Full transcript
Siluvanede & Eaerlann
In the northeastern corner of the High Forest, where the young Delimbiyr River spills from the mountains, lies a gorge that should not exist. Its walls are blackened, an ancient treant stand watch, letting no one pass. Five centuries ago, this was the most feared place in the north.
Bards called it Hellgate Keep, a demon citadel that devoured two ancient kingdoms, bred monsters in its pits and poisoned the rivers of the land. Before that, it was Ascalhorn, a proud city of wizards, sister to Myth Drannor and Silverymoon. And before even that, it was Ascal’s Horn, a lonely elven fortress on a mountain peak, guarding a pass. Most believe the tale is simple. A wizard summoned devils, his rivals summoned demons, and the demons won. But the evil of Hellgate Keep did not arrive with the demons. It was already waiting beneath the rock.
Our story begins almost 24,000 years ago, when a single vast forest covered the north. The elves called it Aryvandaar, the Great Woodlands Home, and the mighty empire that ruled it bore the same name. Aryvandaar was proud and ambitious. Its rulers led it into the Crown Wars, terrible conflicts between elven nations that raged for 3,000 years. When the fighting finally ended, the great empire was gone. Its elves abandoned the forest, and the great woodland began to splinter into many smaller woods.
Along the upper Delimbiyr River, the trees thinned, leaving an open valley that would one day be called the Upvale. Three new elven realms rose from the ruins. In the northwest, proud sun elves founded Siluvanede, a land of bright towers. Fearful of the gods, they outlawed temples and drove out their priests, leaving a godless realm. To the south rose Sharrven, founded by moon elves. And from Sharrven’s nobles came Eaerlann, a realm of moon and wood elves that grew mightiest of all, enduring for nearly 6,000 years.
Birth of the Fey’ri
Far to the east lived a noble sun elf family called House Dlardrageth, survivors of fallen Aryvandaar. They swore their house and their race would never be humbled again. Their method would prove monstrous. Their matriarch, the archmage Lady Xiiltharra, believed elven blood could be strengthened by mixing it with something older and fouler.
In secret, the Dlardrageths began to breed with demons, the chaotic fiends of the Abyss. Their children were often frail, but carried unnatural magic in their veins. Xiiltharra herself took a balor as her consort. Their youngest daughter, a winged fire skin sorceress, was named Sarya. But the elves of Arcorar discovered the truth. Their soldiers stormed the castle, banished the demons, and sealed the family within a mythal.
Trapped inside, most of the house destroyed itself over the following centuries. Yet not all perished. Before the mythal closed, Sarya and her five cambion children, together with her six-armed nephew Xhalh, escaped through a magical gate. They fled westward into the High Forest around 5,000 years before Dalereckoning. The fugitives found fertile ground in godless, prideful Siluvanede.
Over two centuries, they quietly corrupted several of its most powerful sun elf houses, persuading them to follow the same dark path of demon breeding. The result was a hidden race of demon-blooded elves known as the fey’ri, or daemonfey. They masked their heritage behind fair elven faces, and rose to great power within the courts of Siluvanede. The Dlardrageths also prepared a secret lair. Caverns beneath a low volcanic crag, at a river confluence on Eaerlann’s eastern border.
Around four and a half thousand years before Dalereckoning, the High Mages of Arcorar learned the Dlardrageths had escaped. Joined by the armies of Eaerlann, they tracked the fugitives to their hidden lair beneath the crag. A furious battle erupted in the caverns. Four of the seven Dlardrageths were slain, but the last three, Sarya, her son Ryvvik, and her nephew Xhalh, would not die so easily. The High Mages sealed them in a magical stasis that froze time and movement, but left their minds half-dreaming, so they might reflect on their crimes. The prison was meant to last only a few centuries.
The attack enraged the Siluvanede and houses already corrupted by the Dlardrageths. They retaliated, igniting the Seven Citadels’ War. The fey’ri-led armies reopened the ancient war citadels of Aryvandaar and armed themselves with forbidden weapons. When the war ended, Siluvanede was conquered. More than 2,000 fey’ri warriors were locked in stasis beneath an ancient armory. Their jailers forgot them, and the place became known simply as the Nameless Dungeon.
