The Chained King

First Impressions

The Grand Republic of Silareth is a parliamentary oligarchy centered around the castle of Aheth Silareth, a large but relatively unremarkable castle. The castle sits on the shoulder of the Turtok River, where it commands a strategic section of said river. Three smaller castles occupy the opposite side of the river, the outside of the bend, where Aheth Silareth sits on the inside. Aheth Druldina holds a convent, nunnery, and women only college. Aheth Kevroha is a siege tower built for anti-ship warfare and is surrounded by mercenary hiring halls. Aheth Grinvet is a foundry and forgeworks, and is infamous for producing chains of the highest quality.

Beyond the nesting of castles and towers on the main bend in the Turtok River, the land unfolds into rolling hills, open meadows, and relatively sparce new growth forests. The farms are not the conventional pattern of semi-feudal subsistence type, but rather, large communes. The individual towns are comparatively large, walled, and have a strong presence of the Gopal, the Civic Guard Guild of Silareth. The Gopal are easily recognized by their studded leather cuirasses, orange cloaks, and the heavy iron clubs they carry.

Economics - Silareth is fairly wealthy as nations go, even despite its overall modest size. Many of its farming operations produce valuable and cash crops that are used for making material goods sometimes over producing food. Silari linen and muslin are major exports and fetch a good profit, but flax and cotton don't fill stomachs. Flaxseed flour makes an acceptable bread, but it is not a good return on effort compared to other grains. It doesn't take a high perception score to see that Silareth is an oxymoron, a representative democracy (managed limited voting) that fully embraces a slavery-supported agricultural economy.

The Chained King

The Chained King is a giant of a man, almost twenty feet tall. He is pale, the blue of his veins showing through his almost translucent skin, muscles bulging and tensing with the slow-burning fury deep in his heart. The only accommodation to modesty allowed is a loincloth the size of a bedsheet wrapped around his waist. His appearance is that of a contemporary Silari man, clean-shaven, but with shoulder-length hair. Following the personal trends of the city, his torso is hairless as well. He is kept in a rotunda behind the main hall and former throne room.

The Council of Silareth refers to the Chained King as Servus Rex, or Primo Servus.

How did we Get Here?

Aheth Silareth started as many castle-based city-states do. It was a strategic location on a river that was important for trade, irrigation, and agriculture. A castle was built, counter castles were built to oppose it, a few battles were fought, and it would have been little more than this except for one fact, a fortuitous event in the DungeonVerse, a dungeon was found in the area. The dungeon caused a population boom as heroes came from all over to raid before a guild or other organization claimed the dungeon and started charging entry fees and taxes on loot. This would trigger a series of battles as different factions decided that they were going to take the castle and assume ownership of the dungeon before any larger guild could send representatives to negotiate with the landowners. Eventually, Dandsha Lightga and the Gopal Brigade end up coming out on top and taking Aheth Silareth. After securing the castle, they consolidated a large number of unaffiliated raiders, bandits, pillagers, and the remnants of defeated hero teams, creating the Council of Aheth Silareth, namely the dozen most powerful individuals present in this gathering, of which the plurality were Gopal members.

Dandsha Lightga was a specialist magic user, a Seductress, who used magic and charisma to seduce others to follow her. This could range from temporary compliance to undying devotion, depending on how hard she tried and how much power she put behind the spell. She used this power to control the council's more belligerent members, and to keep a sense of cohesion, to maintain control over the castle. The newly established council would be relatively successful in raiding the dungeon, as well as controlling access to it. By the time the extant guilds reached the area to stake out control, along with emissaries and armed forces from other kingdoms claiming ownership of the entire region, Lightga was well established, and her men were well equipped with loot from the dungeon. It started to look like another round of battles was going to start, but Lightga had a workaround for this. Instead of siege and death, she proposed a tournament, and the winner would have their claims recognized by all present.

While reluctant, the different parties agreed.

Lightga's champion was an eighteen-foot-tall man clad in scale armor, a winged helmet, and swinging an ironshod staff that was twenty feet long and too heavy for a single man to lift.

