Hthumos

Hthumos is a city along the northern part of Errid Kaloum.

Background
A small town lies at the confluence of the Salter and Eviet Rivers as they come down out of the Clock of Kala. The town, Hthumos, surrounds a tall castle of dark grey stone. The community takes its name from the castle, which in turn takes its name from its depraved ancestral residents.

The Hthumos family were wealthy nobles who lord over the surrounding land and its people and treat them (and often each other) with trickery and cruelty. They make sport of hunting peasants and rule capriciously, freeing murders from the dungeon and sentencing innocents to toil in the mills for imagined slights. The nobles maintain their control through dark-armored soldiers called terror-hounds, whose collars artificially induce physical pleasure when the wearer inflicts pain or causes fear.

The current head of the house is Hesterin Hthumos, a mutant albino with a conjoined twin brother named Sterrick. The brother is little more than a head and a hand with tendril-like fingers on Hesterin's torso.However, he's fully conscious, aware, and intelligent. Years ago, when local chiurgeons said that Sterrick would likely die and be surgically removed, Hesterin refused. Instead, she spent a great deal of her family's wealth scouring the world for numenera that would save her brother, for whom she had unnatural affections. This quest eventually bore fruit, and now Sterrick is encased in an iron helmet that keeps him alive on his sister's body - a woman that, by all accounts, he despises.