Siluvanede’s untainted mages, horrified by the deception, cast their entire city of Myth Adofhaer into the far future. And the elves of Arcorar, the only ones who knew how to free the Dlardrageths, died in the war. No one who knew how to open the prison survived. Sarya, Ryvvik and Xhalh remained frozen. Never aging and always dreaming, they nursed their hatred for more than 5,000 years.
Rise of Ascalhorn
Meanwhile, a new human power rose in the east, Netheril. The elves of Eaerlann taught its people magic, but the Netherese soon abandoned elven teachings for reckless power, raising great cities that floated in the sky. Uneasy Eaerlann fortified its borders. On a peak called the Horn, the elven commander Ascal Rachiilstar built a fortress to guard Turnstone Pass against the orc hordes. It was named Ascal’s Horn in his honor.
The fortress was finished 372 years before Dalereckoning, and it was built directly on top of the very crag where the Dlardrageths lay imprisoned. Their sleeping forms buried deep beneath its foundations. Its true defenses were invisible. Its spellcasters wove secret wards, nearly as mighty as a mythal, to repel Netherese magic. Deep within, the elves also hid other sources of power that were never shared with later inhabitants.
Less than 40 years later, Netheril destroyed itself. The arch-wizard Karsus tried to steal the power of the goddess of magic, and for a moment became a god. The Weave collapsed, and Netheril’s flying cities fell. Streams of broken refugees fled west. The elves of Eaerlann took pity on them, and allowed the Netherese to settle in Ascal’s Horn on one condition. They would forswear the dark magic of their forebears.
The fortress became Ascalhorn, the town of magic, where human wizards relearned the gentler arts of the elves and the goddess Mystra. Practicing the old Netherese magic became a crime punishable by death. Within a century, only a handful of elves still held office, and the town was overwhelmingly human. The elves told themselves humans were better suited to watching for orcs. It was a decision that would prove costly.
Fall of Ascalhorn
For centuries, Ascalhorn flourished. It founded the town of Everlund, helped raise the mythal of Myth Glaurach, and became a sister city of arcane learning to fabled Myth Drannor and to Silverymoon. The North hailed Ascalhorn as another Myth Drannor. After centuries of success, and a generation of peace without orcs, its people grew proud. Its wizards nearly matched their Netherese ancestors, and some dreamed of reclaiming that lost glory. But one flaw would prove fatal.
Unlike Myth Drannor, Ascalhorn had no wise ruler to ensure magic was shared. Its power was hoarded by an elite circle of paranoid wizards who saw every other mage as a rival. 714 years after Dalereckoning, Myth Drannor fell to the army of darkness. Refugee elves and wizards streamed west, many to Ascalhorn, bringing wondrous magic from the fallen City of Song. Ordinary townsfolk welcomed them, but the elite wizards saw a flood of powerful newcomers threatening their monopoly on power. The sages marked this fear as the true beginning of Ascalhorn’s collapse.
820 years after Dalereckoning, a minor wizard named Wulgreth broke the ancient pact with the elves. Desperate to overcome his rivals, he turned to the forbidden arts that his ancestors had sworn to abandon. In secret, Wulgreth summoned devils to serve him. With baatezu at his command, he dominated his rivals for six decades, but he never truly controlled the creatures he had called into the town. The devils slipped into every wizard’s power games, steering them with secret plots. Magical duels spilled into the streets twice a ten-day. Uneasy without knowing why, ordinary folk began to leave until only the power-mad remained.
Then the devils made their masterstroke. They persuaded several archwizards that lichdom was the path to true power. Once their masters became undead, the devils ruled through them. Within decades, they ruled Ascalhorn openly. The few wizards still free were desperate. Then voices whispered from the shadows: fey’ri agents, descendants of the demon-blooded elves who had escaped capture millennia ago. Their advice was simple. Summon the demons, the devils’ ancient enemies. Eight hundred and eighty years after Dalereckoning, the wizards called the first demons into the town. Nearly five thousand years after the Dlardrageths were sealed below, demons again walked the halls above them.
In the Year of the Curse, eight hundred and eighty-two years after Dalereckoning, the demons did what they were summoned to do and far more. They slaughtered the devils. Then they slaughtered almost everyone else. With no wizards left alive to send them back to the Abyss, the demons claimed the fortress as their own. The town of magic had fallen, and a new and terrible power had been born in the North. A bard named Maerstar, one of the few who escaped, wrote a song of the fortress’s fall. In it, he gave the town a new name that has never been forgotten, Hellgate Keep.
