Branchley Fortress

thick walls tall towers

metal bars deep halls

protection all hours

but inside who calls?

Who whispers from corners,

Who gleans secrets and reads minds,

Who seeks out the mourners,

Who commands and spellbinds?

TTYD MAP

NPCS (below)

EVENTS (TBD)

Branchley Fortress

Yngvi Bragi

Red was the color of the clothes he wore

Now he wears white like the snow

Deerskin circlet and club covered in gore

Sent over dark oceans littered with floes

Wine and cloth bathed red in the glow

Walking and clattering with keys to his doors

Alone with the bodies we found laid so low

Forgetting what his life was like before

Heidrun Wizex

Captured and tried

Stabbed hanged and burned

Dropped in a hole where they thought she died

With life the cell was turned

From her locus she schemes and divides

And who would look where she hides?

red muscle white gristle

pull tendon tight, tangle entrails

with the right magic,

what rights are entitled?

What they did not know was that Heidrun did not die – she stood and waited, caked in blood, shivering nude in a dark hole filled with bones and black rot – in the dark and damp she waited, plotting and furiously calculating and planning.

She stretched her magic out like a cat’s cradle, nipples erect and menses dripping – she scraped her blood off and out of her body, slowly painting the walls and gathering bones.

She scraped the floor with her nails till the stone was clean and her nails were worn to the beds – sculpting this black filth into a small figure.

She softly whispered words of sedition and doubt – weaving a tapestry of subtle madness and pervasive criminality – slowly luring the most vulnerable towards a crime or act of evil – releasing rumors and influencing actions to create criminals worthy of the oubliette.

She waited in her black prison for the accused or the prosecuted to be dropped – pleading, screaming, cursing – and once they dropped she would wait, lithe form flat against the walls – nude and skinny she would hug the darkness like a lover drowning.

Once the pour soul went mad, or stopped pacing, or started to weaken, she would emerge from the darkness – pulling tendons out of their body, plucking lungs, raping men and extracting their seed, breathlessly dissecting women into parts, like furniture.

She would drain blood into small alcoves, weave entrails into nets, take eyeballs and clothes, and make new friends to leave and grant her more and more control.

She made a snake made of spine, many black leather eye-bats, a stumpy man of black organic mud, and all the materials she needed to begin her plans – she stole a ladle and a cauldron – making more and more servants to escape and restart her plans – now she was safe in the last place anyone would imagine her to be hiding – and she has been establishing her castle ever since – while remaining in this tiny cell all the while.

She weaves whips from tendons, cloth from weeping, creatures from organs, clones from hair, and suggests dark and horrible things to nearly anybody who has come into contact with her servants.

She can see and be where she needs.

She has hundreds of hair and swatches, and eyes everywhere.

She is one of the most dangerous and paradoxical women to ever live – a lawful magic-user, and a prisoner who rules from her cell - where no-one knows she even is.