Thralgand
East and south of Candleman's Gap, the Dark Needle Forests of the Old Green Hills stretch over high ground and valley alike in league after league of broken, cold and largely inaccessable ground, interrupted by a few rivers flowing from the north. Deep in the heart of this secretive land, lies the hamlet of Thralgand, a tiny yet relatively sophisticated outpost of human settlement hidden in the wilderness. It is home to a small group of distant exiles from the Kingdom of Han.
Thralgand is built around a monastery on the western bank of the Thral stream, shown in the header image. The monastery is by far the largest building in the hamlet and almost a third of the inhabitants, live and work within its walls. Of the rest, there are four farming families, who scratch out a living in the cleared ground that rises behind the stone centre of worship, with poultry, pigs and a small area of arable land where they grow a thin kind of grain that can be ground for flour. Three more families are specialist hunters who trap game in the forest to provide the community with limited supplies of meat, mainly a variety of forest rabbit and sometimes deer.
The monks contribute to Thralgand's welfare, in the keeping of hives of great orange resin bees that drink the acidic sap of the hardy evergreens when it drizzles from the trunks in summer and turn it into a delicious honey. There are two small orchards in a courtyard inside the monastery which yield enough precious apples and pears to provide some fruit for all throughout the winter. The monastery also keeps goats and the monks make cheese from their milk. They brew a weak ale, favoured with pine seeds.
The monks are highly skilled in carpentry and they build in the community as well as in the monastery itself.
History
Thralgand was established two hundred years ago, when a group of heretical monks from the Water Temple broke away from orthodox teaching and travelled into exile, far in the west and north of Laurasia where they could not be found.
Comments