Rise of Hellgate Keep
The master of the new citadel was Grintharke, a mighty balor and the greatest of the demon commanders. He opened gates to bring his kin into Faerûn and forged an alliance with the orc hordes of the mountains. By late summer, his armies poured down the Delimbiyr Vale. The timing could not have been worse. Eaerlann was already fading, and Ascalhorn, once its northern shield, had become a spear aimed at its heart.
Eaerlann was overrun. Mhilamniir, the temple city and seat of its clergy, was reduced to rubble. The great druid Craenoth Driel died defending the forest, and his staff was carried off as a trophy. In Ammarindar, Princess Olmma led an outnumbered garrison at Citadel Yaunoroth. Her sacrifice bought time for fleeing dwarves to escape south. The gates of the royal capital, Splendarrmornn, were torn down and left where they fell. At Ghaurin’s Hold, the hero Ghaurin prayed to Moradin as his clan died around him. An earthquake crushed the invaders, and Ghaurin became a living stone golem, still guarding his ancestral halls to this day. Within months, the last great elven and dwarven realms of the North were gone. Human refugees rebuilt the old dwarven Citadel Sunbar into the city of Sundabar, while fleeing elves found shelter in Ardeep, Silverymoon, and Everlund.
And Wulgreth, the man who started it all, fled Hellgate Keep with his loyal guard named Jhingleshod the Iron Axeman. They seeked refuge in Karse, the ruined city built at the foot of a fallen god. When Wulgreth plotted to raise an undead army, Jhingleshod struck him down mid-spell. The unleashed magic turned Wulgreth into a lich, and twisted the surrounding forest into the cursed Dire Wood. For a few terrible years, it seemed Hellgate Keep would conquer the entire North. The demons burned the forests of the Upvale, and corrupted the Far Forest, but the heroes of the North would soon draw their line.
Caging of Hellgate Keep
A great alliance of Harpers and archmages gathered. Khelben Arunsun, Elminster of Shadowdale, the silver-haired sisters Alustriel and Laeral, and many others. On Midsummer, 886 years after Dalereckoning, they struck. Wizards fought and died, holding the demons inside the walls while the others worked. Drawing on the ancient lore of Mythanthar’s Folio, and the hidden power sources of the elves, they began weaving a ward. The ward trapped every greater demon within the walls, prevented them from summoning reinforcements, and ensured any demon slain inside would be destroyed forever. The demons were caged, but a cage is not a grave.
Grintharke ruled Hellgate Keep for nearly five centuries as a prisoner king. Unable to leave as a greater demon, he sent lesser demons to tempt ambitious wizards across the North, hoping one might know how to break the ward. Barbarian tribes fell under the Keep’s shadow. Many who came seeking power fell before Grintharke instead. Captured humans were slain and raised as ghouls, then unleashed to hunt across the North. The Keep’s troops were commanded by Shan Nikkoleth, a death knight who, like his master, came from another world. His patrols scoured the wilds for treasure until Hellgate Keep became a storehouse for the riches of many lost realms.
Unable to summon reinforcements, Grintharke decided to breed them. He forced his human and orc slaves to mate with demons, producing cambions, tieflings, and other foul half-fiends to fill the ranks of his army. His greatest success was the tanarukk, a stocky, tusked orc with a ridged demonic brow, glowing red eyes and skin that resists fire. After centuries, they began to breed true, becoming a new race native to the realms.
If they could not pass through the ward, the demons would go under it. For centuries they tunneled, linking cellars to sewers, then sinking shafts deeper, plundering older crypts hidden beneath the rock. Their tunnels reached north to the Nether Mountains, until the blue dragons of the Morueme clan drove them out for a time. Later, the tunnels reached the abandoned halls of fallen Ammarindar, and finally, the Nameless Dungeon itself.
Every spring the Keep’s armies pressed against the north through Turnstone Pass, the mountain road between the Upvale and Sundabar. For centuries, Sundabar, Silverymoon, Citadel Adbar and Everlund held this front line year after year. And deeper than any demon knew, the three Dlardrageths still slept. The psionic Ryvvik kept the others sane. As the demons dug closer, he heard their thoughts and learned the languages of the modern world.
