SISSEKAI: A Brief History of Amberlin

Prelude Amberlin, the bustling capital of Drei Geldreich, lies on a stretch of cliffs in the midst of the Winter Mountains, between noble Mo

Prelude

Amberlin, the bustling capital of Drei Geldreich, lies on a stretch of cliffs in the midst of the Winter Mountains, between noble Mount Zenith and wistful Mount Ganymede. It began its existence as Damascus, an Apollyonian fortress built from a dragon’s iron hide, directly over the dwarven undercity of Einfell. It was here that the dragonborn first conducted their trade with the dwarves, bartering the superior wood and crops of the surface in exchange for the gold, gems, and expertly crafted weapons of the Midst--and this city has remained a key portal between the two worlds ever since, no matter how many times it has changed hands.

The Iron Dragon

Before the dragonborn ever ventured up to the icy slopes of the Winter Mountains, the Amber Span was ruled not by mortals, but by an ancient and terrible iron dragon. Though the hearts of the dracomachia tend towards nobility, this is by no means universal, and Damascus in particular served no higher master than his own lust for gold. With his hellish flame and crushing, mountainous claws, he erupted in the town of Einfell on one fateful day and seized the nursery in which the dwarves raised their young, demanding nine of every ten precious metals and jewels that the dwarves harvested in their mines in exchange for sparing their childrens’ lives.

Unable to resist, lest the dragon make good on his threat, the dwarves of Einfell were forced to follow his orders. In his centuries before his capture of Einfell, Damascus had faced a hundred deathly foes and won a slew of mutations from them; chief among these was the power to shed his scales, in the forms of twisted metal hounds, through which he could extend his senses. These Iron Hounds were surveillance and enforcement both, padding their way through the tunnels and caverns of Einfall in order to ensure the dwarves’ compliance. Even the slightest act of defiance was mercilessly punished; dwarves who dared to turn back from dangerous leaks, or fled from monsters that their spelunking had uncovered, were seized by the hounds and dragged back to Damascus’s captured nursery, for him to torture to death before the dwarves’ captive children. It was only the dragon’s scornful dismissal of the dwarven language that allowed them to oppose him in one tiny, and yet still immeasurably brave, way: they referred to him in seemingly deferential terms by the title Andvaranaut, meaning simply “coward.”

In the end, the dwarves’ true salvation came from an unexpected quarter. When the Praetor of Apollyon first ascended Mount Zenith in mass, their aim was conquest. Their mages had scried a tremendous concentration of gold “beneath a lake that lay between two mountains,” and the then-King of the city-state had declared glorious war against the dwarves in search of it. When the dwarves who rose to the surface to rebuff them proved to be emaciated, smoke-caked sluggards who seemed more terrified of the iron beasts that accompanied them than any dragonborn soldier, the dragonborn general Alcyone was quick to realise that their foe wasn’t a dwarven city at all: it was the dragon who had seized the city.

How unfortunate for this dragon, then, that the Praetor of Apollyon had a long and storied history of slaying dragons. When the dwarves’ continued failure to prevent the dragonborn from advancing towards his hoard convinced Damascus to take the field in person, scouring the mountainside with his fiery breath and weaving blood-magic to turn the very cliffs under their feet against them, Alcyone and her mages brought forth a blizzard to dull his flames and hamper his sorcery. Unused to facing a foe on even footing, Damascus was soon forced to turn all of his efforts towards simply surviving--but Alcyone and her Praetor were relentless in sustaining their assault, accepting casualties simply to keep him from fleeing. After a battle that raged on for a week, Damascus fell to the mountainside, dead.

The dwarves of Einfell welcomed the Apollyonians as their saviours, or so it is written. They gave Damascus’s hoard to the army to take as spoils, and--at Alcyone’s friendly insistence--entered into a pactum nocedat with the city of Apollyon Major; a deal in which Apollyon would assume the responsibility for protecting Einfell, in exchange for exclusive trade rights for all of Einfell’s goods. Not every dwarf was, perhaps, enthusiastic about these terms, but (as would one day become a longstanding saying among their people), besser alser Drache. It was better than the dragon.

