Ifreannbéal, The Pit
In modern times, Ifreannbéal is a bustling site of trade and commerce. Much of what can most accurately be called the city itself is built into the walls of a hole several kilometers in diameter, into which airships are constantly descending to land on the upper level of bridges and landing platforms set there. Set in the middle of the nation as it is, one would think that trade would be stifled when most vessels would need to pass Anchorhal, Mordrekain’s main port to the world, to even reach it, but things aren’t quite so simple. Land trade with the various outposts and trading camps throughout the desert often drive up the prices of food and other supplies in the city, making it an attractive stop for merchants to resale goods bought at lower prices elsewhere. Additionally, the city’s vast distance from most seats of governmental power allow it a great deal of legally-gray leeway in terms of getting around trade tariffs and dealing in illegal goods.
As one descends deeper into the Pit, the bridges become more and more commonplace, giving its citizens more real estate and options for crossing from one side of the pit to the other, but also steadily choking out the light the lower one travels. At the very bottom, hundreds of meters below the city’s lowest bridge, there lies the cistern. An unofficial dumping ground and sewer outlet, where the refuse of the city pools together with the water from the desert’s powerful but infrequent rains to create an miasmatic lake of death and decay. Wafts of noxious vapor sometimes drift up from the lake, making life in Ifreannbéal’s bowels both unpleasant and potentially deadly, but distance and surface winds ensure that the city’s upper echelon rarely have to deal with such unpleasantness, and so the matter is left unresolved.
Speaking of the city’s upper echelon, it is a well-known fact that Ifreannbéal is home to one of the most powerful and influential organized crime rings in Mordrekain: The Pit Fiends. Yes, the city has its Underking-appointed Baron and a gnomish Lord , but even they will tell you that it’s the Pit Lord who truly runs things in that place. A shadowy figure known only to the Fiends’ highest-ranking members, the Pit Lord holds Ifreannbéal in an iron grip of fear, favors, and absurd wealth. Law enforcement certainly exists in the Pit - after all, order must be upheld, and the Fiends can’t always be bothered to do it - but any that aren’t cowed by the crime boss’ power are made silent with their wealth… or else turn up floating in the cistern before too long.
In this time of relative peace for the people of the Underkingdom, some wonder why the Underking of the House of Lords haven’t stepped in to try and clear the Pit Fiends from Ifreannbéal by force, perhaps even leveraging the proper military in order to get the job done. The answers to this question are hazy at best. One point that definitely holds weight is that the city is profitable. Immensely so, compared to many of the Underkingdom’s other far-flung holds. While ridding the place of crime might vastly improve the quality of life for many of its citizens, it would also rob the Underkingdom of one of its greatest sources of income behind the capital itself.
Some also argue that the city acts as a sort of magnet for crime, drawing in many would-be gangsters to join the existing strength of the Pit Fiends rather than attempting to form something of their own somewhere else. One of the branches of the Underkingdom government would surely get involved if the Fiends began noticeably operating outside of Ifreannbéal, that much is certain, but so long as they stay centrally located, some law enforcement officials seems to believe they serve to lower the crime rate elsewhere.
The final and most rarely-spoken of the potential causes of the government’s lax attitude towards the fiends is also the most straightforward: The Pit Lord must have something on the Underking and the Lords themselves. With so little being known about the Pit Lord, it’s easy to come up with all manner of wild theories as to who they might be and what they might know. Secrets are just one of the many commodities the Fiends deal in, and it doesn’t take much information to start building theories about the kinds of secrets that could take down a king’s entire lineage or divide the House of Lords against itself. The Fiends who are willing to speak on the matter are coy when it comes to who they do or do not have under their thumb, and few have managed to meet the Pit Lord and live - let alone discuss what sort of damning information they might have on figures of political power - so for the time being, these remain little more than whispered theories.
History
The Underkingdom in constantly expanding. From the mining out of new tunnels and holds to the discovery of existing caverns, the joined forces of the dwarves and gnomes are continually generating new towns, trading posts, and waystations within the web-like network beneath the ground. Of course, sometimes, when one of these new cities is being built, accidents happen. Ifreannbéal is one of those accidents.
The city now colloquially known as ‘The Pit’ has its roots in the dwarven practice of coring mountains. In an effort to create holds with no entrances to the surface world - and thus no security risks from the outside that won’t announce themselves with digging efforts - expeditionary teams will sometimes tunnel beneath a mountain from somewhere in the Underkingdom network and simply dig upward. Assuming they charted their progress correctly, this practice leads to a mountain that has been laboriously hollowed out from within, while leaving no signs of construction from the outside. As you might expect, this process requires incredibly precise navigation to ensure that the coring team digs in the right spot. After all, when the navigator for a crew like this gets their coordinates wrong, you end up with something like Ifreannbéal.
Led off-course by faulty tools and existing tunnels that didn’t appear on their charts, the team that created the hole that would become Ifreannbéal were aiming for a sizable peak on the border of Mordrekain’s continent-spanning mountain range and its expansive southern desert, hoping to create a new gate into the Underkingdom from the very heart of that harsh, dry region. When they missed, their coring efforts ended early as their machines and miners cracked through sandstone and were met with a deluge of thousands of pounds of sand. The death toll was relatively low for how many unfortunate souls were on site when the surface bared down upon them, but the cost in injured workers, damaged machinery, and effort wasted on an incorrect dig site put the contractors in charge of the construction efforts in quite a bind. The backers of this particular dig were rich, influential, and not known for their scruples. There was no chance of a take two on this one.
It was an incredible gamble, but the contractors decided to gather what workers they still had and try to continue the project from a different angle. Instead of being a more standard hold, naturally protected within the confines of a mountain, the city would be open to the air. The hole they’d made in the desert - helpfully situated in a rather defensible crook in the mountains - was widened considerably, and a sturdy wall was built to close it into the mountains. The pitch the backers received was that the city would be an inland airship port, able to receive ships directly into the very center of the city for the ultimate in shipment security and surveillance.
It was a hard sell, and several of the contractors involved did the next best thing to selling their souls to keep their contracts, but the funding stream continued and construction on the hole in the ground that would come to be called Ifreannbéal continued.
Art by Kate Miterko
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