Rise of Kaanyr Vhok
Grintharke, meanwhile, grew bored and complacent. With nothing but travelers’ tales and gladiatorial fights between his slaves to amuse him, the greatest demon in the North longed for entertainment. That boredom would kill him. In the Year of the Wave, thirteen hundred and sixty-four years after Dalereckoning, patrols from the Keep captured seven elves of Evereska spying on the citadel. For seventeen long months, Grintharke tortured them without mercy. Then bored of torture, he chose a game. He would fight all seven at once in his arena, and they could carry their own weapons.
No demon believed the elves stood any chance against the mighty balor. But no one recognized what the elves carried. The Shattering Swords of Coronal Ynloeth, an ancient elven artifact. When struck together, they explode into a ravenous swarm of razor shards that strips the life from everything nearby. Grintharke toyed with the elves, wounding to prolong his fun. Then one brought the swords together. The shardstorm consumed the wielder, then descended upon the balor in a glittering, shrieking cloud.
Grintharke’s demonic flesh let him survive a full minute, long enough to drag three more elves into the swarm. Then the greatest demon of the North was dead, and because of the ward, dead forever. The four surviving elves did not waste the moment. They struck down Grintharke’s vrock lieutenant, the only creature able to control the other greater demons. Then they too were slain. Their sacrifice worked. With no one to hold them in check, the demons turned on each other. Within a single day, all but seven of the greater demons in Hellgate Keep lay dead, never to return. The most senior of the seven survivors were three mariliths, six armed serpent demons. Amassyra the Tricoil, Ssaarn of the Five Hands and Mulvassyss the Sceptered, formed a triumvirate. It lasted barely a year.
Ssaarn and Mulvassyss conspired against Amassyra. The killing blow was struck by Mulvassyss’ crafty son, the cambion Kaanyr Vhok, who would one day be called the Sceptered One. The two survivors split the keep, each plotting the other’s downfall. Then the mad wizard Radoc, Grintharke’s old enemy, marched an army of mongrelmen from the Fallen Lands to storm the keep. His forces breached the gates and shattered the walls. Victory seemed within reach. Radoc also brought a secret weapon, a deepspawn, a monster that births copies of anything it has devoured. It crept through the deep tunnels beneath the keep, spawning trolls and mongrelmen to join the attack. But the defenders tore masonry from their own battlements and dropped it onto his siege engines, crushing Radoc with them. His leaderless army fled, and Mulvassyss struck down her weakened rival, ruling Hellgate Keep alone.
During the siege, Kaanyr slipped into the High Forest to meet his secret ally, Tanta Hagara, shaman of the Blue Bear Tribe. In truth, she was a black annis, a monstrous hag, ruling the tribe through a broken puppet chieftain. Beneath heavy robes hid an eight-foot, blue-skinned giantess. To her tribe she appeared as a beautiful sky-blue hunter goddess, and they believed her to be an avatar of their bear spirit. She demanded human sacrifices and ate her captives. Hagara had long served Hellgate’s masters, slipping away from her tribe to meet with Grintharke himself. For twenty years she had also been the secret ally of Mulvassyss and her son, though the marilith had never met her in person.
Now in Kaanyr’s grip, the tribe followed him into Hellgate Keep. To Mulvassyss it meant fresh breeding stock for her army. She came to greet her son and her ally face-to-face for the first time. As she welcomed them, Kaanyr Vhok murdered his own mother, with the same weapons that had slain Amassyra. Whether Hagara knew of his plan, no one can say. In the chaos, the tribe’s puppet chieftain was trampled to death. With their chieftain gone, the Blue Bears turned to the only leader they had left, Tanta Hagara. Kaanyr married her to keep the tribe loyal and let her rule openly as the public face of Hellgate Keep. But unlike Hagara, Kaanyr had never favored open conquest. He preferred secrecy, striking only when the odds favored him. While Hagara ruled, he quietly moved his most loyal troops through tunnels beneath the wards, toward the Nameless Dungeon.
Fall of Hellgate Keep
Under Hagara, the Keep grew bolder than it had been in centuries. The Harpers, whose founders had helped cage its demons, feared its armies would soon break through Turnstone Pass. In the Year of the Gauntlet, they struck first.
