[center][h1]The Sour Fen;[/h1][/center]
[center][h3]Wherein the Grand Prinze of Oszbeyr rules, by Grace of the High Stars[/h3][/center]

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[center][i]"In reverence of the sacred and the profaned, we come and prostrate ourselves. In reverence of the unknowable and indefatigable, we come and prostrate ourselves. The Catechism of Silt churns beneath our feet. The Choir of Beasts echoes between our ears. We swear now, as in the last year, and the year before, and on, our vengeance undying, our grudge unyielding. 'Till our dipped lances lay our lost Father low, we shall not sleep. 'Till the Call's refrain ceases, we shall not abide. 'Till the crimes of the past are met with justice, we shall not forgive."

- The Recantation of Respite, Words of the Rider-Foremost[/i][/center]

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[h3]By which the powers of the Fen are known:[/h3]

The greatest power of the Sour Fen are the ghost-knights of the [b]Sacred Order of the Lily Pinion[/b], but that name is lost to history, excepting an initiated few privy to their works. To outsiders, the pale riders are indistinguishable from the other horrors of the Fen. To the locals, those known as Fenfolk, they are sacred phenomena, they are the manifestation of divine purpose and inexorable justice. 

Those 'initiated few' constitute the mystics of the myriad [b]Lodges of the High Stars[/b], who are more coloquially known by the borrowed term 'druid', which originated in the Justinian West to describe their precursors during the Old War. The druids are the vanguard of the Sacred Order of the Lily Pinion, and act as their agents in the mortal realm, while also representing and serving the interests of mortal men as intercessors and intermediaries.

The people of the Fen largely fall under the nominal rule of the Grand Prince of the [b]Principality of Oszbeyr[/b], who rules from the ancient temple city of Oszmilan, a place of labyrinthine walls and crooked, tight streets built upon the ruins of a titanic Justinian Marcher fortress network, which itself was built upon the ruined step-pyramid city of the ancient Fenfolk.
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[h3]By which Fenfolk and Fenbeast are ruled:[/h3]

It must first be understood that the inscrutable, supernatural quality of the Knights of the Lily Pinion renders them at best very aloof suzerains, and at worst as nothing more than a terrorizing myth-made-manifest, the epitome of what horrors the bog offers. Yet, by virture of their power, their persistence, and the superstitious fear they might easily wield, they remain the most potent force in the region. Their maxims and edicts, which they generally hand down to the Lodge masters by direct means, are rare enough that their gravitas can not be understated. 

In likewise fashion, the entreaties of the Lodges are often answered by portent that can be at least vaguely comprehended. This is a less physically direct means of communication, but more readily available to those not privy to the presence of the Knights themselves. Haruspexy, bird-watching, astrology, and fire-staring can be said to have an active role in the 'highest' levels of the Sour Fen's power structure. 

Mortal men abide by all of this strange ritualism and the wisdom it confers, with masters of estates, villages, and townships often being more beholden to the local Lodge than to the Grand Prince in distant Oszmilan. Those masters of men that stray from dogma, those that get it in their head that their own ambitions, at the expense of the status quo, are more important, often find themselves 'visited by ghosts' or struck by absurd tragedy. 

Beneath all of the ritual and mystery, the common man toils, bound by the ancient codes of law set down by the Justinian conquerors who quite unceremoniously sank into the swamp generations ago. The Principality of Oszbeyr is socially and politically reminiscent of the fractious, innumerable duchies of the Justinian Imperium to the west, but it is not beholden to the God-Emperor or his faith. The most prominent cities are ruled by powerful princes who are in theory bound to the will of the Grand Prince of Oszbeyr, but this is rarely the case except in situations of exceptional consensus. Local nobility assign their own tithes, muster their own military forces, and see to their own works.
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[h3]The most notable in the most fetid Fen:[/h3]
 Foremost among the residents of the Sour Fen that the Knights of the Lily Pinion can claim as being under their suzerainity are the [b]Human Fenfolk[/b] themselves, the descendants of the original animist natives as well as the descendants of the survivors of the fall of the ill-fated ancient Marcher Province that was established subsequent to Justinian's triumph over Daigon. These intermixed human communities have retained some of the customs of their predecessors, but a great deal of cultural heritage was lost to the military campaigns that broke their ancestors. Fenfolk are a superstitious and xenophobic people, and they're typically organized around clannish and familial ties, but they remain the most numerous and prolific of the peoples of the marshes.

