Idiran curses

One curse lay over the whole of Idir and over every Peren alive. It was not a single working but seven, each bound in its own keep and scattered across the region, and for a long while the accounts could not agree even on the number. Mikhail’s study, gathered from common folk, old tomes and tavern rumor, counts “perhaps five or more”. There are seven. Six have been located; the seventh has not.

The Shattered Throne

The curse over all the others was the Shattered Throne, and its working was plain: rulers in Idir went mad. Governments fell to internal strife, and the land was visited by famine, drought and plague more often than the rest of Erôth could account for.

Mikhail is careful that none of this is evidence (such things happen everywhere) and offers a single observation in its favor, which is that the vast Peredhel empire surrounds Idir on every side and has never installed lasting control over it. The name Idir is itself ancient Mól for no crown.

The first named victim came much later (S4E40): the last regent of the House of Säv, the Mól noble house that ran the Empire “with access, not swords”.

The Throne ended at a single sunrise, when three of the seven went together and it went with them.

The Seven Keeps

Five are named. Each was a rumor before it was a place, and the rumors were not wrong so much as small.

• Wraithblade Keep: on a hill at the end of a river that runs underground. Few return, and those who do say one of their own company turned on the rest. Clan Zarkhûn’s keep.
• Chaos Keep: a steep hill north of the eastern forest. Said to break a mind past returning; of those who came back, none could speak, and few lived long.
• The Valley of Doom: west in the mountains. Bodies found torn apart with no trace of what did it. That killing proved to be a gnoll band; the keep is a separate matter entirely.
• The Haudh-Gwenn keep: a Mól crystal-cutting works sealed beneath a councilor’s mansion and reached through the sewers. Its sludge is the dissolved bodies and minds of everyone the keep has taken.
• The Twisted Grove: deep forest between two rivers. Travelers do not come out; some hold the trees are alive and hostile, others that the curse turns a man into one of them.

Wraithblade, the Haudh-Gwenn keep and the Twisted Grove are the three that fell. Chaos Keep and the Valley of Doom still hold theirs, and so do the keeps the accounts have never named.

What a Keep Holds

Each keep binds a great elemental, held by Mól crystals cut at the boundary between planes (S3E29). What was learned at the Twisted Grove (S3E38) goes further: every keep stands amid sites of sacred geometry, and what it binds is a pair of diametrically opposed planes (life and positive energy set against death and negative), which at the Grove had taken material form as two linked trees. Each keep holds paired diametric stones to that end.

The ancient Muharib, the Empire’s elite warrior order, were the portal-guards of these sites. From the pattern of the pairs the Elder argued there must be a void at the center of the arrangement, an anti-plane; nothing has yet been found where he said it should stand.

The seven also map to the Mól great clans, each keeping that clan’s relic: the Muharib Crown of Echoing Steel, Clan Zarkhûn’s Wraithblade Khopesh, Clan Säv’s Ring of Säv.

Breaking Them

Three broken at once, or all seven inside one moon, ends the curse forever. Anything less does not hold: a keep undone on its own resets within about a moon, and the attempt is dangerous besides. That rule is why nothing was broken for as long as it was. Four of the seven had been opened before the attempt was made, and every one of them was left standing.

Three fell at one sunrise, within minutes of one another. Under Haudh-Gwenn, Mikhail and Professor Ashanti al-Hassan burned the stored ooze, and it came apart into the two things it had been made of: the souls of the city that once stood there went out of the material plane, and the bound water-elemental essence went back to the inner planes, disjoined for the first time in hundreds of years. About a minute and a half later, at Wraithblade Keep, Hinta brought a hammer down on the Khopesh on the keep’s own anvil and it shattered. Some minutes after that, at the Twisted Grove, the two linked planar trees were destroyed in the same instant.

The Shattered Throne broke with them, and an immense wave of energy went out across Idir, with a dark wave behind it that some saw and some did not.

It did not finish the work. The keeps that were left were made out of Nancáro’s own spite, and they were the one thing his spite did not release when he let it go. Each of them still has to be broken by hand.

The Elder

A Peren ghost walked the inside of every keep and guided those who came to break them. He is Nancáro, brother to Vëné, cursed alongside her and aligned to death and negative energy; and it was Vëné who chose the party for the work.

At first only Koa could see him and only Mikhail could hear him. Aldo did both from S3E29 until he lost the contact altogether; by S5E55 only Koa could see him.

The Shattered Throne was his own prison, and he had made it. Breaking it broke the prison, and what rose out of the ground at the Twisted Grove was younger than anyone had ever seen him and did not know the party at all: the thing that had walked the keeps for seven hundred years was a shadow of him and not the whole. He could set down one part of himself in the elevation, and the party was given the choice of which; they chose his spite over his need for control, and it went out of everywhere and everyone it had seeded, the Peren included.

Where They Came From

Mikhail lays the blame on the Mól themselves: an empire that came to grief through ignorance of the basic tenets of magical safety, at a time when no Arcane Congress existed to enforce them. He wonders further whether the Empire’s collapse was among the events that caused the Congress to be founded at all. He does not claim to know, and no answer was ever written down.

Nancáro tells it another way, and he was there for it. The curses were his, every one of them made out of his own spite, and the greatest of them was the prison he spent seven hundred years inside.