Cyfandir library books

Scroll found on decimated elves

The foundation of the city of Fort Vulgar by King Deyr. The hill he founded the city on was a shrine to the Bloated Goat serviced by satyr fanatics. He destroyed the shrine when he founded the city. He was a great sorcerer king and gifted his followers masks of great power. Together they challenged the Seelie and Unseelie courts for rule of the Black Goat Wood. He despite many battles he never achieved that in his lifetime and his descendents were but imitations of his might. The masks disappeared when he died.

The Nature of Dragons

Detailing various dragons. Dragon Mountain appears once every 20 years and the servants of Infyrana the Terrible lay waste to the surrounding countryside before vanishing again. Dragon Mountain is due to reappear on Night of Terror if the calculations in the book are correct. Aragnak the Red lives on Godsbattle Lake. He loves relieving travellers of their gold but is a coward at heart and is wary of towns and cities. He is Infyrana's mate. The dwarves always try to to reclaim their ancient outpost of Khundrukar but have failed. The most recent to make it out say that a new dragon to the region has made its lair in the darkness. They also say that Dragon Mountain was once the mighty fortress of Thagnurim but only the most proud dwarnow hold serious hope of reclaiming that.

Notes on Valar

The elves detail the arrival of Valar to the winter woods and watched the construction of the Winter Palace. The Winter Palace was constructed over a spring and if you have some means of swimming down a well can you can enter the Palace without the usual rituals.

Map of the location of the Winter Palace.

Cyrilian’s Guide to Binding Spirits into Swords

A huge treatise on the creation of magical swords. Would take about a week to read. Details the location of the Temple of a Thousand Swords where a forge of power resides.

Tome on Aldrya the goddess of the elves

Aldrya

The tale of this goddess starts early in Godtime, with the meeting of the tender and gentle portions of the elements upon the edges of their worlds. There was, in those times, a kind god of light who shyly met a tender goddess of wetness, and one lay upon the other like the sunlight on the sea. 

Where they met they mingled and made something new, and this something was born to be a god called Flamal. Flamal was a god of bright potentials bursting within him. He is called by many names, and known by many races, but for the beings who rule in the forests he is the Father of Seeds. 

Among those he knew his most beloved was Ishtar, who was turned bountiful by the meeting with him. They had a child, and her name was Aldrya. Aldrya was loved by two jealous gods, each of whom threatened to destroy her if she loved the other. She sought refuge among the greater gods of the Celestial Court, and they gave her a place to remain forever upon the slopes of their citadel. Thus was the first tree planted in what became the Black Goat Wood. She bore wondrous fruit there, and others took these fruit and planted them far and wide. Each of these was born to be a Great Tree, and each of these was called Aldrya. The Great Trees bore fruit in their turn and covered the earth with vegetation according to the needs and capacities of the place. Thus, despite differences in local variation, all children of Aldrya know they are one kin. 

The vast and peaceful Green Age spread across the earth. Aldrya took for herself a husband who is named Shanassee, who was a son of the goddess of Love. His presence added new depth and expression within the goddess, and together they brought forth the souls and spirits of the forest. 

From the trees came the beings known as the Dryads, who were the spirits of the trees, free to move but ever bound to the woody groves. From smaller plants, brush and wild shrubbery, came the Runners. They are less subtle and intelligent than their larger kin. Even in the Green Age these beings filled the woods. When it was fashionable among the gods to do so Aldrya took the being called Man, first of his race, and they made a race like him for her. These were the People of the Woods, also known as Elves, who are also counted among the Aldryami. The pixies have a different origin. They are said to have been fashioned by Shanassee for his wife out of some spare magic left over from the creation of the world. He gave them to her in a small turn of phrase and a jest to make her smile. 

The Green Age filled itself with more life as the gods made more and more creatures. There was no problem when the woods and fields filled with beasts, but the Aldryami did not recognize the inherent dangers to come when beast began devouring beast. The ancient woods slowly reacted to the growing disaster of the Gods War, and more often such innocent bystanders were bruised and broken by the greater war. 