Secondly, there are the communities of [b]Half-Men[/b] which inhabit the forests and bogs with varying levels of civility. The most alarming of them are ill-bred, hunched creatures of fur and gnarled, tumorous flesh; touted as the ill-fated descendants of Fenfolk and Justinians who conceived under blighted astral signs during the downfall of the Justinian settlers and invaders. Tribes of these cretinous monsters rove the misted wilderness, eking out a pathetic existence, gnawing on the bones of small beasts and coveting all that the humble Fenfolk possess. They are typically the subject of ruthless hunts and concerted efforts towards extermination, but there are those that have taken up squalorous existence on the edge of Fenfolk towns or as piteous servants of households.

The twisted creatures mentioned above have more upright cousins who also reside in the Sour Fen. There are nomadic communities of heavily maned, long-fanged [b]Gnoles[/b] that were also perhaps born of the same calamity that birthed the half-men. They resemble the hyenas; tawny-furred, leopard spotted scavengers of the more arid northern reaches of Nagath. The Gnoles have, through the adversity of their unknown origin and unwelcome countenance, forged their own semi-nomadic communities on the periphery of human civilization. They hunt and range through the darker reaches of the Sour Fen. Their word is reputedly as good as gold, even if they are blunt and unwelcoming folk, and there are no better guides to the insidious mire.

In the deeper reaches of the Fen, beyond the pale imitation of civilization that the Fenfolk enjoy, worse things than beastmen lurk and hunger. Rarely seen but on the most ill-portented of nights, and rarely possessed of any sentiment more than avarice and gluttony, there are those that the Sour Fen has 'taken'. There are men, women, and children who have been taken by the curling, ill-understood tendrils of dark omen and maddening dreams, who have wandered out into the mists. They sometimes return, glassy-eyed, with the pale, clammy flesh of a corpse, encrusted with lichen and draped with bog flora. Those that do not are said to remain in secret, single-minded congresses in the darkest recesses of the wilds, praying to some unknowable intelligence. They are the mortal tithe to the Fen, and only the knights themselves have any sense of their true purpose.

The indisputed masters of the Sour Fen are the knights of the Sacred Order of the Lily Pinion and those others who fell with them on that day of historic treachery. The knights, priests, philosophers, nobles, and other hanger-ons that attended the summit of peace with the old natives of the Sour Fen were not permitted the rest of the grave, but instead rose in the proceeding decades as vengeful revenants, occupying whatever bones their spirits might find purchase on. Their old minds remain, for the most part, with the same pure intentions and high-minded virtues that they died for. Their return, though not well understood, has seen them assume a sort of stewardship of the Sour Fen and its people, as a sort of continuation of the works they had died for. They remain inscrutable to the residents of the Sour Fen, but they are acknowledged and obeyed for their apparent spiritual power and martial pre-eminence. They mediate between the men and beasts of the bog and the untamed, spiritual wildness that now presides over the region. They guard the 'Taken' and obey the inescapable 'Call' that remains in the backs of their minds. They want their vengeance, but they all fear that they're instruments of something far more potent than their former traitor liege.
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[h3]From which all ills arise:[/h3] 
The Sour Fen and the surrounding regions, as the name might imply, are not conducive to comfortable living. History paints a much more welcoming picture, of a fertile delta valley flanked by forests and hills, but only part of that recollection still holds true. The delta is moreso a mire now, where silty effluence has bottled up and created a truly inhospitable bog, perhaps one of the largest of its kind. The soil is still rich, but the climate is alternatingly too hot or too cold, and the air sticks to the flesh, permeated as it is by a perpetual mist.

