Tulmai Heights
Little is known about the modern landscape of the tulmais heights, just as little is known about its shrouded and sordid past. All records agree that the small nation known as the Tulmai Heights, occupying a mountain range of the same name, came to power some 300 years before the breaking. In that time, the nobles gained much wealth in trade though much of their practices remain a mystery. The trade goods from the heights were of no better quality than many other produced in nearby areas though they could undercut any competitor. Rumors abound of corrupt merchants and nobles employing slave labor and making devious cuts to turn profits. The truth was much worse
About 50 years before the Breaking new rumors spread like wildfire through Quarren. They spoke of dark arts, necromancy, even blood sacrifice. Witch hunts became the norm for the next 40 years until the reigning king, king Barov was taken and executed in a sham trial. Two weeks later the capital city was destroyed in a powerful blast of arcane destruction and the heights fell into outright civil war between the remaining nobility. The bloody and gruesome conflict destroyed what little trade remained with the world outside the heights, driving the remaining factions to slaughter each other that much faster. With many of the passes into or out of the heights blocked off in attempts to forstal flanking tactics and dissuade mercenaries, news of events in the heights slowed to a trickle, then stopped altogether.
The last anyone heard from the factions in the secluded mountain valleys was that one of King Barov’s children had cornered another group of nobles in a remote valley and engaged in a wholesale slaughter. No further word came of the fight or of a victor. The heights became silent as the grave with none to tell the tale. Scouts and looters entering the mountains rarely returned and those who did reported being unable to find even ruins of the old nation.
Ghost stories now abound about the Tulmai Heights and the wicked practices of the corrupt nobles. Most say that the most powerful were vampires and liches that employed the dead or worse to fuel their trade. The borders were so closed to keep outsiders away from the peasants hunted by their depraved rulers. Eventually the people had enough or the rulers got too greedy and they began hunting the other foul creatures that held positions of power. The destruction of the capital is said to have been the work of a powerful mage or even a lich who used dark arts and his own self sacrifice to seal the doom of the Tulmai Heights with his own.
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