Age of Ashes (Team Alseta)

Game Master Delta Arena

There is something weird about the amount space taken by the wardrobe.

For weeks, we were disheveled and confused, shivering in the shadow of winter as it crept into the mountainous valley. We barely managed to forage for food and build rickety shelters. A few of us carried swords to fend off wild beasts, but we had no memory of how we found those measly weapons, or of who might have put them into our hands. And that was the worst of it: we knew we all had lives before this bleak state of affairs, but to a one, we barely remembered our own names. Our spirits were broken, and our hope for surviving the winter seemed slim. Then a miracle happened: a benevolent wizard stumbled across our valley. His name was Lamond Breachton, and it is with his kindness that our town’s story begins.

Breachill traces its founding to 4520 ar. That fall, 50 humans found themselves mired in a threadbare outpost in a valley at the foot of the Five Kings Mountains. They had little shelter, provisions to survive for just a few weeks, few skills among them, and almost no defenses against the area’s dangers. Even stranger, they had no idea how they ended up in their hovels, nor why they were there in the first place. Most barely remembered their own names. As winter encroached, the flimsy outpost’s vulnerabilities were clear, and the desperate survivors felt hope fading.

And then an act of serendipity saved their lives. Lord Lamond Breachton, a wandering adventurer, scholar, and wizard, was returning from a lucrative trading trip to Druma when he stumbled upon the amnesiacs’ meager outpost. Even with his powerful magic, kindly Lord Breachton couldn’t solve the mystery of the humans’ origins or restore their missing memories. He took pity upon the villagers, and spent much of his recently acquired wealth on building proper shelters along the banks of what became known as Breach Creek. Further, Breachton helped the amnesiacs acquire food and establish farms, brought in experts to teach them trades, and used his magic and know-how to aid their day-to-day affairs while the townspeople became self-sufficient. In less than a year, the outpost was thriving, and the leaders of the burgeoning hamlet named their settlement Breachton’s Hill. This name was soon shortened to Breachill.

Despite his monumental place in the town’s history, very little is known about Lamond Breachton himself. The wizard’s origins are a mystery, and details of his life before arriving in town are conspicuously missing from the extensive local texts written about the town’s founding. The townspeople know only that Breachton had distinctive, golden-colored eyes, the rich voice of an angel, and flowing white hair that reached past the magnificent robes he always wore. Curiously, the wizard made it clear to those early town pioneers that he was indeed a human, as opposed to an aasimar or other celestial-touched being. History books describe Breachton’s demeanor as exceedingly paternal; he treated each of the town’s pioneers as wayward children regardless of an individual’s actual ages. His kindness and willingness to expend his own resources to help the outpost seemed without limit, however—he made the humans’ survival and wellbeing his entire focus for an entire year. Then one day, as quickly as he had arrived, Breachton disappeared. The townspeople never heard from him again, but they understood the wanderer’s need to move on. As a final tribute to the wizard, the townspeople erected a statue of him that stands in the center of town to this day.

Breachill’s population swelled and came to include dwarves, half-elves, half-orcs, and even goblins. Though it remains a comparatively small settlement, Breachill quickly became known as a perfect place for adventurers in the region to stop for a hearty meal, a decent inn, and an enthusiastic audience for their tales from the road. Early on, the town established a tradition of formally employing adventurers for duties that concerned its citizens but fell outside the purview of the town’s guard. And in time, the town caught the eyes of the Hellknights, a strictly lawful mercenary group dedicated to protecting order at all costs.

