Vigil

A small town, and very well guarded for its size, standing on the far shore of a forest lake in central Idir, between the rivers, roughly a night and a day north of Haudh-Gwenn and well off the Ridh road. It is on no map. It is reached by riders who know the way, and the way is the first thing a guest is sworn not to repeat.

It was founded about a hundred and twenty-five years ago by Peredhel émigrés, a schism of the Dhel led out by Xander Sarros after he lost a princely election to a Krangal. They brought the army’s habits with them and left the rest behind: Vigil abandoned In Ikhtar and the mette-hina together on arrival and has kept neither since. Sarros is still alive, past his hundred and twenty-fifth year by the town’s count and past his hundred and thirty-second by other reckonings, and failing.

The Town

The walls are Peredhel work, uniform, plain, ten feet of stone with reinforcement towers standing six or seven feet higher, and the guards on them carry bows rather than crossbows, which is the southern habit. Whether Mól hands ever worked this ground was never settled; the walls show none of the signs, though the obelisk in the graveyard rests on Mól stone.

Everything inside is stone too, with slate roofs, and the buildings are tall enough and laid out plainly enough that several families live in each. There are no patrols within the walls. There are no locks on any door, and none of the doors are locked. People go about in the ordinary way, in armor and out of it, and a child will call up to a stranger to play them a song.

An open square of sand serves as the training ground, with dummies stood up and targets set against the wall for archery. Another open space is the graveyard, a few dozen plots inside the walls, where only the titled are buried. At the back stands the largest building by height, which is not the largest by floor, a cold stone cathedral with statues of the Three Maidens at its back and seating enough that it does the work of a town hall as well.

The library is the other building that matters, run under congressional rules with no flame allowed and voices kept low. It holds a complete Mól Encyclopædia in mint condition, backups filed beside it, ancient Taal tomes and an old early-Peren book. Nothing there is for sale, and neither is anything else. Vigil trades by barter and keeps no market.

Rule and Office

The town calls itself a city-state and governs as a theocratic socialism. It is fiercely against slavery, more so than anywhere else in Idir.

The Lady or Lord Vigil rules, and is not elected. The Sword of Vigilance chooses, and the town holds the sword to be an extension of Lady Eravil herself. Beneath the office sit a Custodian, a Commander, a sword-bearer who carries the blade until it decides, and the assessors. Vigil holds the sword, the scroll case its oaths are signed on, the Bell of Order and the Chains of Eravil.

Assessors spend most of their lives outside, working as diplomats, spies, barristers and finders, and are bound by three rules: never reveal where Vigil is, submit to outside law if taken, never abuse the office. The three at the top of the town almost never leave the country around it. An outsider judged worthy may be made a Friend of Vigil, which buys hospitality, the run of the town, training and future aid, against silence about where Vigil is, how it lives and what it keeps. Leaders swear a heavier oath than that, to stand watch over the grave even after death, until the curse is sundered.

Twelve or so have held the office in a hundred and twenty-five years, and most of them met untimely ends.

The Three Maidens

Vigil keeps a triad: Lady Eravil Dark Eyes most prominently, Winifred Orenda the First Scribe, and the Martyr. Faith runs through ordinary speech here. Let it be written, judged, and remembered, the Custodian says over a man’s deeds. The page remembers, when the deeds are done being spoken.

Their reading of the Martyr is a separatist one and their neighbors would call it heresy. Peredhel uses her to justify servitude, sacrifice owed to the nation as a debt; the Vigilites hold that sacrifice is a willing choice for a just cause and can never be a requirement. They call her Vëné, which was her mortal name, and say plainly that it is no blasphemy to do so. Her enemies had another name for her. That one is not spoken here at all.

They distrust the Arcane Congress, and say so.

The Grave

In the graveyard, among the plots of the titled, stands an obelisk about six feet tall, dark stone very like obsidian, rising out of a base of woven Mól stone. The carving on it is in an old Peren dialect and reads that she martyred herself for our freedom. It is Vëné’s grave, and guarding it is the reason the town exists and the reason it is not on a map. Koa alone could see that the filigree in the base goes on shimmering down under the cemetery, into a network nobody living has mapped. The founder might be able to explain it. He is very old now and rarely lucid.

Koa prayed at that stone alone one night, and after a long silence a glow rose out of the ground into the obelisk and an Iophanite unfolded from it: a wheel of metal the size of a wagon wheel, wreathed in yellow-white fire, sent as a messenger.

Campaign Updates

The Valiant Few came here as the first outsiders the assessor Rafi had ever sponsored, and were assessed rather than fought: three of the town’s leaders in the cathedral, asking them to account for themselves. Aldo refused to rank his own deeds, quoting Vigil’s own saying about speaking plain or not at all, and the Custodian took his side against the Commander. They were lodged overnight in a furnished house with an unlocked door and told they were guests who could leave whenever they liked, and that leaving would end the assessment.

At the end of it a binding oath was offered on the scroll case. Koa and Mikhail swore it and became Friends of Vigil. Aldo declined to be bound, which leaves him an outsider, and leaves the other two unable to tell him what they now know. Venessa Hasek explained the sponsorship afterwards: with no Lady Vigil chosen, the assessors cannot travel abroad, and Vigil has decided the party are Eravil’s instrument for putting Haudh-Gwenn back in order, which would let Vigil flourish. Resources were offered within reason. None have been called on.

The succession is unsettled. Lady Vigil Octavia, an orphan the town raised and the sword chose, was murdered in a night raid by Blackguard Jack of the Tillermen, who pinned her arms, stabbed her repeatedly and got away wounded. The raid was retaliation: Vigil had taken captives, executed a magic-user among them, and returned the rest. Theresa Sarros, an assessor and the founder’s grandchild, holds the office in her place, and the sword has chosen nobody since.

Mikhail spent the better part of a month in the library afterwards. Nearly everything the party understands about how a curse returns, and about the Wraithblade, came out of that room. Nobody has been back since, and the last word of the place from outside is that a burned criminal cell out of Haudh-Gwenn is running for it, hoping a town that grants asylum will grant them one.