Unbended:Unsacred Mountains
Welcome to the Ayhat Ghyn. Doesn’t ring a bell? No wonder; the mountain range that many inhabitants of the far north consider the seat of the old gods is only called this by the indigenous people. In the alledged civilized world those “daggers of ice” are better known as the Unsacred Mountains. But what has earned this region such a disparaging and dangerous sounding name?
Well, the permafrost area in the north have always been their own world. In this sparsely populated region that is little inviting for travelers due to its hostile climate, the natives that settle at the foot of the mountains could over centuries live largely unencumbered from the continuous power struggles and territorial wars that permanently shake the rest of the continent. But that changed as a group of traveling cartographers and geologists by accident discovered a real treasure: black diamonds of astonishing size and clarity. And because stories of wealth and fortune travel faster than the strongest storm winds, there soon were people from all regions of the continent that set out to wrest the treasures from the frozen mountains.
But it was not only the cold that soon turned out as bitter enemy. The natives of the mountain region, of whose existence until then no one had knowledge, weren’t willing to let the foreigners carry on. Never before had the Dhyadayn, the mountain dwellers, seen something like these little, but aggressive and highly bellicose dwarf-beings that attempted to enter the tribes’ land in order to dig – in the eyes of the mountain people – worthless, dark stones from the rock. These mites carries shining blades that were ground so sharp that they even could cut through the thick hide of the Dhyadayn and so it came to bloody slaughter where many lost their lives. When the mountain people began to gain the upper hand (their weapons certainly were less superb, but the mountains themselves were their allies so that they could fight with the powers of avalanches and the crunching weight of huge boulders), a large imperial army reached the north. In the end, the mountain people were forced to retreat by the superiority of their attackers and the surviving withdrew high into mountains. So high that the invaders could never follow as those that want to breathe this thin, ice-clear air should have more to offer than the puny thorax of a gnome.
In the end, the expeditionary corps of the Imperial Army found that which should give the mountains their name. The chronicles call it “godless slaughterhouses.” In this place the giant natives – that through the eyes of men were primitive cannibals – had evidently slaughtered and disemboweled their own kind. That in the culture of the Dhaydayn the “beloved prisoners” simply had made their last sacrifice and that the mountain tribes had learned to utilize all that nature granted them (which, by the way, they did in a festive ceremony) was something that men did not understood. And so it came that soon there were sinister legends being told over the mountain dwellers and only few adventurers since then have dared the ascend into the majestic heights of the Unsacred Mountains.
What happened to the legendary riches on black diamonds, you ask? Well, nothing really. Even though for many years mining shafts were driven into the rock, no one ever again found even the smallest of gem. Eventually, even the last treasure hunters left the mountains and their traces were soon buried under ice and snow. The Dhyadayn, though, should never return to where they once lives. Nothing is known over their fate.
