Arn Griishank sits in a bowl-shaped depression in the jungle, the furthest south established Jouvaine settlement on any map – reached only after days of hard travel from Last Hope through forest that would rather kill visitors than let them pass. A signpost marks the approach, lettered in several languages under Lord Valden’s own crest, two ingots wrapped in leaves for the gold and copper his family’s mine used to pull out of the hillside. Just past it, the jungle opens onto fields worked by the dead – condemned criminals raised and set to tending crops, shambling and stiff-jointed under mud-caked clothes, trailing a stench and a cloud of insects that reaches the path long before the workers themselves come into view.
The mine gave out before the family running it did. Valden’s grandfather struck the gold that paid for the keep; a smaller vein of silver kept the place going a generation longer; every shaft sunk since has come up empty, the last of them costing Lord Valden his own son, Blake, in the final collapse before the works were shut down for good. Most of the prospectors who came for the silver left with whatever they could carry. What’s left of the village gets by on tilapia raised in the old rice paddies, a handful of cattle, hunting, and wood – not because anyone particularly wants to stay, but because there’s nowhere better left to go.
The village fills the bottom of the depression: one muddy main street lined with plain, worn buildings, better kept down the centre than at the edges but never dry. A hillside dominates the skyline ahead, and a small, dark keep watches the whole settlement from its shadow. The people here are worn down rather than openly desperate – older than average, the younger men heavily scarred, conversation low and careful. Two things come up whenever it does: the Lord taxing the place dry, and a fear of “Overseer Kaleb” strong enough to stop a sentence halfway through. At the centre of it all is the Moonlight Inn, run by Brent Spinner – crude tables, a dirt floor, and one genuinely striking feature, a wide circular skylight that drops a shaft of moon or sun straight down through the smoke onto the floor below.
FILE NOTES
Guests summoned up to the keep don’t walk. They’re collected by a windowless, wheelless carriage that hovers a couple of feet off the mud on its own, braked by two poles driven straight into the ground – built more like a travelling prison crate than a coach, because it was one, requisitioned from a prison to the north. Its upholstered benches are scored underneath from manacled prisoners, and the shuttered windows are missing their bars. The ride up is unnervingly smooth for the terrain.
The keep itself opens onto a cobbled courtyard under a single spire’s long shadow, lit more by moonlight than by the handful of torches actually burning – a working manor built for function rather than to impress anyone, and it shows. Inside stays dark, sparse and functional the whole way through, right up until the dining hall, which breaks the pattern entirely: a polished table on marble floor, the walls hung with generations of Valden family paintings tracing the mine, the keep, and a lineage that ends with the one heir left standing.
The old mine workings never really emptied out. The rain-fed cisterns and ore-washing tables that once drew silver clear of the copper are still down there, repurposed as part of Overseer Kaleb’s operation rather than left to rot. It was in those same tunnels that Kaleb turned up the raw deposit of Slagma he later flasked for transport north – the same flask a local crew boss named Avon lifted weeks later without ever quite reading the warning runes correctly, and came away with a young black pudding instead of the payday he was expecting.
Everything Valden’s dinner guests were never meant to see sits below and past that hall – the donjon’s cells, ten-foot stone rooms with prisoners manacled to the walls and a cat-flap for food trays, and further down still, Overseer Kaleb’s laboratory, the actual reason his project rented out Valden’s isolation in the first place.
STATUS: Filed under Locations. Kaleb’s lab and much of the donjon were left in ruins after the Agents’ escape; the keep itself still stands, now run considerably more honestly than it was. See also Lord Valden, Kaleb, Deville, and Kortagor Karver for who lived here, and why, and The Trolls of Arn Griishank for what the mine tunnels are still hiding.