The Ageless Promise

Leaving Kintargo on the road to Oprak, the group took shelter in a forest after the trouble at Thrune’s Chance. A dream led Sigurd to a camp of Horselord nomads, where the group stopped a shadowcaster’s interrogation; in thanks the nomads lent them three horses to ride on towards Oprak.

A nation chained to the shadow for ten thousand years. During Earthfall, three ancient knights of Nidal threw themselves at the feet of Zon-Kuthon, the Midnight Lord, begging him to protect their people. The pact was accepted: Nidal was saved, and the three knights became the immortal Black Triad, who have ruled ever since. Every Nidalese is born into the faith of Zon-Kuthon, taught from childhood that pain is sacred and that the highest duty in life is to refine it into a sacrament.

An unnatural darkness wraps the land. Travelling inland, colours seem to fade little by little, until the world is tinted with a subtle monochrome. In the Uskwood the leaves are black; over the port of Nisroch permanent clouds block the light; over the capital, Pangolais, falls a shadow with no source.

Government

The Black Triad rules through the Umbral Court, a shadow-touched aristocracy closely intertwined with the church of Zon-Kuthon, with the Shades of the Uskwood (the pale druids sworn to the forest) and with the magic academies that train the shadowcallers, Nidal’s magical specialists, exported all over the Inner Sea. Nidal considers itself an ally of Cheliax, not a vassal, and its shadowcallers were decisive in House Thrune’s victory in the Chelish civil war.

Life and peoples

Farmers, fishers and craftsmen pay formal homage to Zon-Kuthon and try to raise their families in private; in this land, hope is dangerous. Long stability has produced families who perfect their crafts over generations: Nidalese glass, inlaid jewellery and ornamental metalwork are unmatched in Avistan. Most of the population is human; there are also fetchlings, kayal, velstracs and light-averse undead, tolerated in a nation where shadow is divine.

The Atteran plains and the Horselords

Far from the cities, on the greyish plains of Atteran, live the clans descended from Nidal’s original knights, famous for the speed and courage of their horses, the best in the Inner Sea. The group met a camp of these nomads: they call themselves the true Nidalese, the ones who rejected the pact with Zon-Kuthon, and they hope one day to free Nidal from the eternal night. Their way of life has much in common with that of the Ulfar.

Places the group visited

• The Horselords’ camp: where the group stopped an interrogation led by a shadowcaster and her Obsidian Guard.

On the road from there towards Oprak, riding the horses lent by the Horselords:

• The altar on the cliff: a stone altar ringed by five columns like the fingers of a hand, a kind of embassy of the Plane of Air.
• Ravenscry: the ruins of an ancient Horselord city, with its burial mounds and a great raven statue with ruby eyes.

People

Yalma, Miur