"Garrond & The Tower"

Historical Basis

During Garrond's Conquest of The Eastern Highlands, the forces under the command of Garrond Lesnik, Kaldari Founding Father found themselves in need a safe place to shelter during the long Kaldari winter. They had heard rumors from Rodnoy that there was ancient ruins nearby belonging to a human culture that was now forgotten. The Rodnoy avoided the ruins and Ancestral Spectres that were said to haunt it, but Garrond's courage was as great as his need, so he gathered a small group of men to ride out to the ruins of Serdrayt and see for themselves if the city could be fortified against the coming winter. Historians are not clear as to what exactly transpired with Garrond in the ruins of the city. All that can be confirmed is that Garrond rode out with forty-eight mean and came back with only six. Neither Garrond nor the six survivors were known to have spoken about what happened in the ruins, but each of them came back changed in some way. Garrond returned with his hair completely white, and with him, he now wielded a beautiful greatsword that glowed with a somber light when it was drawn. This weapon would later be named "Somber Dawn" by the Rodnoy Kzars that swore fealty to the sword's wielder. Garrond then lead the rest of his expedition to the ruins, where they settled with little incident - eventually forming the first citizens of what would be Seryvadrat, Faithful City risen from ruin.

Spread

While rumors certainly spread about Garrond and the fifty men who explored The ruins below Seryvadrat once they returned, it wasn't until after the end of the Kaldari consolidation of [The Eastern Highlands that the story began to take on the first steps of legend and myth. Spread quickly by bards and writers, the story quickly began to break into regional variants - with different versions of the story involving increasingly more imaginative reasons for Garrond's refusal to discuss. The more outlandish and mystical the story, the quicker and more widely the version of the story spread.

Variations & Mutation

Many versions of the story speculate widely on the sort of misfortune Garrond discovered in the ruins. Celestial and Synmatre encounters were the most outlandish and wide-spread, but also significantly less likely. The most grounded and therefore "true" versions of the story tend to relate to various undead creatures or spirits that may have inhabited the ruins before being driven out by Garrond - always at the cost of the lives of forty-four of his men. Other stories instead rely on stoking the flames of Kaldari distate for the Alvain, and invoke treachery and plots involving a mysterious Alvain character named "Indrina", who is not believed by the Alvain to be a real person.

Date of Setting

14,860

Related Ethnicities