A Relevant History of Granmont

The history of the founding a growth of Granmont is a story. A story about two men. A Vampiric Patron known as the Saint of Dreamers, and the nobleman Lord Nolan Baudelaire.
The Saint of Dreamers' origin is unimportant to the history of Granmont, although it can help to understand the role he continues to play in the story of Granmont.
Originally a hermetic herbalist, he was turned to a vampiric thrall to become an enslaved blood magician. Over decades of imprisonments he outsmarted his captor and, applying the very skills he was turned to cultivate, concocted an elixir to break free of his overseer and he fled. He eventually settled in the wilderness of what would soon become Granmont. He struggled to feed, disgusted by what he had been turned into. Unable to bring himself to feed on the unaware or the innocent he entered the dreams of the shepherds and foragers that lived around those mountains. He showed them the limitless freedoms offered in dreamscapes. These isolated people who never left the mountains they were born were shown distant shores and new horizons undreamt of. And he began offering a deal; allow him to feed from you, willingly, and he would teach you what he new of oneiromancy and dreamwalking. Eventually word spread and people sought out the Vampire of their own volition. A cult of sorts developed around this "Saint of Dreamers" as he became.
At first the Saint had been seen as a boon; the last great empire had been broken apart for nearly four hundred years by then. Its territories fractured and wilderness retook the frontier. Nobles abandoned their isolated fiefs for the security and opulence of the Seat of the Empire. As pilgrims seeking the Saint of Dreamers settled in the valley a semblence of civilizatoin was coming to this territoty, the Eastmarque as it was called in that time. Then the affect of the cult was seen. Settlers neglected their worldly responsibilities to trifle in the Dreamscape. Children went unfed as crops rotted in the fields. Opportuning bandits robbed dreamers too caught up in their other world to even notice.
And this is where our other actor, Lord Baudelaire enters stage right.
Unlike his peers Lord Baudelaire held little affection for the mundanity of noble courts. He yearned for the frontier. The young noble was all too eager to try his hand at settling the Eastmarque and earning the prestige that would come with that achievement. He spent years raising funds, then recruiting men-at-arms and ratcatchers. And after a years-long campaign the cult had been dispersed and the Saint forced into hiding.
He never did end up finding The Saint of Worms, as he was now referred, although Lord Baudelaire never stopped searching.
By then it had been decades (20y campaign +20y after). In that time settlers continued to come to the area; from commoners seeking their fortune to foreign nobles curious of the Saint they've heard do much about a booming city had laid roots. The woods were felled for lumber, the mountains themselves carved away for stone. The Church of the Golden Flame was established and the few radical dreamers that remained faced persecution for feeding the Saint who they sought to push to starvation. His hand forced, the Saint of Worms made the seminal decision to attempt to undo the reign of Baudelaire.
He scoured the Dreamscape of Granmont looking for a certain kind of mind. One with the cunning and ambition to execute his scheme. One closed to outside prying. He eventually found Beausoir Beaumont. The plan was simple. The Saint would take care of the messy part. He was a prodigious dreamwalker by then, able to enter and have absolute control over the dreams of others. To prevent this, the entire Baudelaire lineage (for the Lord had wed and had children by then) drank a tincture of herbs that closed their minds to interlopers before bed. The Saint gave Beausoir his in; he knew of a prophecy Baudealaire received from a close ally, one he would heed. Beausoir earned his trust an adolescent Rapheal Beaumont was to live as a ward in Seat Baudelaire. Once in he would tamper with their tinctures, swapping their mind-closing elixer with one that would shunt the sleeping mind into the Dreamwave. Once there, the Saint would kill the entire family; no heirs.
It was Raphael that saved the young Baron's life. Don't mistake it for kindness, though; it was cunning. Rapheal saw how impressionable Baron was; as the youngest child no one ever expected Baron to assume the throne, and he was brought up accordingly as to avoid a succession crisis. Rapheal watched as one after another the bodies of the Baudelaires seized then shook, then fell limp, wounds exploding over their body. First the Marqueese, then his wife, the eldest, and so on. He watched as Baron too seized, then he shook him awake saving his life.
Beausoir first struck young Rapheal before seeing the influence this gives the Beaumonts. The family had secured themselves as the closest allies of the new Sovereign, le petite marqueese, the young Baron Baudelaire. Beausoir promised the youth that, given the resources, he would find the Vampire responsible. And he did. After first using the boons to establish themselves as industrial titans of Granmont they finally turned the location of the Saint over to the Church, and the Vampire was captured to be disposed of.
In the four decades since the Beaumont have only dug their claws deeper into Granmont. With the blessing of the new Marquesse and an inhumen ambition nothing has stood in their way. Their mines weave underneath the city. Their resources are used in every industry in the city. They provide hedonistic paradises for themselves and their allies, ruthlessly exterminating any threat to their power real or imagined. Most residents don't remember a Granmont before the Beaumonts, just the way they like it. In their minds the city should be thankful for everything they've done: every polluted stream, every stripped mountainside, every cleared forest.
After all, the Beaumonts own this city.
History of Granmont