Plagues of insects devour less hardy crops and suck livestock dry in the summer months, while hungry, desperate beasts prowl during the cold seasons. The interior reaches of the Sour Fen are poorly understood, and landmarks are prone to shifting to the whim of the dark, mangrove-flanked waterways. Islands appear and disappear in as short as the span of years, old ruins and dead vegetation are churned through the mud and silt, as though inexorably kneaded by divine hand. The topography churns so restlessly that some postulate that it's utterly supernatural, that the land is writhing at the behest of the ancient entity that the knights owe their undying allegiance to. Legends persist of the lost cities and fantastic secrets held within the heart of the Fen, but even the best guides and trackers shy away from such ventures, as the monstrosities and pestilences only grow more fearsome as they delve deeper.

The further from the dark heart of the Fen one moves, the more manageable the terrain becomes, and the less necessary stilts, planks, and boats become. Even so, the more solid grounds of the surrounding foothills and dark forests are inhabited by the same sort of vicious beasts and inedible, thorned greenery. These dreary lands tend to be where the majority of the mortal, 'civilized' population of the Sour Fen reside, especially in the east. The old homesteads and forts of the Justinian invaders remain untouched, pristine despite generations of fearful abandonment by the locals. Webs of caves run through these foothills, often choked with spiderwebs and damp with the upwelling perspiration of the nearby marshes. Some reaches, especially higher up, where mud and soil give way to bald stone, are home to desolate stretches of black pools of pitch and dead vegetation. In essence, the communities of the Fen abide by the belt of 'tolerable' land between these wastes and the truly untouchable heart of the marsh.
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[h3]The sky breathes, the land writhes:[/h3] 
The Sour Fen as it is now is something of a dark reflection of the fertile delta that it once was, and the inhabitants are suitably changed as well, far from the proud and noble clans that once staunchly defended their way of life against imperial encroachment. It was this occurence, the invasion of Justinian forces, intent on piercing the underbelly of the united peoples of Nagath, that supposedly gave rise to the haunted mire of today. That, of course, is a matter of spiritual belief just as much as it might be objective truth, but it's also entirely possible that the encroachment of darkness simply coincided with that bloody war - the bloodiest in the Fen's history.

The customs of those that came before, the ancestors of contemporary Fenfolk, are very much lost to the ages. An ill understood oral history was wiped out in a single stroke by Justinian treachery on the eve of peace, as it is understood, and so the faith of the land became a matter of clinging to little tatters of knowledge and custom while cursing the machinations of outside forces far beyond what the local Clans could contend with. Instead of enacting what once was, there is now a veneration of what might have once been. Indeed, there was a faith, there were sacred sites, there were secret rites, but the truth of them, the essence of what once was is now gone. There are no inheritors to the legacy of the ancestors, none that possess knowledge unblemished by the war with the Imperium at the least.

Fenfolk spirituality and identity is bound instrinsically to the nature of the mire itself, to the inhospitability of it and to the danger its more base denizens pose. Placation, survival, and continuity are the foremost values of Fenfolk religion and magic, and could be argued as the foremost values of Fenfolk society as a whole. Knowledge regarding coping with the Sour Fen give the residents of the Sour Fen their distinction. Indeed, it could be said that the Fenfolk live as they do in response to what became of their homeland, rather than by any proactive effort towards some sort of civilizational concept. The massacres of the Old War, according to the mystics and sages of the Fen, gave rise to not only a new societal paradigm, but a new existential paradigm.

The Fenfolk social order and religious traditions are informally based on two primary entities, respectively. First is the clan unit, wherein powerful families preside over the majority of habitable land and dictate law and edict to the common man. This is the norm for both humans and gnoles, but humans tend to be the more sedentary of Fen residents. The second is the myriad of lodges and orders devoted to the mystic traditions of the people of the Fen. These groups are informally associated by the similarity of their beliefs and an indisputable orthodoxy in understanding the nature of the Sour Fen and its residents. 

