World of Aihrde ~ The Darkenfold

Valley of the King

This broad, deep valley is sacred to many of the peoples of the region, for here the ancient Ethrum carried their dead kings and queens and laid them to rest in stone holds carved out for them by the dwarves who lived in the high peaks of Rim Top. Fourteen Kings and eleven queens they set in stone biers cut into the mountains. The dwarves, to honor those who aided them in their many wars with the goblins, set the stone with magic runes and guarded the wealth of monarchs and their bodies from plunderers. In all their wisdom they did not know that when they sent the human kings "to stone" that they bound them to the material world.

In after ages the power of the Ethrum fell away the valley was abandoned and left to the wilds of the Darkenfold. Trees crept into the deep vales and climbed the hills until the whole of the valley became a forest. Shadowed by the mountains it took on a particularly dark character for the sun never touched the ground beneath the forest. In time the digging roots upset the tombs and some were broken open and their spirits set free in the valley.

It is a haunted place, the ghosts of the kings and queens of old holding it as their own, though in truth their minds do not know where they are and only remember small shades of their former life, but they are filled with the loss of death and are malevolent.