In 4638 ar, the newly formed Hellknight Order of the Nail pledged themselves to fighting lawlessness in the untamed wilds. Impressed with Breachill’s peaceful and efficient functionality, they chose a spot outside Breachill for their inaugural home, Citadel Altaerein. The order built its single-tower keep high on a low-rising hill about 10 miles northeast of town. For decades, Breachill served as a supply juncture for the Hellknights, and many townspeople took jobs as laborers or staff members attending to the keep’s needs. But then, in 4682 ar, only 44 years after building Citadel Altaerein, the Order of the Nail pulled up stakes from what had become known as Hellknight Hill. Lured to the west by Queen Domina, then ruler of Korvosa, the Order of the Nail relocated to a far more expansive home in Citadel Vraid. For many years, it maintained a skeleton crew of Hellknights to watch over the essentially empty citadel atop Hellknight Hill, but in 4711, the Hellknights abandoned Citadel Altaerein entirely.

Most everyone in Breachill fully believes in their town’s saccharine origin as the beneficiary of the kind and selfless wizard Lamond Breachton. But the truth, like so much of sanitized history, is far darker. Lord Breachton was not a big-hearted philanthropist. To Breachton, there’s no mystery in the origin of the amnesiac humans he “discovered” at the foot of the Five Kings Mountains: they were individuals who he himself had chosen to establish a utopian society—one that he quickly deemed a failure. And Breachill was not the first settlement founded by that group; it was the second.

Just six months before he left the humans defenseless and amnesia-riddled in the valley where Breachill exists today, Breachton had recruited them for his utopian project dubbed Paragon. Each had agreed to the Golden Contract—a set of strict behavioral and moral guidelines that Breachton believed would lead to civic, social, and political harmony, and to the ultimate course of human perfection. The wizard used magic to create a perfectly suitable humanocentric environment deep in the heart of the Five Kings Mountains, in an isolated valley where his work would not be disturbed. Then he plucked his test subjects from their lives and families all over Isger and brought them to Paragon.

Although his recruits valiantly tried to fulfill his wishes, when he told them that his plan would require their self-sacrifice, discontent quickly festered in the new society. Breachton swiftly grew
frustrated with the squabbling and declared the entire project a failure. He ended the experiment, magically uncreating Paragon so that no trace remained of it.

As for Breachton’s chosen humans, he now considered them wayward children in breach of the Golden Contract. To him, this group represented not only humanity’s inherent weakness but also his own shameful failure to mold them into something better. Instead of returning his former subjects to their previous lives, the wizard dumped them into a nearby valley and gave them only the barest training to start life anew. He wiped their minds not only of their experiences in Paragon but also of their entire former identities save for their own names. This, the Breachton believed, was a fitting punishment for the humans’ failure, and it ensured that his own shameful shortcomings as master of the experiment would remain hidden.

Yet soon after, Breachton realized that he had essentially committed the former citizens of Paragon to slow deaths in the wilds of Isger, whether from hostile goblinoids, roving monsters, or the harsh winter that threatened to set upon the region. And so the wizard returned to the people he had failed, presenting himself as a savior, and in that guise he helped them achieve self-sufficiency, not just with respect to food, shelter, and defense, but even in government and economy. Once his conscience was sufficiently soothed, Breachton abandoned the humans yet again, content that the residents of Breachton’s Hill would at least not immediately perish at his irresponsible hand.

Breachill’s official records, and the reports the Hellknights collected about the area, contain no
obvious hints of this cruel truth. The townspeople of Breachill buy deeply into the falsehood of their origins, and those who question the accepted facts can expect public ridicule at the very least. Thus, a seemingly idyllic lifestyle persists in Breachill, isolated as it is between the hordes to the west that emerged in force during the Goblinblood Wars and the dangers of the mountains to the east.

The life of Breachton after leaving the town is completely unknown.

You never meant to spy on grandma’s conversations with Voz, but grandma’s recent moods after them made you increasingly worried. Even though you couldn’t catch most of what was said, and didn’t know the context behind it, one thing was clear: there were arguing about Voz’ recent involvement with The Scarlet Triad. Voz said they needed the money, while grandma insisted Voz was taking things too far, that she didn’t know what she was messing with. More than once Grandma had said that she wouldn’t “keep covering for her mistakes.”