Kassædeia (Cas-Say-Dee-Uh)
The former capital city of the Elflands Empire. Founded more than four thousand years ago when elves first left the Golden Forests, the Elflands turned it into the cultural and economic capital of its empire. Cheap labor from the colonized races allowed for a building spree in recent decades, but the New Year’s Massacre of 897 left the city a wasteland of violence and chaos with hundreds of thousands forced to flee the Sunken God and his sahuagin horde. The city still remains under Elflands control, but with tens of thousands of elven ghosts haunting its streets the city has become a grim monument for elven hubris and grief.
Demographics
- 97% Elven
History
The ancestral homeland for the Elfland's elves was Henriad in the Golden Forests, but the Empire's capital moved to Kassædeia for its central location and direct access to the Karaga Ocean. The town was founded as the Empire's first trading post outside of the Golden Forests by its founder Emperor Laertes I (064, 3rd Cycle - 629, 3rd Cycle), and a millennium of trade and conquest would turn it into the wealthiest city in the world.
With subsistence laborers from the Empire's conquered territories, high-rise buildings and dazzling vistas were constructed out of solid gold and metal to make the capital gleam in the sunrise. The spoils of war were stored in the Elflands' Imperial Library and Royal Treasury, enough riches to tempt any thief worth their mettle if the capital's defenses weren't so imposing.
Perhaps it was this hubris that led to the capital's total destruction in the New Year's Massacre of 897. The city hadn't been besieged in over two thousand years by the time of the Character Revolution of 896, allowing Character agents to exploit the city's aging infrastructure and storm the city during the chaos and bustle of New Year's Day. The Sunken God took this opportunity as well to seize the city for itself, summoning a horde of sahuagin from the sewers that massacred the city's elven population and established a reign of terror that lasted for nearly a year. Elves fled to all corners of the world to flee the violence, while tens of thousands were massacred in the city in a matter of weeks. As the reign of terror stretched into months and the death toll reached into the hundreds of thousands, a disturbing phenomenon began in Kassædeia and spread to the outlying suburbs: elven ghosts appeared in the tens of thousands, haunting the streets and ruined buildings and going about mundane tasks as though no massacre had ever occurred.
Many hoped that the spirits would disappear with the Sunken God's defeat, but even after the Battle of Kassædeia in the winter of 897 thousands of ghosts still haunted the ruined city. Elven scholars concluded that there were too many elven souls in the world and not enough elven bodies to contain them, meaning theses ghosts would be stuck in Kassædeia until global elven populations returned to pre-Sunken God levels.
With the Treaty of Iverburg in 898, the Elflands Empire was dismantled and the kingdom's capital moved to the ancestral city of Henriad. Kassædeia became a city-sized graveyard, vestals and priestesses from the temple of The Ageless One tending to the ruins and praying over the thousands of spirits to stop them from corrupting into undead monsters. Efforts were made to recover artifacts and ancient literature from the ruins of buildings like the Imperial Archives, but researchers had to contend with the hordes of thieves and looters swarming on the city in hopes of finding treasures. Kassædeia would never return to its former greatness, but the people of the Elflands hoped that it would one day be put to rest.
RUINED SETTLEMENT
897, 4th Cycle
Type
City
Included Locations
Owning Organization
Characters in Location
Related Reports (Primary)
Related Reports (Secondary)
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