Predictably, the giant, Finhamel Rex Silarethian, easily dominated the tournament, not just defeating his foes but killing half, and outright murdering one. The tournament decided what the guilds were allowed to do in the city, and determined what throne claimed Aheth Silareth was bound to, with the region being recognized as a semi-autonomous region of the Castledom, not counted as a Great Castle and not granted a seat there, but also only given nominal oversight, and neither paying taxes, nor receiving military or magical aid or support from the Castledom.

The only guild granted a seat on the council was the Guild of Champions, the heroic guild that focused the most heavily on one-on-one fighting, gladiator style. The Guild of Heroes lacked a strong contingent in the tournament, and the sometimes haughty and hubris-afflicted Guild of Adventurers-Upon-Return sent a token emissary, expecting their name to carry them was the specific man who was murdered. The castle remembers Alain Caladron, Ranger of the Guild of Adventurers-Upon-Return for his attempts at guile and treachery with a massive tapestry in the main hall of Rex Silarethian slaughtering the man in his tent, in his sleep, by stomping on him barefoot.

BUT HOW

Dandsha Lightga was a solid hero and by expert use of throwing knives, dual wielding, backstab, poison use, and owning the mythic and almost useless Panoply of the Bride, she was able to summon the avatar of the dungeon core, seduce it several times, and then convince it to fight as her champion. This was no small task, as the core was masculine, it had no real interest in sexual relations, but Lightga managed it. Like a trainer breaking a horse, she broke the dungeon to her affections and allowed it to invest its power. and seed into her.

After the tournament was done, she did something it did not expect. She clapped the Avatar in Chains of Binding and bound it to her will.

Dandsha Lightga made the avatar of the dungeon into her slave and property.

The dungeon raged and struggled, but could not disobey Lightga, and in short order, she was controlling the core, and it was forced to obey. She changed the layout of the dungeon, the monsters were made in resources to be harvested, the chambers were for the cultivation of needed and valuable goods, and the core remained as a prize for her alone.

The House of Lightga lasted four generations, the sire of the line being Finhamel. The Lightga were a tall and imposing lineage, showing giantish blood, innate magical power, and stunning strength. They endorsed and supported slavery across the region, creating the Guild of the Chain and the Guild of the Leash as respective guilds for the slave trade, and humanoid trafficking.

The Guild of the Chain

Tasked with keeping the fields working, the mines working, and the menial jobs staffed, the Guild of the Chain is a major hub in the slave trade. They buy, sell, and breed slaves with no remorse or compunction, considering them little more than livestock that can speak. The guild is also involved in training, disciplining, and otherwise managing slaves and slave labor. While extremely distasteful to the other kingdoms around Aheth Silareth, those kingdoms have also benefitted from the Guild in material ways. The Guild is always willing to empty out gaols and prisons, giving those institutions gold for their difficult keepers and non-political guests. When there are shortages, the Guild always has cheap and readily available labor, be it shoring up defenses for a battle, managing a levee breach, a harvest where there aren't enough workers, or anything else.

The Guild has a very attentive breeding program, where they scrupulously inspect their incoming stock, make sure the fresh meat is healthy, docile, and manageable. The male specimens are examined for overall health and racial conformation, and those that fail to meet the Guild standards are castrated. No need to let inferior seed spread. The deemed inferior females are not given the same treatment, as abdominal surgery tends to have almost completely fatal results, they are ritually disfigured and have their breasts and clitoris removed.

Being left intact reproductively generally means the slave will either be used for breeding, or they will be sent to the gladiatorial pits. Eunuchs tend to be very poor and unmotivated fighters.

The Guild of the Leash

The Guild of the Leash trains its slaves to be used as courtesans, prostitutes, and the like. The guild specializes in broken spirits in flawless unblemished bodies and has almost no dealings outside of Aheth Silareth.

The Guild of the Leash does its worst and most infamous work with children, which has become a facet of high society within the region. The powerful lords of the land will keep their child concubines in visible postings and positions, even going so far as to bring them along to social appearances and duties. What most nations consider a high crime, Silareth considers a show of conspicuous consumption. The ladies of Silareth are less ostentatious in this display, but will also keep their own manlets and libertines, sometimes making a show of exotic races more than sublime and shocking youth.