From Damascus to Amberlin

When Apollyon Major fell to the Second Calamity, alongside the massed forces of Damascus who had charged out to slow the beast’s advance, the slaves who had once manned the firerooms and kitchens and cleaned the hallways of Damascus were swift to seize control of the fortress; and from there, the future of non-dwarves upon the Amber Span became uncertain. Einfell’s dwarves had remained underground, and therefore intact, for both aspects of the conflict--the battle between the Second Calamity and the forces of Damascus, and the subsequent capture of the fortress by its slaves. There were some who saw this as an opportunity to drive the surface-worlders out of the mountains once and for all, and return Einfell to its former state of total isolation from the affairs of the other races.

However, among the factions within Einfell there were also those who had grown enamoured of the fruits of the surface; their fine wines and spices chief among them. They saw the capture of Damascus as a chance to renegotiate the terms of trade between their city and the surface--this time, on grounds far more favourable to the dwarves. These surfacers may have claimed the fortress, but they did not have the combined might of a continent-spanning military alliance lurking behind them. The leader of these surface-accepting factions--the dwarven overseer Umber Braun--approached the captured fortress with a new contract, and (after reading it aloud) shook hands with the human that the slaves had chosen as their leader. In exchange for dwarven gold and stonework, the former slaves of Damascus would fish in Lake Dorian, pick the herbs of the Amber Span, and attempt to master the arcane edifice that the dragonborn had built upon Mirror Fall--the Iris Gate.

Iris Gate

The Iris Gate is the finely sculpted gateway that sits at the top of Mirror Fall, casting the very multicoloured hues that the waterfall is named for in modern times. It is a potent artifact of Apollyon, one of many innovations whose intricacies was lost in the chaos and destruction of the Second Calamity. In the case of the Iris Gate , this was its ability to call forth a shimmering platform of light, which either followed the flow of the waterfall beside it or went exactly against it, allowing people and goods to travel from the base of Mirror Fall to its height. This device was foundational to Damascus’s utility as a colony of Apollyon, enabling their extensive trade with Einfell, and it remains the lifeblood of Amberlin to this day; in fact, the whole of Ilvergeld, and the wider nation of Drei Geldreich, owes much to the access to dwarven steel and gems and gold that the Iris Gate provides.

In the modern era, the Iris Gate is maintained and administered by a troupe of arcanists in the employ of the city: the Fallkeepers. Though there are still vast gaps in their understanding of the exact principles that the original builders of the Iris Gate used to procure such tremendous effects with such little cost, the Fallkeepers have learned enough to be able to keep the Gate running for centuries, and their study has led to advances in sewage and damming magic that is now used by civil arcanists across Drei Geldreich--in fact, the layout that they have devise is now referred to an Amberlin-style sewer, as opposed to the more traditional dragonborn-style sewers found in Rhodeia Polis and Solomon Praxis.

Local Dungeons

The city of Amberlin is near to two dungeons; an ancient one, at the very peak of Mount Zenith, and a far newer one, found deep below the oldest tunnels of Einfell. While the dungeon of Zenith Spire’s creation is a well-documented historical event, being tied to the fall of Ak-Kardun, the events surrounding the Hellshaft’s creation are far murkier. Indeed, it appears to have developed at some point during the Second Calamity, based on records of monster attacks in the lowest mines by Einfell’s Oversee; but whether this was early on, in the battle with the Second Calamity that first wiped out the soldiers of Damascus, or later (in the final engagement between the Second Calamity and Archalors Solomon), is a matter of considerable contention between scholars.

Whatever the case, the dungeon exists now, and positively thrums with the dire magic of the Second Calamity. Appearing as an endless series of bleeding caverns, with the same scorching heat and balmy rush as a blood dragon’s breath, the dungeon’s primary foes are mutated forms of cave monsters, demonkin, and dragonkin. After their initial expedition to stabilise it succeeded, the Oversee flirted for a time with the idea of sending in regular patrols to harvest it for resources--but a disastrous dive that ended with the brutal deaths of almost every soldier willing to risk it at the time put a quick end to that scheme. The tunnels surrounding the Hellshaft were collapsed and declared off-limits; and only recently have the efforts of allogenes, beyond death and therefore beyond fear, newly unsealed this dungeon to give Einfell (and Amberlin) a chance to win its riches once more.