Ghedaran

Ghedaran, City of Gears

In the Far North, East of the Haslanti League, legends tell of Alatah, a wandering spirit driven mad by the Fair Folk. Once a god of good hunting, they say the Fair Folk tore his mind asunder, turning him into a horrible cannibal spirit, a monster of the dark winds that come in the night. Tall as a tree and with the fangs of a monster, he walks the wilderness, ever hunting and as unseen as the wind.

The Northmen are wrong. But to them, it makes no difference. Alatah is still a monster, and he still eats their children when they go out alone into the night. Once, he was known as Alatah'nordi of the Emerald, the city father of Ghedaran, the clockwork city. Driven mad, corrupted and damned, he was released into the wilderness, into the Northern Wyld.

The one who did this was the mortal sorceror Bagrash Kol, wielder of the Eye of Autochothon. With it's power to alter the world around him, he tricked Alatah'hassah into a Demesne, and used the chaotic energies there to remake Alatah, to stop him from interfering with his plans.

Ghedaran became the clockwork city at Bagrash Kol's hand, and the creature known as Master of Ticks and Tocks was made it's ruler. Now, it flies on the winds of the Northern Wyld, raiding to gain food, stealing to get artifacts with which to feed the Engines of Ghedaran.

Ghedaran is a floating city, which tends to hover at about a thousand feet, a black mass of metal in the sky, about twenty miles in diameter. If the Master of Ticks and Tocks is able to exert control, the city can move at about sixty miles an hour, but he can only keep up such a thing if the engines are well powered and he has time to charge them up. Normally, it moves rather slow, much slower than a Haslanti airship. Thus, the city tends to need support to defend it from siege cannons and airships when it appears on a city's horizons.

When raiding settlements, units similar to Gunzosha armor is used. These suits of armor are about half the size of warstriders, but due to Bagrash's still working magic, they are usuable by those mortals who have under gone the correct training and granted mechanical augmentation from the Master. These armor units, known as X-03s officially, but are generally refered to commonly as Jotuns of the Thunderous Conquest. They are carried in large dropships to the ground, each about twice the size of a Haslanti airship, called Jotun Nests (officially named ARD-45s). One Nest can fit five Jotuns, and requires a mortal pilot trained in basic piloting. The Nests doesn't move much faster than Haslanti airships.The last working mechanical unit are the Hammers of Heaven (KJ-33s), small one-man airships that fly fast and fire grappling hooks to take down opposing airships. Only a small number of these are still in working order, and it takes an incredible amount of essence to make them work. The Master specifically forbids their use unless it is imminently necessary to save Ghedaran from an enemy force.

The Master of Ticks and Tocks is an inhuman machine, an immortal ruler and a highly contrived essence converter at the same time. He was created by Bagrash Kol, and to best define him, it would be apt to say he is like a small god or a demon, unable to dematerialize. In appearance, the Master is a gigantic three-eyed Face, with no mouth. It is here, in the Master's Vault, that the worship of the Master takes place. The Face of the Master orders the entire city, it's commands sent across most of the city via a static-filled speaker system. It's commands come every five hours, normally a few minor bits of clearification and an all's well. Ghedaran's people have learned how to sleep through the loud crackling voice of the Master. They've managed to live through the sound of the ten thousand clocks which still tick simultaneously in Ghedaran's walls.

The clocks are an eccentricity, an anomaly that popped up three hundred years ago, the clocks growing from the walls, like flowers sprouting from a spring field. They are winding down to some imminent event, but what? The death of the Master? The return of Bagrash Kol? The finding of the Eye? It is a matter of great question for the Master, but he has set the matter aside until he has the resouces to devote to the question. At the moment, the clocks are a year from ending their centuries-long task.

The Master, though inhuman, has his own agendas. Mostly they are that of simple survival, but he has always sent out scout parties to look for remains of Bagrash Kol's empire, to find some remnant of the lost tower and the Eye. It believes it has amassed enough information to locate the tower, but it does not have a well trained group of citizens devoted to such a task, and thus has it on hold, like many tasks are.