Two Harper agents, the bard Cryshana Fireglen and the priest Spellviper, used cloaking magic to slip into the Keep disguised as Blue Bear barbarians. They hoped to break Hagara’s hold on her tribe by exposing her true nature. Their plan failed spectacularly. When the tribe saw Hagara’s monstrous form, they believed their god had granted her that strength. Emboldened, she told her troops that gates in the cities of the North would let more demons join their conquest. Her raiders struck caravans bound for Sundabar, then whole armies marched. Fiends broke through Sundabar’s walls and set its streets ablaze until its ruler, Helm Dwarf-friend, drove them out. Silverymoon and the Citadel of the Mists held firm.
In the northern high forest stands the Citadel of the Mists, built upon an ancient elven fortress. Its lord is the Mistmaster, a reclusive wizard priest of unnaturally long life, who raises pegasi and cloaks his home in enchanted mists. And he held a weapon that could end Hellgate Keep, the Gatekeeper’s Crystal, a three-pointed onyx star. Legends said a lich forged it to strip priests of their power. Its greatest gift was tearing down wards, even mythals. The Mistmaster struck a bargain with Turlang, the ancient lord of the treants. The treants would defend the forest against Hellgate’s armies, and in return, Turlang can expand his territory and bury the Keep’s ruins beneath the forest forever. He also needed two people to carry pieces of the crystal to precise points inside the Keep, but its power would kill them.
Cryshana and Spellviper, the Harpers already within its walls, agreed to trade their lives. The Harpers wanted to draw Hagara’s army out of the Keep into the open, where it could overextend itself and be crushed by the forest’s defenders. So Cryshana and Spellviper spread rumors of magical gates and artifacts. The final rumor was the most tempting. The Mistmaster’s citadel held an artifact that could unravel the Keep’s wards. Hearing that Turlang himself guarded the woods nearby, Hagara was certain it was true. She took the bait. She marched with more than a hundred demons and cambions and over 400 barbarians.
But Kaanyr sensed a trap. Rather than march with her, he sent his loyal troops down the secret tunnels, far from the Keep. As Hagara’s army neared the Citadel of the Mists, Cryshana and Spellviper climbed the Keep’s eastern and western towers. The Mistmaster teleported invisibly to the cliffs above, holding the third piece and activated the crystal. Purple beams lanced between the three points, forming a vast triangle, then plunged into the rock, forming an inverted pyramid of force that swallowed the entire citadel. Every ward and mythal inside was ripped away. Then the field collapsed inward and exploded outward. The blast shook the land for more than a hundred miles. Hellgate Keep was leveled, and its high outcrop was blasted into a deep gulch.
Cryshana and Spellviper died as they had known they would, hurled from their towers amid the flying debris. The heavily-warded Mistmaster was thrown three miles, but survived. Few within the Keep lived, except those deep underground. Hagara’s army felt the ground shake, but Tanta Hagara never learned her home’s fate. Turlang slew her with his own branches, and her army was destroyed. The Blue Bear tribe which had followed her into darkness was broken.
Then Turlang claimed his reward. Treants blocked the rivers into the Upvale, and with a group of galeb duhr allies, they buried Turnstone Pass beneath an avalanche, sealing the ruins away from the world. After 500 years, Hellgate Keep was no more, and the North celebrated. When Elminster and Khelben later asked the Mistmaster where the crystal had gone, he could not say. Most believed its pieces lay scattered across the planes.
Lingering Evils of Hellgate Keep
But the story of Hellgate Keep does not end here. Some of its evils survived the blast, and some were older than the Keep itself. They stalked the North still, waiting for adventurers bold enough to cross their path. For the crystal had stripped away every warding magic within its reach, including a far older spell buried deep beneath the crag, the stasis that had held House Dlardrageth for over 5,000 years. They awoke to find their secret doors jammed by shifted rock. Slowly, with magic and brute strength, they carved their way up. Anyone who wandered near was seized, tortured, and their minds torn apart for knowledge.
Countess Sarya Dlardrageth, daughter of a balor, is a fire-wielding archmage, cold and utterly without remorse. Only 180 years old in body, she has had five millennia to nurse her hatred. Her son, Lord Ryvvik, fathered by a vrock, is a master of psionics. He never speaks aloud, only through the mind and craves the thoughts of others, storing everything he steals in a gem on his brow. Her nephew, Lord Xhalh, the six-armed son of a marilith, is a berserker who lives only for battle. He serves as his aunt’s enforcer, yet secretly believes House Dlardrageth needs a patriarch. Sarya’s plan was simple and chilling. Learn the new world, find a safe hold, abduct gold elves to rebuild her house, then take revenge on the great elven families who had condemned her.
