracts knights of the cross-trade faster than razorvine brings the dabus. Many berks who need muscle for shady jobs here and there just flash a hit of jink, and a dozen hungry sods from the he’ll scramble to sign up. And there’s plenty of peelers looking to cheat a dimwitted body out of his last copper piece.
’Course, that’s not to say that the criminal element is all a body’ll find near the Gatehouse. Bleaker artists canvas the long line of sods, boldly sharing the sour fruits of their introspection with the masses. The atmosphere outside the asylum is often that of a funeral circus, with the latest anguished poems, elegant dirges, and gloomy stunts all battling for a spectator's eye, performed by the Bleakniks.