The Abbey of Rubblefort

The Abbey of Rubblefort

The Abbey is the current investment of the lawful good faith, and in truth, in many places, this faith is in decline and retreat. This is especially true for the town of Rubblefort, and for the entire region. It's not just religion in retreat, it's civilization that's being pushed back. The abbey is the largest building in Rubblefort, and when not being used for religious ceremonies, it doubles as the town hall, and emergency shelter when there is a threat to the town. The abbey is made from stone, old durable stone, while most of the rest of the town has some stonework, most of the buildings are stick and board built.

Economics are relatively simple, a large degree of subsistence agriculture, supplemented by the monks of the abbey as they are engaged in the profitable trades of stone milling, making liquor and wine, and curing things like cheese, sausage, and the like. There is also a passable amount of trade in traffic that moves through Rubblefort, though this tends to be a one-way flow as people are trying to take back some of the region's lost ground, recover lost cities, lost treasures, pioneer new settlements, and the like. It is minimal, not enough to attract tax collectors from the distant crown that places Rubblefort in its domain and scarce little more attention from the faith itself.

The Past

Rubblefort wasn't always Rubblefort. Before that, it was Castle Carswick. Carswick sat as the southern gate of the region, and had two sister citadels in the north, Cunningford and Goodbridge. The region was scourged by seven dread trials, and through these trials Cunningford was leveled, and Goodbridge remains deeply and profoundly haunted. The cities and towns were emptied by those fleeing the trials, or those who sought to stand against them and dying, their survivors scattered into starvation or hiding. Castle Carswick held fast, and the trials moved no further. The castle was destroyed and was stricken from the lists of fortification. It remained a great heap of rubble, with a few partial walls and the abbey surviving. It became known as the rubble fort, and then as people resettled around the abbey, they adopted the name Rubblefort,

The First Acting Abbot of Rubblefort

Brother Olyvar Meadows was the senior surviving member of the abbey at Carswick, and indeed, was the senior surviving member of the castle residents. It fell on his wide shoulders, round belly, and bulging knees the fate of the Abbey and of the people who survived the Last Battle of Carswick. The other survivors raised Olyvar to Acting Abbot and placed him in charge. The man did the best he could, and there were many problems facing him. The weather was turning, so retreat was cut off, the pass that Carswick guarded was not an easy one. The trials remained, broken and defeated, but still a menace. The Last Battle of Carswick had ended in a draw, with both sides technically losing. The Trials lost their leadership, the castle was felled, and the champions were broken. But both sides survived, shadows of their former might.

Meadows knew three things: stonemasonry, food, and telling stories.

To this end, he set up what he could to get the food supply working again. The cellars under Carswick were intact, and the Abbey used them for storage, and it was found that the new underground climate was ideal for aging cheese, sausage, and barrels of beer, brandy, and much smaller casques of a rough sort of local whiskey.

He also organized work gangs to clear the rubble, repair a few of the walls, and the lone surviving tower into a look out. This recovered stone was used to build the floors and lower walls of the new town of Rubblefort, including some stone fences for sheep paddocks and runs to bring the animals in for sheering, or milking.

He did all this while telling stories, listening to people, and putting their fears to rest as best he could. More people joined the abbey, new monks were raised, and a messenger was sent to the nearest cathedral of the faith, informing them that the Abbey at Rubblefort remained, and they would be delighted to accept the appointment of a new abbot, especially if it were the raising of brother Olyvar Meadows, for his exceptional service to the faith, and the new community.

The faith sent an emissary and a new abbot to take over things at Rubblefort, and this caused quite the stir.

Because it was almost seventeen years after the call of Carswick, and acting Abbot Meadows had been in the crypt of the abbey for almost a year and a half.

The Second, and Third Abbots.

The Second Acting Abbot was none other than good mistress Annari Wendwood. She was a good deal older than Meadows, but she was in better health and less affected by the stress of the position she took. It was said that a man could watch a year pass in a season on Meadow's broad and genial face. Wendwood had been a sister of the Abbey almost her entire life and was as cunning and wry as she was old and dry.

