Lore & history

The story of the realm so far, as the Marchfolk tell it around the hearth of the Crooked Lantern.

Vael, the green kingdom

Long before Thornwick, the land north of the King's Road was Vael: a rich kingdom of wheat fields, orchards and slow rivers, ringed by friends. The elves of Silverbough traded songs and silver-wood to its west; the dwarves of the Ironroot Halls traded iron to its east; the halflings of the Mossdown grew its best ale. Its kings were buried in great barrows on the hills, each with a ring of standing stones to keep them company.

The king who would not die

The last king of Vael was Corvane. In his fortieth year a wasting sickness took him, and when Veyra's lantern came to guide him to his rest, he refused it.

Instead he went down into the barrow of his ancestors, past the burial chamber, down a stair no one remembered building, to the thing that lives beneath the hills. No one knows what it is. The Duskborn call it the hunger. Corvane bargained with it: a life for a life, and then another, and then another. He sat back on his throne in the barrow, and he lived.

His kingdom did not. Over the next seven years the fields turned to grey heather, the rivers to black bog, the orchards to dead sticks. The people sickened and faded, and many of the dead did not stay dead. The elves call those years the Withering. When it was done, the green kingdom was the Greyveil Moors, and Corvane had become something without a heartbeat or a name: the Hollow King.

The seven locks

The gods could not reach him; he was beyond their kind of death. So their champions went instead, one sworn to each of the six gods of that age, with Silverbough elves and Ironroot dwarves at their side. They fought their way into the barrow, through the dead that had been Vael's people, to the empty throne.

They could not kill the Hollow King, because there was no life left in him to end. So they drove him down the hidden stair, back to the hunger he had bargained with, and sealed it behind an iron grate with seven locks: six blessed by the six gods, and a seventh forged by Corvane's own daughter, Princess Ysolde, who gave her life to make it.

Some of the elves went down the stair with the champions and did not come back for months. When they did, they were grey-skinned and silver-eyed and would not say what lay below. Their children are the Duskborn.

The seventh god

A god is whatever enough people pray to. In the three centuries since the sealing, enough people have prayed to the Hollow King in fear that he has become one: He Who Waits, the seventh and youngest god, worshipped by no one sane. The cult of the Hollow Crown prays to him openly now, wearing crowns of iron wire, and their Deacon preaches his return in the catacombs beneath Thornwick's own temple.

The March and the lanterns

The survivors of Vael built Thornwick at the edge of the moors as a watch-town, a march, to make sure nothing came out. Their descendants, the Marchfolk, have kept that watch for three hundred years. Every night they light the iron lanterns in Lantern Square and along the walls in Veyra's name, so that the dead of the moors know where they are not welcome.

The lanterns burn low these days. Oil is dear since the roads closed. And the old folk say the dead walk more often than they did.

The world now

• The rot. Twenty years ago a sickness appeared in Silverbough's oldest grove: trees rotting from the inside, dryads gone mad. The elves sealed their great gate with a spell and a message: closed until the rot is ended. No one in the March has seen Silverbough since.
• The rockslide. Last spring, the mountain fell on the road to Ironroot Hold. The dwarves stranded on this side blame ore-goblins, who now hold the old mines under a warchief named Grukk. The goblins, when anyone asks, blame something digging up from below.
• The wreckers. On the coast south of Saltmere, gangs hang false lanterns on the cliffs to lure ships onto the rocks, an insult to Veyra that makes the Saltborn spit. They have a hideout somewhere in the sea caves, and something worse in the grotto beyond.
• The Night of Falling Stars. Forty years ago the Vesperi came down out of the night sky, fleeing a realm that went dark. They settled among the lanterns of Thornwick and do not talk about what put out their sky. Some wonder whether it was hungry.
• The cold stair. Beneath the barrow on the moors, behind the empty throne, the seven locks are rusting. The draft coming up through the grate gets colder every year. Some say three of the locks have already rusted through.

The seven gods

The Marchfolk honor six gods in three pairings, Light, Balance and Dark, and fear a seventh. Most adventurers choose a patron when they first arrive; Priests and Oathsworn must.

The Light

The Balance

The Dark

The peoples

Ten peoples share the March. Their stories are on the Races page.

Places

Every town and region has its own history; see The world.