During the fighting of the Gods Age, the new Power, Death, came into the hands of the elves through a wager by the Trickster. They took the Power and enchanted it upon the edge of their sacred earth tool, the Axe. With this they slew many Dwarf foes, and thus turned cold all the world’s stone forever. Zorak Zoran, a troll god, then stole the weapon from the elves and, as he escaped, slew Flamal, father of Aldrya and beloved of all the gods. Thus the iron axe then became the bane of elves. 

In her grief the goddess Ishtar commanded all of her children to withhold their bounty from the world until Flamal was returned to life. Aldrya obeyed and slept the unending sleep, and her children began to die, one by one, in the cold darkness. The liberation of Flamal is sometimes called the “Secret Quest” of the Lightbringers, or the Greater Bonus by some. However, even his return to life would have had far less meaning without the long struggle of the Protectors on earth to save the sleeping form of their wards. The Protectors were led by High King Elf, the leader of his race from among the undying Green Elves. He led a beleaguered band of elves through the whole of the Darkness, ever struggling to protect the empty bodies of the forest from their foes. in this he was aided by the gods Arroin and Yelmalio, another wounded survivor, but he hated the god Oakfed, the Wildfire deity who devoured the once magnificent forests of Aquilionia and slew almost all there. High King Elf was among those beings present in Dragon Pass for the I Fought We Won Battle where chaos was turned back upon itself. Thus when the Dawn came and the spirits of the living returned again to the world there was a prepared place for the Aldryami, who returned to their old places, inside of the Black Goat Wood.

The coming of men to the Winter Woods

Men started coming in numbers to the Winter Woods. Chopping down trees with their axes. Clearing lands for crops. Building settlements like wounds on the land. The unity that was forged in I Fought We Won Battle at Dragon Pass was broken. 

The Seelie and Unseelie courts took great joy to ensare, ensorcel and distract men. Still the men kept coming. The High King Elf took to imprisoning and enslaving men in Cyfandir. Men learned to dread disappearances at midnight. Entire families went, leaving behind only rumors as to their fate and warnings that elves were everywhere in the woods. Before long, High King Elf learned that, while his methods kept his kingdom safe, Cyfandir became overrun with men. A solution had to be found. 

Luckily for the High King Elf, amongst the men was one, Drusus Deathspeaker, who dabbled in such obscure arts as necromancy, demonology and philosophy. Seeing the High King Elf haunted by thoughts of an open rebellion birthed from the overcrowded city, Drusus proposed a plan that would both alleviate the High King Elf’s worries and provide himself with a laboratory in which to conduct experiments into the dark hearts of men. Detailing his scheme to the High King Elf, he was pleased to find that his ideas embraced readily and he began the preparations needed to bring it to fruition. After a month of scouting, Drusus announced that he had found a location, a huge cavern underneath Cyfandir, suitable for his experiment. Immediately thereafter, one hundred prisoners were drawn from the ranks of the High King Elf’s prisoner and subsumed into the darkness. There the prisoners were forced into the cavern and handed tools of excavation. They were then commanded to begin digging. It was to be their task to excavate a new dungeon to serve as their place of incarceration. However, there was a more devious purpose behind their labors. 

Drusus believed that man, although an adaptable beast, was an animal nonetheless. Concepts such as honor, kindness, and ―for the common good were fragile veneers created by the needs of civilization. Strip away the supports of civilized life and man would show his true nature: baseness, cruelty, and the vicious drive to kill to retain what little he owns. This nascent prison would be the crucible that would separate the dross of civilization from mankind‘s base soul. The rules were simple: a prisoner who worked would be fed; a prisoner who resisted would not. Anyone attempting escape was killed. 