The new abbot from the faith was nothing like either of the previous position holders. He was a young man, hot under the collar and incensed by his posting to Rubblefort, and that the position itself had been allowed to decay to such a point that a bony old crone was left the hold the title of Acting Abbess. Abbott Jares Vypren was a highly problematic person in the distant city of some great importance. He had escaped a number of obligations, mostly those of a military nature, and of a noble's duty. He had no desire to go and ride under a banner against some mongrel foe and possibly die on a hobgoblin's spear or a bugbear's club, and by no means would he end up in an orc's cook pot. He joined the clergy, abstaining from the use of the sword or spear. Then came the issue of his duty as a noble son, and he had less interest in being leashed to some third-rate backcountry viscount's prize sow of a daughter so that he might sweat and thrust upon her until she gave him some screaming children to loathe.

No, fair and handsome Jares Vypren styled himself as a rake. He dabbled in occult studies, the inner mysteries so that he might gain a glimmer of magical power, and alas, found none. He ascended into an administrative position, and thence made a scandal of himself. The handsome Vypren was quite fond of cuckolding many senior husbands with their much younger wives and ended up getting a few with child.

There was a choice to be made. Vypren could not be allowed to stay, nor could he be treated as a criminal as he was both a noble son and a member of the clergy. He was given the option, he could accept a lateral promotion to head abbot and be sent far away, or he could choose to stay but he would be gentled, and put into atonement for a year and a day. He almost chose to stay until he learned what being gentled meant, and decided between keeping his testicles attached to his body or moving to Rubblefort, he quickly chose the latter.

Thus, when Abbot Vypren arrived at Rubblefort, he was in a sour disposition. He also had a small entourage of mostly men who were part his followers, and part his minders. He immediately turned Acting Abbess Wendwood out of her role and told her to go home and not trouble her lady brain with such serious and dire matters as leadership. Wendwood bowed, and many locals considered her dry smile that of the hangman counting out the knots in the noose and taking a measure of the man before deciding how much rope to give him.

Vypren turned the original dwelling of the abbot into storage and started looking for a proper seat to live in. And he found one, a run-down rural manor house nearly an hour's ride from Rubblefort. He had no intention of living in the shanty town and made it known that he would remain at this new country estate unless duties at the abbey required his personal attention. When the locals warned him of the Trials and that they were not gone, he scoffed at them and their backward bumpkin ways.

The Trials

The locals refer to twenty years of demi-human incursion and displacement as simply the Trials.

The First Trial - the invasion of the goblin Night Hag clan. The clan was driven over the northern mountains as they found fighting humans easier than fighting whatever was pushing them south. They had no night hags, or any hags for matter, in their ranks. Rather, they had a strong tradition of goblin maidens following mystic traditions and acting as spellcasters in service to the warbands. Though the incursion was defeated, the clan settled into the swamps and mires north of Castle Goodbridge and would remain a menace in the region.

The Second Trial - the Keurok Incursion was smaller than the Night Hag clan, but was at times more dangerous. The Keurok were ogres, dozens of them, and they moved in a tight band. Like the Night Hags, they were being pushed out of the north. They smashed the defenses at Goodbridge, sacked several farms, and put a few towns to flame before the heroes of Cunningford and Goodbridge rallied and broke them near the Cairn Stones. This scattered the ogres, and ended them as a single cohesive force. But, being allowed to scatter, they found dark and remote places, and they did what ogres do, they hunted and they made more ogres.

The Third Trial - The Black Host is a common enough name to describe an organized, regimented, armed and equipped fighting force operating under a strong warlord/warlock. The Black Host was a military invasion from the northlands and it was a multi-racial force of predominantly orcs, but included chained bugbears, hobgoblins, goblins, and other conscripted or enslaved races. This was the force that drove the previous two incursions south, as they were trying to escape the Host and its promise of enslavement to a dark lord. The battles lasted two years, Goodbridge was besieged for most of it, and it was only an alliance of the free cities, including Carswick that allowed the heroes to carry the day and drive back the black host. This was not without cost, as the host claimed the northernmost stronghold in the region, the fortress Starfall. The Black host would fall back and reorganize, as its warlord and cadre of warlocks had been badly depleted during the fighting. The head of Warlord Kassran Bloodfist was put on a spike over the main gate at Cunningford, with his blood and shit smeared banner dangling beneath it.

