Wednesday, September 03, 2014

The Seven Swamps

With this the dwarves were thrown into consternation, and the Goblins renewed the attack. Ondluche used the power stolen from the All Father to assail Gorthurag. He brought the Kingdom down, slaying her King, Isorn III, and his seven sons before the gates and battling her hosts before the halls for nine days and nights. In the end, the dwarves fell and the walls were breached. The goblins under Ondluche plundered the halls with such vicious slaughter that few survived. Those areas sealed to them they buried; those not, they pulled down or blasted with magic.

Here the Axe of the All Father passed from the world, lost or destroyed, none could say.

Ondluche left the ruins of First Home and returned to Miklberg, where he brooded upon all that had passed.

Angmule, his lieutenant, however, remained. He spent many years filling the wide valley before First Home with mud and muck, diverting rivers to the ruin, making all a swamp. He peopled it with vile creatures of his own design, and left it as a trap for all to see.

Thus ended the oldest and greatest of the Dwarven Homes. No realm ever matched its glory or might. No realm could. There the All Father fashioned dwarf, man, and giant. That was the beginning of the peoples of Aihrde. And the end of it, for there died the fathers of all the dwarves. Its glory ended in doom, and it became a haunted place, the once magnificent halls now a trap to the unwary, a place of wreck and ruin. The valley before the gates, once alive with men of the Engale and dwarves in all their might, now a mire of dread and darkness, called now the Seven Swamps, for it is said that the seven sons of Isorn haunt the valley still, calling out for their father, whose body the horrid swamp had devoured. All around the gentle slopes of the valley's arms were honed to broken ridges and deep gulches. All the glory of First Home turned to ill.

~The Codex of Aihrde

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