Pip Fenwick

Thornmark is a frontier province on the edge of the fallen Karthic Empire: a patchwork of walled free towns, deep woods, and ruin-studded hills where the old imperial roads still run straight and no one walks them after dark. Three centuries ago the empire burned in a single night called the Cinderfall. Thornmark survived because it was too poor and too far away to matter. Now it is where the ambitious, the desperate, and the brave come to make a name, because the ruins of the empire are full of gold, and the dark between the ruins is full of teeth. The Lanternhall is Thornmark's guild of chartered adventurers. Anyone may petition for a charter: sellswords, hedge-wizards, runaway priests, reformed thieves. A charter-bearer carries a small brass lantern-brand, may claim salvage rights in any ruin, and is owed room and board at any hall-friendly inn. In return, the Lanternhall takes one part in ten of every haul and expects its bearers to answer a call for aid. The peoples of Thornmark: humans everywhere, farming and trading and scheming; the dwarves of Meridan, proud bankers and smiths who lost their vault-city to something in the deep and do not speak of it; woodland elves of the Thornwood, who count years the way humans count hours; river-barge halfling families who run the Greywater trade and hear every rumor first; and half-orcs descended from the old Border Legions, respected as soldiers and wardens in most towns. Goblins, wights, and worse haunt the wild places. Magic came back wrong after the Cinderfall. Wizard-craft works, but it flickers near the old scars, and places where the fire fell are paved in cinder-glass that whispers on cold nights. The gods answer quietly now. Folk keep four: Solenne of the hearth and honest light, Morran of roads and luck, Vesper the Dusk Warden who keeps the dead where they are put, and the Green Lady of wild things, who is not prayed to so much as apologized to. And lately, Vesper's work is coming undone. Graves in Thornmark have begun opening from the inside, and the dead all dig their way out facing the same direction: toward the ruined capital.

The Karthic Empire gave the land three hundred years of order: straight roads, standing legions, colleges of magi, and taxes to pay for all of it. Thornmark was its poorest border province, garrisoned by the Border Legions and mostly left alone. The Cinderfall, 307 years ago - the court magi of Karthis attempted the Last Working, a great spell whose purpose is still argued over: some say they meant to chain a dying star, others that they meant to cheat death itself. The capital burned in a single night. Glass rained for a season. The empire collapsed within a year, and its roads emptied. The Silent Years - two centuries of plague, famine, and closed gates. Towns walled themselves in, the wilds took the roads back, and the ruins filled with things that prefer the dark. Most of what the empire knew was lost. The Lantern Charter, 122 years ago - the merchants and veteran soldiers of Harrowgate founded the Lanternhall to map the ruins, retake the roads, and put coin back in motion. It worked, mostly. Thornmark today is poor, free, dangerous, and alive. The Stirring, this past year - barrow doors in the Sleeping Hills found open from the inside. The shrine bells of Solenne ringing without hands. The dragon Kazrivex descending to tax the passes. The collector Corvyn Hale arriving with his crows. And the Lanternhall's westernmost expedition, sent to look upon Karthis-That-Was, now a season overdue. Guildmistress Valen has begun signing new charters faster than ever, and she does not say why.