The guards who oversaw the place, many of whom had been assigned to this duty because of their own cruel natures, did nothing to maintain order within the prisoners‘ ranks. As long as the work proceeded, they fed these wretches, but this was the sole concession to law and order. Many sages and holy man would like to believe that the prisoners quickly banded together to overthrow their overseers and seek freedom from bondage, but the sad fact was that most of these inmates conceded defeat and abandoned their dreams of escape. Instead, they replaced those hopes with the desire to make the best of their situation by any means necessary. When they did band together, it was to dominate weaker inmates and to carve out a prison block of their own. Drusus had chosen his seed prisoners for the experiment wisely.

As the excavations grew and the numbers of prisoners thinned from violence and exertion, more inmates were funneled from the High King Elf into this cruel project. With each new group, the established prison power blocs found new numbers to add to their ranks, and the underground holdings of the various factions grew larger and deeper. The dungeon became like a great beast with an endless hunger; devouring scores of men, women, and children who would never see the sun again. 

A visiting scholar who toured the site wrote, “These doomed souls are condemned to the earth. Without the possibility of pardon or parole, they will spend the rest of their days in a vast stone hell of their own construction.” The name stuck. 

Drusus, encouraged by the initial success, began to tinker with the experiment. Food rations were halved or stopped without warning to see how the prisoners would respond. Fell beasts were captured and set loose amongst the underground halls of the prison. When the High King Elf slew a dragon and took its kobold servitors prisoner, these scaly humanoid were thrown into Stonehell to see what effect they would have on the prisoners. Many of these and other ―variables were observed by magical means; their effects recounted to the High King Elf and his court for their entertainment. 

In time, even the bravest or most callous of guards ceased to patrol too deeply into Stonehell. Rumors begin to spread as to how far the prisoners had dug into the earth and as to what they found within those inky depths. Attempts to conduct censuses of still-living prisoners were failures. Stories were passed from prisoner to prisoner about the cannibalistic petty kingdoms some of the oldest inmates had established in the deeper levels of the dungeon. Stonehell had indeed lived up to its name. It is unknown what the ultimate fate of the prison would have been had Valar not entered the Winter Woods and forged an alliance between elves and men. 

The alliance included that the gates of Stonehell were to be thrown open to release those incarcerated. What the prisoners‘ would-be rescuers discovered was beyond description. Those who were present that day refused to speak about what they found beyond the doors of the prison. It is known that only a small portion of the prison‘s inmates were freed, staggering into the sunlight that they had not experienced in decades. Of these, many would never be able to return to polite society, their experiences in the prison and the crimes they were forced to commit for their daily survival being too great for them to bear. Attempts were made to recover other prisoners who had fled into the depths of Stonehell, but these missions came to naught.  The deeper prisoners were too far gone or too well-adapted to their subterranean world to return to life on the surface.

With heavy hearts, the well intentioned rescuers took what few prisoners still bore the spark of civilization and humanity back to the cities and left the prison and its inhabitants to their fate. Much passed since the liberation of Stonehell, but in that time the prison has not rested easily. Like a festering wound, Stonehell will not heal or grow quiescent beneath Cyfandir. Routes from outside the city have been made into the prison. During these decades, the site has been used as a hideout for countless bands of bandits and brigands. It has served as the laboratory for wizards who needed solitude to conduct their bizarre experiments. Practitioners of grim religions have sought sanctuary within its night-haunted halls to avoid the prying eyes of the forces of light. Roving bands of orcs, goblins, and other fierce humanoids have found shelter and respite within Stonehell‘s chambers, their numbers swelling with the passage of time. The years have done little to quell the rumors as to what lies within the crumbling prison. Tales of cannibal kingdoms inhabited by pale-skinned ghouls who‘ve carved a fortune of jewels from the earth compete with yarns about obscene magical experiments that stalk the corridors below. Those brave enough occasionaly plumb the depths of the former prison. Those who return do so laden with riches won from that which still malingers within, but many do not return at all.