The Fourth Trial - Ermac Stonefist led a new dark host through the pass at Starfall with the intent of breaking Goodbridge and taking the north and opening the way for his forces to cross the Goode River into the middle and south of the region. His host was made of goblins, dark dwarves, chained ogres, chained trolls, and worst of all, he commanded a feral demon thing that appeared like a cervine version of a minotaur, but the size of a giant. Goodbridge fell. Stonefist took the castle, slaughtered the defenders, butchered all the men and boys for the cook pots, and the surviving women were sent north clapped in iron and shame.

Ermac's forces attempted a break out into the middle country after taking the winter to reorganize and reinforce from the northern regions. This gave the humans of Cunningford time to prepare and the Battle of Bolhil Fields was a massacre. All of Ermac's forces were foot and heavy infantry. The men of Cunningford attacked with mounted archers, then heavy cavalry. The host was broken on the field, and the Cunningford Order of the Obelisk mages sent fire and flame into the breaking ranks. The great cervine-headed giant was turned to gleaming white stone, and when it toppled, it broke into dozens of pieces. Most of these pieces were looted, but the great then antler-less head was dragged back to Cunningford where it was left as a trophy near the gate. Ermac himself was taken captive and made a prisoner in the dungeon under Cunningford.

The Fifth Trial - following Ermac's defeat, the dark dwarf was questioned, tortured, and questioned again about who and what he represented, and it was there that the High Lord of Cunningford learnt of the Queendom north of his borders, in a land they thought as desolate and empty. Far to the north was the boreal Queendom, almost an arctic empire, of Praxingdrell. The region was supposed to be an easy win, weakening all of the human kingdoms of the Greenlandis. Instead, they had proven to be something of a meat grinder. The Fifth Trial came as the invasion of the Bleeding Eye. It would be the first proper military force, Praxingdrell centaur knights, and the hosts of the not quite human but not not-humans of Praxingdrell. They were clad in black steel, carried starlight enchanted weapons, and the legions of burnished armored soldiers and knights were supported by two full clans of boreal barbarians, the Clan of the Midnight Bear (a darkly luminous supernatural monster of the extreme north) and the Clan of the Glowing Fang (a type of dire northern wolf)

Goodbridge, recently retaken, would hold out against this force for little more than a month-long siege before the defenders staged a strategic retreat. The bridge itself was destroyed with alchemist munitions, delaying the Praxingdrell army's advance. The following year, a series of running battles and skirmishes were fought with the defenders falling back towards Cunningford, where elaborate defenses were being prepared. The siege of Cunningford would last almost two years. Magi used their power to move people and supplies between Cunningford and Carswick, as well as the Order of the Obelisk exacting a heavy price from the Praxingdrell army. The Praxingdrell levied their own ruinous toll. Any humans captured were taken as slaves. Those deemed suitable to whatever the Praxingdrell looked for were sent away in chains, and the rest were either conscripted into slave labor, or were rendered down into boiled meat, powdered bone, and fat for Praxingdrell lamps and candles.

The Battle of Buxning Hill marked the end of the siege of Cunningford. A human army had organized at Carswick and marched north, swinging around the western flank of the Praxingdrell forces, and taking them in the rear. The battle was bloody and vicious. At the end of the horrific ordeal, the Carswick army held the hill, and the surviving Praxingdrell forces had organized a retreat. The Carswick forces pursued the Praxingdrell army back to Goodbridge, and the running battles of attrition had reduced the fighting strength of the northern invaders to the point that they were forced to withstand their own besieging.

The Sixth Trial - The Dreadlord Nimrazeonne was the first Praxingdrell royal to enter the fray, and she brought her personal guards, the Witchlords of the Ruinous Stair, as well as more Praxingdrell soldiers, and the boreal barbarian clan of the Ice Harpies. The High Lord of Cunningford had sued for aid from the distant monarchy, old pacts with the dwarves, with the elves, with anyone who could put swords and spears on the field. The Praxingdrell force broke out of Goodbridge with ease, and the retreat to Cunningford was a running disaster for the human forces. The castle fell after a brutal six-week siege, and though half of the Witchlords of the Ruinous Stair were killed, the entire Order of the Obelisk was wiped out and their libraries looted or burned.