The latter, the mystic groups, intercede on behalf of the population in the interest of placating the various spirit courts in residence in the wilderness, fending off the more monstrous denizens of the Fen, and representing their needs and desires in treating with the phantom knights that are the de facto masters of the Sour Fen as a whole. Coloquially, the men and women who are initiated into the mysteries of the Sour Fen are known as 'Druids', hearkening back to the old traditions of the ancestors in the Fen-As-It-Was, though the quality of knowledge and custom actually retained despite the span of bloody centuries is dubious at best.

The Druids are bound, spirit and will, to the spectral members of the Lily Pinion Order, which is believed to have a very active role in the selection of new members. Children vanish from villages more often than the Fenfolk would like to admit, only for Druids of concurrent age to be found responsible for the sacred warding of the very same community, likely under the tutelage of some enigmatic, gray-bearded master. Bittersweet it must be indeed, for a father and mother to find that their firstborn may indeed have been selected by auspicious birth to be inaccessible and yet acting in the capacity of a local guardian.
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[h3]From whence the myriad ailments arose:[/h3]  
The very most basic summary is that it's a land inhabited by the 'pagan' (read: Non-Justinian) humans who found themselves allies of convenience with Daigon in times way back, though they were hardly his most devout followers and hardly his most effective warriors. They were a loose bunch of clans from the bogs, forests, and hills who saw their way of life as being threatened by the encroaching westerners. An escalation in their participation in the war, perhaps killing an important member of the Imperial court or military as they made their way through the region, warranted an actual dedicated campaign against them by the Justinians. To this end, a well-appointed crusader order was mandated the task of pacifying the region and either converting or eradicating the locals. 

Ultimately, the order found itself disillusioned with its task as their campaign became more of a systematic slaughter than an actual war, and higher-ups on both sides became inclined towards some sort of peaceful resolution. This created discord in the Justinian Court, as retribution and total victory were the typical modus operandi of the armies of the west, but these were fellow men, even if they were heathens, and the crusader order saw that perhaps 'redemption' was possible. Members of the court, particularly scholars and academics and some radical theologues, saw this as a flagship means of consolidating order and control in these newly taken territories and also as a moral imperative. They were swayed by the arguments of the masters of the crusader order and departed to join them as they tried to open a dialogue with the locals.

The Justinian powers-that-be, as the war moved in their favor elsewhere, quashed this dissent through the massacre of all those in attendance at a peace summit between the warring parties. The knightly order was condemned for its defiance and heresy, and they were shown just as little mercy and consideration as the pagan locals. This massacre took place at one of the most sacred sites of the Sour Fen peoples, and it's postulated that this awakened something primordial and powerful. A sacrifice, as it were, of thousands of men and women upon sacred ground that predated even the Justinian Imperium.

A Marcher Province was established by the victorious general, a man whose unscrupulous works won him a massive chunk of land and a great deal of wealth. He continued with the previous efforts of the Justinian Imperium, steamrolling the natives and creating a capable buffer state. The province was ill-fated however. It was swallowed up by the treacherous Fen, which grew only worse, as tales would have it, as the balance of power shifted. Folk claim the horrid massacre, or some oath uttered in the midst of it, cursed the land and those who'd try to master it. There may be some truth to that, as the marcher province was utterly swallowed up. Ruins of citadels and towns dot the mire, while the natives, still traumatized by the war generations ago, live furtively. Horrid monsters inhabit the land. A thick blanket of fog twists and roils over murky waters. It's unwelcoming to all but the most cunning of its residents.

Now, the Knights of the Lily Pinion persist despite the centuries and despite their endless battles with those at home and abroad. They are revenants, bound by a hatred for the God-King that betrayed them, and now beholden to the mysterious powers that were awakened by the old massacre. They act as the aloof, inscrutable masters of all those within the Sour Fen. They answer to 'The Call', the dream-state manifestation of the desires of the cursed powers that dwell beneath the churning Fen. Beneath them, the clans of the Fen survive and practice superstitious mysticism to placate the knights and the Fen itself, for the Fen's maliciousness is calculated. It is all the unwholesome power of nature concentrated, and some would go as far as to say the Fen is an entity all its own, with an intelligence and power hidden away in its very darkest, inaccessible heart.
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