Tuesday, June 23, 2015

Tales of Aufstrag


The tower of Kara Nuel rises from the Bone Pit, up through the Acre and ends in the Dungeons above. From top to bottom it is roughly 300 feet high. It was established long ago by the Master of the Lower Wards, a Captain of sorts, set to watch over the three first levels of Aufstrag. The post was filled routinely by all manner of creatures until the civil strife, after the fall of Unklar, at which point the post and tower was abandoned.

It stayed thus for many long years until a Nebian Priest came to dwell there. Seeking to rebuild the power of her order she established a foot hold in the tower and slowly drove out its many occupants. Eventually she triumphed and made the tower her own. Afterward she called others to her, some came, others fought her rule, some ignored her. It was ever her intent to control the order and all its minions and eventually assume the dignity of High Priestess. So it was that Kara Nuel became a bastion of sorts for the Nebians.

She took the name of Nectanebo, but without possessing the true power of it and ruled her small realm within Aufstrag in such tyranny that it was marked as unique in Aufstrag. She butchered most who came to her and all who failed her. Her victims were skinned and the bodies eaten. The skins she wove into a cloak that she wears even now and the souls of the departed she bound in her iron-headed mace. 

Denizens of Aufstrag took to calling her Nectanebo the False, and no one would join her. Her army, if ever it could be styled as such, shrank to a few of the devoted and she eventually became lost in her tower of horrors. Her people sealed her off and brought her offerings of flesh and blood and gold and magic ores. These they bathed her with and left in her possession.

~ Aufstrag, The Horned God's Acre

©Chenault and Gray Publishing, 2015

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