While still engaged with the human defenders at Cunningford, Nimrazeonne struck south to make an attempt to seize Carswick and cut off the human's line of supply. Then the remaining human forces would be easier to starve out and defeat. They were proving a difficult foe even with two of their three great castles gone. It was in the defense of Carswick that the humans broke the Praxingdrell assault. The Lord of Carswick was a bear of a man and was a rune blade. Armed with a great axe emblazoned with a magic eating rune, Lord Goetham Carswick lead the charge into the Praxingdrell host where he slew four of the five remaining Witchlords of the Ruinous Stair, a dozen bodyguards and then managed to hack off Nimrazeonne's right arm. She retreated with sorcerous power, leaving her southern forces leaderless and with one witchlord, bereft of magical support.

Nimrazeonne retreated to her mother, the Empress Praxingdrell, missing an arm, with a sucking chest wound, and a leg barely attached to her body, and made her report. The Empress had Nimrazeonne healed of her wounds, and she was allowed to commit ritual suicide before her mother for the depth of her failure and the loss of so many witchlords. The Empress had Nimrazeonne bound as a ghost and she remains as a functionary within the Royal Palace beneath the Sunless Sky.

The Seventh Trial - with the north and central part of the region now infested with goblins, hobgoblins, trolls, ogres, and worse, the work of retaking Cunningford was a heroic effort. Regular raids were sent north to harass the forces of darkness from consolidating their hold over Goodbridge. Racism became a thing, because the waxy pallid men of the Praxingdrell could cross with normal humans, and when the host of the north broke, some remained behind, they might set up a farmstead with a few human slaves, or a Praxingdrell war maiden, maimed and unable to fight, might have offered herself as a spoilsbride to a human, all but making herself a slave in exchange for food and shelter. A lot of people who were too pale, or had hair too white or too black were murdered. Sometimes their companions faced the same.

Then came Tipophon, the Consuming Flame. The dragon was as vast as night, and her breath was darkling flame. The dragon came not along, but with a dread contingent like no other. Two dreadlords attended, the ladies Vaghollaelle and Hagludris. Both were terrifying sorceresses in their own might. They were attended by the Dreadwives of Iron Chains coven and the Daughters of Splintered Ice coven. Were this not enough, the Empress herself attended. High Queen Dracothaelle Praxingdrell, Empress of the Endless Night, Queen of the Sunless Sky, First Wife of the God of Night, Queenpriestess of the Tempestuous Deathless Shadow, herself came. How could she not, as tradition had demanded that her first and most prized daughter, Nimrazeonne, had been forced to commit suicide before the Imperial Court. There would be a fucking reckoning for these insultingly audacious humans.

Vaghollaelle and the Dreadwives of Iron Chains laid an indescribably foul curse on Goodbridge. All within were immediately slain, their bodies blowing apart in showers of gore. Their souls were trapped, twisted, and turned into tortured ghosts left to inhabit the ruin of their castle. Vaghollaelle had been very fond of her sister, and this was her punishment.

Hagludris and the Daughters of Splintered Ice drew their power together and cast a legendary spell, Hellecaraxe, the Curse of Grinding Ice. Castle Cunningford was pressed beneath the mass of a glacier that moved twenty feet a day. Within a week, the entire castle was reduced to gravel and sand beneath relentless ice. Kassran Bloodfist had been a paramour of Hagludris, and she recovered his skull before annihilating the fortress.

The Empress rode Tipophon, the greatest of her dragons, in a blitz attack against Carswick. All the might and magic of the Praxingdrell empire fell against the castle with the irresistible might of a falling star. The remaining lords and defenders of humanity had not been idle. The last weapons and desperate plans had been made, final calls for aid had been sent, and they prepared for the end.

Why should we make this sacrifice? For who? For a distant King who cares nothing for us beyond what we pay in tax, what we send in levies for his armies, for what treasures we dig up and yield to him? He who has forsaken us when our castles are fallen, when out men are made into stew and our women in whores for invaders, until they are spent and then cast into the same cook pots? Why should I give my last breath to defend lands that have no care for me, for what I have given, what I have lost? What we all have lost?

Because we can stop this here, stop this now. It will cost us everything, but if we do this, it ends. The other kingdoms survive, cities survive, children grow up, they have lives, and the corpses we've left behind have meaning, and they are more than just bone cobbles to make a road for that hell bitch in the north to march south and take everything. If we don't stop her here, now, who will?

