Opening the Door

Kaer Illumar

Before there was a Scourge, there was a city, and when the Horrors came the city did the only thing it could: it went into the earth and pulled the door shut behind it. Its people named it Illumar, for the light, because light was the first thing they thought they would miss.

Illumar was not a village hiding in a hole. It was a metropolis grown from living stone, tier on tier of streets and markets and shrines lit by enchanted lamps that never quite matched the color of daylight. The lamps were the pride of the city. They burned a steady, even gold, and generations of children grew up believing that gold was what the sun looked like. Dwarfs worked its forges beside t'skrang who kept the great cisterns, trolls hauled loads through corridors cut for their shoulders, windlings strung lanterns across the high galleries, and obsidimen stood guard at the deep doors with a patience that settled even nervous children. Every people of Barsaive had a district, and over the years the districts bled together. Children grew up speaking three languages and arguing in all of them.

It was loud. It was crowded. It was home, and it was the whole world.

The Long Dark

Nobody who lived through the Scourge will tell the story the same way twice.

The wards held, but never perfectly. There were breaches: a seal that failed in the lower tiers, a wrongness that came through the stone, a night when the lamps guttered and something walked the corridors wearing a familiar face. Each time, someone stood in the gap. Some of them lived. Whole districts were walled off and never opened again. Names were cut into the Hall of the Lost until the wall ran out of room, and then a new wall was raised.

Your people fended off what came for them. They paid for it in ways that don't appear on any ledger, and they carried the cost forward, generation after generation, because there was no other way to carry it.

The Measure

Every kaer kept a clock, and it was a very simple one. In the deepest chamber, a stone of true earth hung in the air above a basin of true water. The stronger the magic in the world, the higher the stone floated. The Horrors could only reach through while it rode high, so for generations the whole city lived by that gap. Children were taken to see it. Priests and Wardens measured it every day, and the measure was written in the Wardens' ledgers beside the births and the deaths.

When the Scourge was at its height the stone floated far from the water. Then, slowly, it began to sink, and the city dared to hope. Then it stopped sinking, and the hope curdled into something more complicated.

Year after year the stone stayed where it was: lower than it had been, but never settling on the water. The old calculations said it should keep falling, and it didn't. Nobody could say why.

The Argument

What followed was not a decision. It was a very long argument.

The Wardens held that nothing had changed enough to risk the lives of everyone behind the door. The Scholars said the stone had held steady for years and the old reckonings were wrong. Families who had lost people at the breaches said they would sooner sit in the dark forever than lose another child to a Horror wearing a familiar face. The young, who had never seen the sun, wanted out and said so, loudly. Councils formed and dissolved. Whole seasons went by in debate. Some who argued in the first year were dead before the last.

Nobody was certain the Horrors were gone, and nobody ever really believed they were. The Wardens kept the ledgers, the measurement was made every day, and for years the answer stayed the same.

In the end the city did not decide that it was safe. It decided that it could not stay forever, and that if someone had to go first, it would be done slowly and with every precaution it could devise.

The Door

There is no front door. The only way out of the kaer is the Passage, a long tunnel built to do one thing: kill whatever tried to come in. It is lined with murder holes and ward-lines, with portcullises that drop in sequence, with channels meant for fire and sections designed to collapse on whatever was inside them. Its wards were laid by the best Wardens the city had, and they were laid to be unforgiving, because the people who built it believed that a single mistake would doom everyone.

Nobody ever planned to walk out through it. Taking it apart in the right order took the Wardens years, one ward-line at a time, with each stage argued over in council and recorded in the ledgers. Even then the Passage was never fully disarmed. A narrow way was opened through the killing ground and the rest left armed, in case something had to be stopped.

You are the first party through the Passage, or at most the second, following a scouting team that stepped out into the light, stayed a few hours, and returned shaken and half-blind. Either way, nobody in the city has spent more than an afternoon in the open in living memory.

The first light is too much. Real sun is not the steady gold of the lamps. It is white, restless and enormous, and it moves, and it hurts the eyes. The air smells of things no one in Illumar has smelled in generations, and the silence feels less like peace than like the pause after a very large thing has finished happening. More than one scout could not make themselves cross the last stretch, and nobody blamed them.

Behind you, the Passage closes. Behind that, Illumar waits, watching the door, deciding whether to believe what you tell them.

What You Remember

You remember the world as it was. The old road to the river. The name of the great market town three days east. The nations that stood in this region when the doors first closed, their banners, their quarrels, their trade routes. A few of the neighboring kaers were known to your people, and the old maps still show where they lie.

Hold that memory carefully. It is all you have, and it is out of date.

What You Find

The road is gone, or it is somewhere else. The market town is a field, or a ruin, or something that grew where the town used to be. The nations you remember may have vanished entirely, or become something you would not recognize. Rivers have shifted. Forests stand where farmland was. Some places are strangely untouched, and some are scarred in ways that make your skin crawl.

Everything you know about this land is a story about a place that no longer exists. Everything you will learn about it, you will learn by walking it.

The Work Ahead

Your people cannot stay behind the door forever. The kaer is crowded and the stores will not last, and the first generation brave enough to leave has to make the ground outside survivable for the ones who follow.

That means going out. Finding the nearby kaers and learning who, if anyone, still lives inside. Finding what is left of the old nations. Clearing the roads, the ruins, and the hunting grounds of whatever has made them dangerous. Making a small safe place in a large unsafe one, and then making it a little larger.

Someone has to be first, and you are the ones who volunteered.