In the shadow of the towering IronPeaks, Iron'Heits stood as a city with a mysterious and often forgotten past. Long before the IronHold Dominion laid claim to its walls, the city had served a much darker purpose. It was a prison, a place where the worst of society were sent to rot, far removed from the eyes of the world. Criminals and dissidents were kept within it's high, icy walls, their fates sealed in the stone chambers below. The Iron'Heits prison became infamous, whispered about in taverns and courts alike, though few dared to speak of it openly. It was a place of finality, where, once a person entered, they rarely returned.
Yet, even before its days as a prison, Iron'Heits was steeped in an older, stranger history. Legends told of the city being built over a tomb, the resting place of a powerful being who had once walked the path of Ascendance. This figure, unnamed and shrouded in myth, had supposedly reached the highest known realms of existence but failed in a desperate attempt to go even further. His ambition had cost him everything, and he perished in his final trial. His followers, mourning his loss, entombed him beneath the mountains, believing that his body still held untold secrets of power.
For eons, the tale of the Ascendant's tomb remained little more than a myth. No one had ever seen the supposed burial chamber, and the story was often dismissed as the fevered imagination of long-dead mystics, and it vanished. And many new theories and myths were borne, foretelling the nature of IronPeaks and Iron'Heits. Some believed the city's harsh aura came from the powerful energies sealed beneath its foundations. Others simply shrugged it off as a tale meant to warn the ambitious of the dangers of overreaching.
The city itself, however, was never a beacon of prosperity or renown. Isolated and often overlooked, Iron'Heits existed on the periphery of Arvindor's attention. It subsisted on its production of a peculiar oil, a resource that was not widely used but possessed remarkable properties. The oil, once ignited, burned with an unrelenting flame that could not be extinguished by conventional means. Only when the liquid had been completely consumed would the fire finally die out, leaving nothing but scorched earth in its wake.
This oil became Iron'Heits' lifeblood, and its production was the city's only claim to relevance. It was traded with neighbouring regions, though its use remained limited because of the risks involved in handling such a volatile substance. Still, it was enough to keep Iron'Heits from fading into complete obscurity, though just barely. There was even a myth about a lake beneath under Iron'Heits filled to the brim with oil, enough to let the city economy stay stable. The city's economy hinged on this singular resource, and the lives of its people revolved around the careful harvesting and refining of the mysterious liquid that could be found anywhere in Iron'Heits like some sort of passageway, tunnelling through the Iron'Heits, like a spider web.
The origins of the oil were a source of endless speculation. The elders of Iron'Heits, men and women who had lived long enough to witness the city's many changes, spoke in hushed tones of its true source. According to them, the oil was not a product of the earth, but of a living creature. Deep within the IronPeaks, they claimed, there slumbered a legendary being known as the Mornshroud, a mythical creature that produced the oil as a kind of mucus from its body. This creature, as old as the mountains themselves, lay dormant, its body curled beneath the stone, awaiting the day it would rise again.
Few took the elders' stories seriously, of course. To most, the Mornshroud was little more than a fantastical myth, a convenient explanation for the city's strange oil and mages chalked it to fossils under the earth of Iron'Heits. But to the older generation, there was a kernel of truth in the tale, passed down from the time before Iron'Heits became a prison. They believed the creature still lived, its presence pulsing faintly beneath the earth, its very existence tied to the lifeblood of the city.
As Iron'Heits continued to produce its oil and maintain its fragile economy, the legend of the Mornshroud never fully faded. Many claimed to have felt tremors beneath the earth, faint but unmistakable, as if something massive shifted in its sleep. Others spoke of the strange, almost otherworldly glow that sometimes appeared over the IronPeaks at night, casting eerie shadows across the city below.
The city's leaders never officially acknowledged these rumours, preferring to focus on more practical matters of governance and survival. But deep within the heart of Iron'Heits, in the cold stone corridors that had once served as prison cells, the air was thick with the weight of its history. The city was a place of secrets, both ancient and new, and though many had forgotten or dismissed the tales of the Ascendant and the Mornshroud, they remained—quiet, waiting, like the city itself.
As time passed, Iron'Heits continued its existence on the fringes of Arvindor, its past forgotten by most, but never entirely erased. The myths and legends surrounding the city were kept alive in whispered conversations, carried through generations like embers from a long-dead fire. And though the truth of the Ascendant's fall and the Mornshroud's slumber remained unproven, Iron'Heits endured, its history woven into the stone of its walls and the oil that burned like fire in the night.
But now, this history was coming back to the surface, its causes were unknown but its ramifications… Disastrous.