If we don't stop her, we will cease to be, and our names will be erased, and that ice cold cunt will scrawl across her map Greenlandis, and add it to her empire.

I would and I will die to stop that.

High Lord Goetham Carswick.

The Battle of Castle Carswick would have been a tale for the epics, but alas, there were no bards, historians, or other recorders of such events to leave a record. To the rest of the world, Carswick called for aid, and then Carswick was gone, a veritable entire pocket kingdom vanished, and the only noise to emerge was a few written missives from a lay brother of the local abbey asking for someone to come and oversee putting thing back together.

Such are true unsung heroes.

High Lord Goetham had a secret weapon. He had the Virednith held deep in the vaults of Carswick. It was a desperate gamble because the High Lord had no idea how much of the lore around this horrific treasure was true and how much was myth and hogwash. As the forces of Praxingdrell fell towards Carswick, he had the weapon moved to the highest point of the castle, and with some tremendous effort, the device was tilted to one side, to face the oncoming host of the dragon, and its dragonkin flyers, and witchlords and covens, the might of the sunless kingdom.

Goetham himself, as a rune warrior, couldn't activate the weapon, so he lead the counter assault on the ground while his wife, the High Lady Edeline Carswick fired the device. In a tremendous silent flash, the Virednith fired. Castle Carswick did not survive the activation and it was reduced to rubble. Hundreds of defenders were blinked into crumbling ash. Thousands of Praxingdrell soldiers, heroes, champions, were turned to dust in the wind. Tipophon was caught in the edge of the event and the great dragon lost a wing, her lower body and a front leg. The beast came apart in a shower of ash and blood as hot as magma. The Empress was not slain by the power of the weapon, but was so direly wounded by it that she remains in a magical slumber, recovering her missing limbs, ruined organs, and shattered visage. Of the dreadlord ladies, neither survived, and the witchlord covens were annihilated. The acolytes and neophytes who did not participate in the attack were divvied up and absorbed by other covens.

The Pocket Kingdom was gone. The noble families were exhausted. The castles were cursed or destroyed. The fields were littered with ash and bones. Entire hosts were simply ... gone. The stewardship of the Praxingdrell Empire was passed to the literal ghost of Nimrazeonne, as her specter was the closest thing left to the royal blood of Praxingdrell, at least until her mother-empress awakens from her restorative slumber, picks something male and suitable enough to breed with, and create another heir for the Sunless Empire.

Back to the Third Abbot

It would happen that almost every part of this illustrious and violent history was unknown to Vypren. He chose a manor house away from the protection of the Abbey and the crumbling walls of Rubblefort. Within a month Vypren was dead. So far away, in a manor lacking serious defenses and lacking men to man even those weak fortifications, when the goblins came in the night, his men were butchered, and under a moonless sky, a goblin priestess carried out what the clergy had suggested. Jares Vypren was alive and screaming when the she-goblin cut all of his manhood off and ate it in front of him, to steal his power.

The Defense of Rubblefort and Rubblefort Abbey

The legacy of Acting Abbot Olyvar was that he meticulously recovered the stone gargoyles that survived the destruction of Castle Carswick. He set these stone beasts on the corners of the abbey, where they seem oversized and too close to the ground. There is more to the stone sentinels than shedding water from the roof of the abbey. During the time of Castle Carswick, the gargoyles were stone defenders that could be called to the defense of the castle, swooping down on stone wings to smash armor and bone with their granite fists.

The Guardians remain active, but in a different sense. They are not true gargoyles, they are no magical living creature that turns to and from stone. Rather, they are golems, animated by divine magic and souls. Each of the surviving gargoyles houses the soul of a brother or sister of the abbey and most of the time, they slumber. When the guardians sense a great evil, or strong magic, they will awaken. This can be as little as speaking with the abbot, to leaping from their perches to smash the threat before returning. This is not a permanent situation, and as time passes, some souls request retirement from service, and a new brother or sister is sought out to replace them. When their life comes to an end, their soul passes into the stone, and the old is allowed to go on its way. 

A dozen abbots have served since the fall of Carswick. A few have served very short terms, but the majority tend to take the office young, and preside over Rubblefort and its vaults of cheese, brandy, and sausage for decades before retiring from the office and then not long after that, the mortal realm.

The Virednith was not recovered and its location, along with many other powerful treasures and weapons is unknown.