Graven Keep

"It is always possible the records are incomplete."

- Proverb of the Azurejays, Scholar-Knights of San Sylvester

This article is incomplete and will require additional work.

Graven Keep is the modern name of a castle predating the city of Whiterock and the Battle of the First Wall, along the shores of the Earth River in the south-central Lordless Lands. The castle was established by a lord in the ranks of the Men of the Gauntlet, a Chivalric Order of humans who remained loyal to The Enemy during the Age of Rebellion, and did not change hands during the war. In point of fact, it remained a thorn in the side of most who lived in the Great Fen or even the lands south of Southport for several centuries after the fact before reaching its present state. The castle's position allows it to easily threaten commerce along the Earth River.

The castle fell out of the control of the Skull Knights in or around ASM 50, early in the period known as the Desolation of the Bleak, when the Lord Commandant of the Keep, Kerr Ultwin, lost control of an occult ritual, twisting his form and the form of the surviving knights into aberrant and undead creatures that continued to hold the keep into the 17th Century ASM. While their assaults against riverine shipping halted, the area itself is widely considered haunted, and was never properly explored or excavated.

Geography

The keep occupies a promontory above the sloping northern shore of the Earth River, almost exactly due south of the Labyrinth of the Minotaur. It is a small and increasingly ruined fortification consisting of little more than two concentric walls and a central square keep; records on the fortification that have survived suggest it was used as little more than a waypoint and a supply station for the Men of the Gauntlet to resupply and requip when they had completed crossing the Great Fen from their origins in the Bleak.

It is known that the area beneath Graven Keep has been extensively excavated even before its corruption by Kerr Ultwin. Since then, further excavation of the darkest portions of these warrens has connected it to the Deeps. A chamber at the heart of this warren contains the Lorespring, a deep and straight shaft of unknown origin which is said extend all the way down to the Dark.