Serpent's Rest Myth in Jewels of Lockhinge | World Anvil

Serpent's Rest

There are many known names for the string of sheer cliffs and mountains that wall off the eastern edge of Greymantle Marsh, and a multitude more known to the non-Common-speaking world. While the myths and meanings behind these names are as diverse as the cultures who use them, there is one particular commonality that runs through a startling number of them.   Several different and seemingly unrelated communities of creatures, most of which do not share language and are not known to have ever had significant communication between one another, refer to the mountainous ridge by the proper name of some mythological serpent creature. It doesn't take a wild stretch of the imagination to see how a thin and winding line of mountains could have given rise to myths involving some kind of snakelike being, but the number of other similarities found between many of the tales is noteworthy.   In the broadest of strokes, the serpent in question is a massive, winged beast, with some cultures reviling the mention of it and some revering it as something akin to a god. Whether viewed as being the only one of its kind or being one of many, it is at least agreed across the myriad of variations that this serpent is an individual without peer. The name given to this creature is completely different from one culture to the next, even when sharing a common language, and the translations of these names vary widely. Due to the high proportion of Dwarves and Lizardfolk in Lockhinge, when discussed by Common-speaking folk, the serpent is usually referred to by the names used by those cultures: Ahduinsa in Dwarvish, and T'Eskiss in the Lizardfolk dialect of Draconic. Many different communities in Lockhinge County speak Draconic, so T'Eskiss is the name most used in oral retellings of the myth, but as Dwarvish has a far more robust literary tradition, Ahduinsa is the name typically found in written accounts.   In the legend, the trouble that the serpent had found itself in varies depending on the telling, as well as whether this trouble was deserved or not, but there seems to be an agreement that it had finally met its match in some great, godlike hunter. After a tremendous battle that usually resulted in the formation of some other massive land formation (eg. the caves along the Silver Strand, Blindwater Gully, etc.), the serpent led the hunter on a chase across the land as it attempted to flee. One particularly violent telling of the tale describes the series of strikes that the hunter lands on the serpent's body as it fled, and its pouring blood resulted in the wetlands themselves with a strike to its heart forming the central river.   All versions of the tale end with the serpent's flight finally ending right before it reached the ocean, where it could have dived into the waves to escape. Instead, the creature crashed into the earth, leaving its impossibly long body to land behind it like a fallen ribbon stretched out for miles. Its bones created the mountain range, and its skull formed the famous outcropping of stone that Lockhinge's keep and Stone Quarter is now built upon.   This crest of stone that forms the foundation of Lockhinge Keep is occasionally known as Serpent's Rest for this reason, and the legend of its origins is at least partially to blame for the other myths and rumors surrounding its nature. Some versions of the tale say that the keep appeared on the serpent's skull fully-formed as a crown. There are versions that say the serpent created a hole in the earth when it crashed, which likely led to some of the belief that some sort of well or tunnel stretches down from Lockhinge Keep and deep into its stone foundation. One large tribe of Lizardfolk near the city of Lockhinge believes that the mountain range is merely stone kicked up from where the serpent skidded and writhed across the land as it crashed, and that it managed to tunnel so deeply at the ocean's edge that it successfully escaped. In this optimistic tale, the outcropping is a massive boulder that was dropped over the tunnel to hide the serpent's escape, and Lockhinge Keep was set up to guard it.