The other great survivor was Kaanyr Vhok, the Sceptred One. He and his army had been deep underground when the crystal struck. Behind his cultured manner lies a traitor who sees every ally as a future victim. His army, the Scourged Legion, numbered over 1200 tanarukk warriors in five tribes. Other tribes had seemingly deserted into the mountains, perhaps sent there on purpose to breed a demon-tainted horde awaiting his call. At his side stood Aliisza, a winged half-demon born of a succubus and a human. A shapeshifting sorceress, she is able to read thoughts, charm minds, drain life with a touch, and always plans six moves ahead. Kaanyr also struck a pact with Zhentarim’s slavers from Llorkh. His tunnels gave them a hidden road into the North that the treants could not close. Knowing his treachery, the Zhentarim began hunting for rituals to bind the cambion’s will.
By spring, the ruins had become a wild frontier. Turlang’s treants choked the ruins with thorns and began planting trees to bury the keep beneath a forest. Strangely, no magical flight works there anymore. Something still lurked below. The Company of the Jaded Heart descended into the ruins and never returned. No one knows what claimed them. Kaanyr’s rear guard, the daemonfey hunting captives, or something else in the deep tunnels. Radoc’s deepspawn had survived the siege. When the deepspawn began snatching Kaanyr’s deserters, Kaanyr trapped it in its cavern. There it bred an army of trolls and nursed a burning hatred for the cambion who imprisoned it. Alustriel, now Lady Hope of the new realm of Luruar sought heroes to carry Mythanthar’s Orb into the depths to seal away whatever remained. Meanwhile, treasure hunters converged from every corner of the North.
In the years that followed, Kaanyr’s Scourged Legion marched south through the tunnels, seizing Northpeak, Ammarindar’s old adamantine mines as a war camp. Later, Kaanyr Vhok even led his legion to war against the drow of Menzoberranzan. Sarya hid in forgotten chambers beneath the old Siluvanedenn city of Lothen. From there, she searched out the descendants of her fey’ri servants and the places where other fey’ri lay imprisoned. The hidden fey’ri bloodlines she found were adopted into House Dlardrageth and the reborn house raised a new crest, a scarlet phoenix with the black wings of a demon clutching a burning whip in its beak.
But Ryvvik, who had kept them sane for five millennia, plotted to take his mother’s place. Sarya knew his every scheme and killed him without hesitation. She keeps his skull as a trophy. Watching, Xhalh abandoned his own ambitions. Her fey’ri scouts slipped through the Silver Marches, abducting sun elves as breeding stock for summoned demons. Sarya even considered alliances with the drow and the Arcane Brotherhood of Luskan. The daemonfey were rebuilding, one captive at a time. The daemonfey then occupied the ruins of Myth Glaurach, a city whose mythal Ascalhorn’s own wizards had helped raise. Sarya corrupted its ancient wards, twisting them into an engine for summoning and binding demons.
Then somehow wielding the power of the Gatekeeper’s Crystal, the very artifact that freed her, Sarya shattered the stasis of the Nameless Dungeon. From below rose more than 2,000 fey’ri warriors, loyal after 5,000 years. With fey’ri, demons, orcs, and ogres, Sarya made war upon the elves. Her army struck at the very gates of Evereska itself, and wrought great destruction and suffering across the High Forest. Wood elves, moon elves, and a host from distant Evermeet led by Lord Seiveril Miritar rallied against her. The daemonfey were defeated at Evereska, the Lost Peaks, and finally on the Lonely Moor.
But Sarya was never captured. More than a thousand of her ancient fey’ri warriors escaped with her, vanishing to parts unknown. House Dlardrageth is now stronger than it has been in 5,000 years. Turlang still stands guard over Hellgate Dell. He knows the Harpers never destroyed the evil beneath the Keep. They only contained it. He feels he is watching over a festering wound that could reopen at any time. Hellgate Keep is gone. Trees grow where its towers stood. But its legacy lives on in the tanarukk tribes, the Scourged Legion, and a red-winged Countess patiently rebuilding her house in the shadows. The true horror of Hellgate Keep was never the demons. It was how quietly corruption works its way into even the noblest hearts and greatest realms, and how patiently it can wait for its moment to return.
