Chaos Keep

One of the seven keeps of the Idiran curses, and the one named keep that nobody has stood in front of. It has been a destination for longer than the Valiant Few have existed, and it has never once been the place they went.

A steep hill, north of the eastern forest. A place said to bend the mind to breaking, to a point of no return. Those who come within sight of it are advised to be wary, because it is held to break a wise man’s mind at that distance; and of those who set foot on its grounds and came back, none could speak afterwards, if they lived long at all. That is the whole of the entry in Mikhail’s study, gathered out of tavern talk and old tomes by a man who says plainly at the head of it that its accuracy may vary.

The tavern talk it came from is still running. In Forven a man will tell you his cousin went out that way with friends and came back with blood under his nails and no speech left in him, and the man across the table will tell you there is no keep worth fearing at all, that the story is one the Free Folk tell to keep strangers off their country, and then say a great deal about the Free Folk that has nothing to do with the keep. Neither of them has been.

The one other thing said of it is that Orsugo lives there. That grew up in a burned thorp near Forven, in a crowd that had just lost five people to his men and heard the keep’s legend sung to them the same afternoon: a fire-brigand who burns the eastern forests, a keep in the east that unmakes minds, and a short step to putting the one inside the other. Nothing has confirmed it and nothing has ruled it out.

Where it stands is not settled either. The study puts it north of the eastern forest. The relief map the Elder marked in the Valley-of-Doom keep put it out by the Free Folk woods, which is also roughly where the Twisted Grove sits. Mikhail’s own later geography of the curses sets it against Veren, and which of those two lies north of the other is disputed by the same accounts that mention them. All three put it east.

The curse itself has never been argued over: this is the keep that drives visitors to a madness of no return, set against Wraithblade Keep, which turns a company against its own members instead.

Campaign Updates

Kithul came nearest to it by accident. Leaving for an old keep north of Ridh, he was asked whether that was the Chaos Keep, and thought about it for a long minute before answering: there was a sinister nature in how the stone whispered, but he did not believe chaos was what he had heard. Something else was inside it. He was right, and the keep he was describing was Wraithblade.

The nearest anyone came deliberately was an argument over a map. The third keep to be taken was narrowed to two candidates, Wraithblade north of Ridh or Chaos Keep out near Veren. The keep they walked into was the Twisted Grove, which was neither.