Outside of Silareth, the Guild of the Leash tends to be either ostracized or treated as the worst of the worst, which would be slavers being found later hanging from gibbets or left locked in roadside cages to die slowly of exposure.

The End of Lightga, and the Final Chaining

For three of the four generations of Lightga, things went relatively well. Finhamel was displeased with being so controlled, but having fallen under the sway of the seductress, his complaints were relatively minor. The daughters of the house were line-bred back to Finhamel, who was a manifestation rather than an organic being, so lacked the biological repulsion to incest. Dungeons don't reproduce, other than the occasional mitosis-like budding of new cores, so those biological protections and taboos are just not present. The effects remain the same, and after a century or so, the last generation of Lightga scions was badly inbred, showing severe problems and deformities. Nothing quite like having a mentally deficient lordling with impressive magic power, but no ability to control said magic, their drool, or their bowels.

Dandsha herself, her life extended by having some of the dungeon's divine essence in her, lived far longer than expected, but by the time of her death, she was cackling, insane, and riddled with mana-derived cancers and dementia. After her death, Finhamel was completely chained, wrapped, and confined to the Slave Throne, and his chains were magically bonded to the chain being produced in Aheth Grinvet, and all the manacles and chains in the region. He is the first among slaves, the king of the indentured. He is aware of all the abuse, beatings, and other punishments dealt to any who wears Silarathian steel. Likewise, should a councilmember take the nine-thing lash to start beating Finhamel with it, all those who wear the slave's steel will be brought to their knees, feeling each stroke as if it fell across their backs.

Thus order is kept.

The Past Bloody, the Present Tyrannical, the Future Uncertain

Aheth Silareth is a bastion of slavery and humanoid suffering. That being said, shudderingly and seemingly impossible, it is neither chaotic nor evil in alignment. This is no small source of irritation to those of a paladinic alignment because their lawful natures struggle with the fact that the acts in Silareth are not considered illegal, immoral, or even distasteful there. A group who comes in swinging swords and shields to liberate slaves is a criminal, a raider, and a thief in Silareth. Thus, aid to the slaves must be done covertly.

There is a good deal of unrest in the region, and there are routine problems with maintaining order over the slave population. The Chained King is also showing signs of hostility and discontent. Keeping him from hammering at the chains is taking more and more violent beatings from the members of the council, as well as more focused and organized abuse. The chains holding the King also seem to be failing. A few have broken, and newly forged ones have been placed on him, but it is obvious there is something wrong, as the metal of the chains is showing fatigue faster than the older chains that are still holding. There is a very real concern that the King will eventually break free and retreat back into the dungeon under the castle and then the economy will be wrecked. The only resources are coming up from slave gangs digging in the dungeon, drawing out raw dungeon gold and silver to fill the coffers, as well as watery colored dungeon gemstones.

The thing that has happened is that the resources drawn from the dungeon before the chaining were of superior quality. Everything after has suffered. Dungeon cores are the center of a non-biological organism that draws in mana, condenses it, purifies it, extrudes the corrupted elements as treasures, and then returns a good portion of that mana back into the environment, much like a fruit tree. The function of the dungeon has been compromised, it draws in too much mana, and only purifies some of it, and its extruded treasures are low quality and tainted with corruption. There are no monsters, and the only things dying in the dungeon are slaves, and they are left to rot as the core cannot absorb anything in its enslaved position.  The resource extraction is excessive, and this allows for more corruption to escape, mostly in the form of magical contamination much like radiation. This is what eventually killed Dandsha, and doomed the Lightga family. Even breeding out didn't dilute the corruption of their blood on the dungeon side.

The chains will eventually fail, and Finhamel will break free. The avatar of the dungeon is very likely to go on a killing spree and destroy a good section of the castle before retreating into the dungeon proper before turning it into a maw of death for any who enter. It will also mean the end of the magically enforced slavery across the region, as the enspelled steel binding the slaves will become non-magical and they will be free to organize, rebel, and kill their masters.