Arabel: Winterfront

[Hangman]

Six weeks past, high amid the broken teeth of the Storm Horns, the victorious hosts of Orcs stood surveying the carnage of their conquest. The air hung heavy with the stink of blood and the blackened bodies of Arabels finest littered the ashen snows. It was then that the sky broke open, and a searing white light, pure and terrible, poured down from the heavens. It bathed the heights in brilliance beyond endurance, and when it faded, nothing was as it had been…

In the weeks since, the world has unravelled into a skein of new and unknowable designs. A storm, immense, glacial, and without mercy, has settled upon the region, forming a wall of shrieking white. None who have braved its mists have returned whole, some frozen solid, others mad with terror, whispering of titanic forms moving within the storm’s depths. Travellers vanish, expeditions falter. Beyond the curtain of ice, the wider world has been swallowed whole, and no succour, no sign of reprieve, has come.

At first, the city strained against the storm, seeking to banish it to whatever nameless womb had birthed it. But the best efforts, like sword on stone, shattered against the immensity of the thing. In time, it became a truth too brutal to deny, there would be no answer, no deliverance. Only the slow, ponderous necessity of survival remained, an existence measured not in triumphs, but in deferrals of doom.

Little can be said of the storm, whence it came, what will drives it, what horrors prowl its fathomless heart. All that remains certain is this: none may breach its shrouded wall to the world beyond, and none beyond may break back through. What is, is all that shall be. No comings, no goings, only the sealed ledger that is the City of Arabel.

The storm, pitiless and perilous to all that gasp and grovel, has birthed a grim necessity, a sin clad in the raiment of survival. The House of Ash, rebranded as the Last Watch, has risen to prominence.

The faithful of Jergal, embracing the black edicts of their creed, summon the lumbering dead to a solemn duty. Their animations walk the storm haunted expanses beyond, pale sentries plucking the lost from the jaws of death, or dragging their frozen bodies back from the brink.

In a city strangled by fear, even necromancy has found its place. The Last Watch gather anew in the Historic District, where they are afforded liberties denied them beyond its crumbling bounds. Here they endure, not by right, nor by grace, but by rendering a service no other dares or can, their worth measured always against the weight of their necessity.

But why does the Historic District shelter them? What fracture in the city's soul makes this place different from all the rest?

Politics, always a bloodsport within Arabel’s walls, have curdled into open resentment. The city is now a thing cleaved in two, the Historic District, where the People’s Militia under Warden Sleathe stride unchallenged, and the Noble District, where Sir DeSchurr’s Justiciars hold vigil behind fresh ramparts.

Sleathe, a man of coarse speeches and bloody deeds, has become a new idol to the common folk, who chant his name in the broken markets and slums. Whispers tell of a vagabond band, driven to Arabel by the storm, who have woven strange, half-pagan rites about his figure. It is their black-spoked banners that are found in street corners and fester in shadowed alleys, that crown seized halls and most tellingly, loom above the Warden himself.

The Black Wheel Company seeps through the veins of the Historic District, under the unyielding gaze of Warden Sleathe, an amalgam of the discarded, the shattered Militia, and the cryptic gypsies. Together, they tighten their grip on the east, their power pooling like blood in a long-forgotten wound.

Meanwhile, the Noble District endures, fortified like a stone rising from a frozen sea. Here, Lord Protector Malcom DeSchurr rules with a heavy hand, his Justiciars carving order from chaos with mailed fists and sharpened law. Within their gilded halls, the highborn dream of rescue, or of dominion.

The few Orcs who survived the events of six weeks ago have been rendered into little more than half-mad wretches, glimpsed only rarely in the wild places where the mountains, cracked by thunderous quakes, now drown under endless snows.

The Storm Horns themselves have become a labyrinth of ice and stone, a broken monument to something glimpsed but not understood. For now, they are themselves impassable, heaped snow blocks much of the path north. Somewhere amid those abominable heights, Avalanche may yet endure, or perhaps she was already claimed, swallowed whole by the tumult she could neither master nor escape.

And yet, whispers curl through the air, speaking of something that now stirs in the peaks, something that was not, something vast and untamed, its power bloated with madness, its presence a stain upon the land...

Beyond the white veil the world has fallen silent. Only the Storm speaks now, in voices none can understand.

And always, always, the storm thickens.