The Master of Ticks and Tocks has three once-human sons: two are not worthy of names, and are indeed no more than failed human-machine hybrids who are barely sentient and whose very presence is horrifying and nauseating. The Candle of Justice is the third and youngest son, a creature who defies mortal understanding. Like his father, it is easiest to simplify him and say he is a god-blooded, but it would be best to say he is a replacement for his father, a heir to the throne of Ghedraran. His father IS the city, is the controlling mechanism, while he is merely a strange human-like thing, forced to wear a mask so that those around him will not become at unease by his appearance. He has no voice, so he talks through the lighting fixtures of Ghedaran, controlling their brightness. This code of dark/bright/dark is only understood by a few citizens, causing the Candle to feel lonely and angry at his own existance. His daily tasks tend to consist of overseeing important maintainance tasks, military command and acting as the high priest for his father's religion. As his father's avatar, the Candle must be the one to kill and devour a five year old child every Calibration, to maintain the flow of essence from worship to the Master's engines. The Candle of Justice hates this task especially, but still does it.

What only the Candle knows is that the Master of Ticks and Tocks is dying, its lifetime wearing out. The Candle of Justice must take the Master's place, or the city's engines will fail and Ghedaran will fall and crack. By estimations, this event will be within the next century, but what do the clocks mean, and what will happen in the next year? The Candle does not know, but he hopes that whatever it is, he will not be forced to take the Master's place and give up the last vestige of humanity.

The Master can "bless" a willing citizen by implanting a mechanical contrivance into their body. This opens the proper chakras, allowing the mortal to control their essence flow, and to use the mechanical weapons of the city (the Jotuns, the Hammers, the Nests, etc). Some become more machine then man, but retain their humanity still. It is only the Master's sons who become such horrible monsters, for they must be spiritual almagams of the two.

Once, Ghedaran was a factory city, making a military force to destroy the nascent Realm and conquer it in Bagrash Kol's name. When the wielder of the Eye was destroyed by his own hubris, Ghedaran lost the many hearthstones and essence flows needed to power the Master and keep the city going. It took to drawing energy from demesnes (and the people's worship) to feed to the Master, and most artifacts recovered by the raids are fed to the Face to add even more essence to the energy banks. For the past few centuries, the mortals of Ghedaran have managed to keep the city powered, as it falls apart around them. The population is a tenth of what it was meant to be, and many of the factories and defenses of the city go empty and un-maintained. Most of the citizenry live in the upper levels of the city, going into the lower levels only to maintain broken machinery. They have legends of monsters, of laborers who went below and never returned.

Kosa lives down there, however. Kosa is the Quick Claw of the North, a Lunar who has left the Silver Pact, but will return with the Face of the Master as a war-prize. Once a young boy of Icehome who ate rats in starvation, now a proud Changing Moon. His children are in the hundreds, living on the biomechanical refuse of the Master and the City. They breed and die in the tunnels below, in the drainage pipes, empty factories, drained canals. Kosa wants to destroy the Master, to destroy the wretched flying blasphemy and to stop it's heartless raids on the barbarian tribes of the North. In doing this, he hopes to gain prestige among the Pact and his kind. The only thing holding Kosa back is a poor understanding of the "Why?" for most of the Master's internal machinery. If the Clever Claw only knew, he could have destroyed the Master a century ago, but to destroy everything in sight would only bring him and his children destruction. The rat-shifter believes himself to be an intelligent strategist and a mighty warrior, but on both counts he is wrong. It is only blind luck that has stopped the Master from correctly identifying "the Cancer within", locating it and killing it. The people of Ghedaran have grown use to the warning about destroying the Cancer, but due to the inhuman patterns of thinking of both the Master and his sons, they are unable to deduce what the Cancer being spoken of is. Some have begun to integrate the Cancer into their worship of the Master of Ticks and Tocks as a terrible adversary that must be stopped, a metaphorical realization of evil that doesn't not really exist, but instead is represented by Ghedaran's many enemies. Kosa can only laugh.

The Haslanti League has become more and more affected by the Flying Cities predations in the past years, as the barbarian tribes of the North war and one another, causing the Ghedaran's to move their city westward to find more sources of food and water, and easily gotten Demesnes to channel into the Master's essence banks.

(My first impulse is to run a big Conquest of Ghedaran game with mini-warstriders and Haslanti airships, cities burning on the snow plain, strange machine-gods demanding sacriface and fights between mechanical drones and ratmen in the sewers. It's dark, it's steampunkish (sort of), I imagine alot of Russian-esque imagery and a very distopian edge to everything. Yeaaah. Plus, imagine the reward of those who capture Ghedaran intact...)

(The Image this Location was based upon is found here: http://www.cgnetworks.com/stories/2004_8/phil_straub/bigimages/terradin_thecrossing-large.htm)

--KingLeon