Farewell Happy Fields
Where Joy for ever dwells: Hail horrours, hail
Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell.
Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings
A mind not to be chang'd by Place or Time.
- Milton
In the decades following the Great Revolt, it was customary for the Kings of Caphan to subject the defeated rabblerousers to a fate they deemed worse than execution: exile.
Stripped of the protection of the laws of any realm and all their possessions, the exiled were unceremoniously deposited on the shores of a vast, uninhabitable continent to the southwest known as the Hinterlands. A land of steaming jungles and brooding forests, fire mountains and ash deserts. Red tides ring its shores, tinging black sand beaches blood red and rendering sealife poisonous and inedible. The coasts were infested with pirates and reavers, hiding within the innumerable coves and fjords of the continent's jagged coast. But the interior of the continent belonged to a thousand nations of savage cannibals. Anyone left on such shores would surely die.
Or so the masters of Caphan thought.
Some thirty years after the Great Revolt, something in the Hinterlands has deeply unnerved the masters of Caphan. So much so that King Amond has seen fit to establish a great fortress in the Hinterlands, manned and supplied at tremendous expense as all food and supplies have to be shipped in across the sea. Within the freshly-built walls of Semaphore, one might almost forget they were 200 leagues from Caphan were it not for the fifty-foot ramparts and enormous garrison of soldiers. But only the bravest souls on official business dare exit the gates into the wilderness, for many of them never return.
Somehow or another, you have been sent to the Hinterlands. A soldier or mercenary maybe, or even the governor of Semaphore. Maybe you are just a smuggler or bartender, or some failed merchant trying to scrounge enough silver to catch a cog back to Caphan.
Or perhaps it is you that keeps King Amond awake at night: the Emperor in Exile.
Any interest in this?
