The Norrath Secret Society
​Kaladim: The Forge of Norrath and the Golden Kingdom of the Dwarves
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Introduction: A City Carved From the Mountain's Heart
Deep within the jagged cliffs of the Butcherblock Mountains, behind a great gate marked by a huge carved statue of a dwarf, lies Kaladim, the underground city of the dwarves of Norrath. It is not a city built upon the land but a city carved into it, hewn from living rock and winding ever deeper into the mountain's belly, a network of warrens and halls and forge-lit caverns that its people have shaped over uncounted generations. To the dwarves who call it home, Kaladim is more than a capital. It is the proof of their claim to be the truest children of their god, the physical monument to a people who believe the surface world is a waste of space and who find their true happiness in the caves, caverns, and tunnels that perforate the depths of the world.
Kaladim has been called the forge of Norrath, and the title captures something essential about the place and the people who made it. This is a city of miners and smiths, of stone-cutters and warriors, a golden kingdom raised on the wealth of the mountain's veins and the skill of dwarven hands. Its history is a history of labor and defiance, of gold torn from the deep rock and enemies turned away from the gates, of a proud and stubborn people who have endured wars, cataclysms, and even the invasion of their own god's darker creations. To tell the story of Kaladim is to tell the story of the dwarves themselves, for the two cannot be separated. The city is the dwarves made manifest in stone, and its long chronicle is the chronicle of a race that has never learned how to yield.
This is the history of that city, from the divine act that created its people to the catastrophe that nearly ended them, and the stubborn hope of those who still dream of taking their home back.
The Children of Brell Serilis
Before there was a Kaladim, there was a god, and before there were dwarves, there was the deep. The dwarves are the children of Brell Serilis, the god known as the Duke of Below and the god of the Underfoot, and their entire character as a people flows from the nature of the deity who made them. Brell Serilis was the first of the gods to come to Norrath during the Age of Scale, and from his Plane of Underfoot, a dark realm of vast caves and endless tunnels, he quietly created a magical portal to a cavern deep in the belly of Norrath. Through this portal the Duke of Below seeded the depths of the world with all manner of creatures, populating the darkness beneath the surface with life.
The dwarves are among the most ancient of the civilized races of Norrath, standing on par with the Elddar elves of Tunare and the Kedge of Prexus in the antiquity of their lineage. Their creation was bound up in one of the foundational events of the world's history. The dwarves, along with those other ancient races, were the result of the Duke of Below's pact with the Mother of All and the Oceanlord, a pact struck to suppress the draconic children of Veeshan, and this alliance marked the beginning of Norrath's Elder Age. The dwarves, in other words, were not created idly. They were part of a divine strategy, a bulwark of stout and stubborn folk raised to stand against the dragons in the great contest for the young world. That martial origin echoes through every later chapter of their story, for the dwarves have always been a people made for endurance and defiance.
Brell would go on to create other children. Later he made the gnomes, resembling dwarves to some extent yet more wiry and gnarled, consumed with tinkering and devices far more than their sturdier cousins. And the Duke of Below is claimed as creator by a great many other denizens of the Underfoot as well, a fact that has long been a source of friction. The Runnyeye Clan of goblins claim Brell as their father, much to the disgust of the dwarves of Kaladim, who are certain that only the dwarves are the true children of Serilis. The vicious gnolls of Splitpaw disagree entirely, for was it not Brell who sculpted them out of the sacred Clay of Cosgrove? The kobolds too hold him as their creator, as do many other subterranean races. But the dwarves brook no argument on the matter. They alone, they insist, are the true heirs of the Duke of Below, and Kaladim, home to the main temple of Brell in all of Norrath, is the seat of that conviction. This is not mere pride. It is the theological cornerstone on which the whole identity of Kaladim rests.
It is worth noting that Brell's abandonment of some of his other creations had lasting consequences that would shape the dangers around Kaladim. It was due to the Duke of Below's neglect of the kobold race that some of them turned to the worship of Rallos Zek, the god of war, through one of their own elder shamans, Rolfron Zek, whom Rallos elevated into a demigod of despair. Thus even the family of Brell's children is riven, some faithful and some fallen, and the dwarves of Kaladim find themselves surrounded in their own mountains by kobolds and other creatures who share their divine parentage but not their loyalty.
The Founding: Dagnor Butcherblock and the Golden Kingdom
The recorded history of Kaladim as a kingdom begins with a single name: Dagnor Butcherblock, the first dwarven king. From his time, before the great Elven Empire had been established in the east, the dwarves thrived in the western mountains that surround the forest now known as Lesser Faydark. They settled into the jagged cliffs of the range that would come to bear the founder's name, the Butcherblock Mountains, and there they established their golden kingdom of Kaladim. The land itself is a vast expanse of rough terrain, and though the dwarves scattered guard stations throughout the mountains, they were never able to fully claim the whole region for their own, so that even in the height of their power dangerous monsters wandered freely across the peaks and passes.
The city they built is a marvel of subterranean engineering, completely carved out of the mountains and winding its way ever deeper into the rock. Over the ages it grew into two great districts, North and South Kaladim, each a warren of tunnels and chambers, and the various guilds of the dwarves carved out their own niches in different areas of the caverns, forming an interconnected network of halls that all dwarves call home. The southern district holds the castle of the king in its eastern reaches, along with the warrior's guild, the arena, and the great taverns and eateries where the dwarves take their famous pleasure in drink and food. The northern district holds the temples and forges, the farms and the potteries, the assay offices where the wealth of the mines is weighed and stored. Everywhere in the city the marks of dwarven industry are visible: forges and kilns, brew barrels and looms, the Everhot Forge and Redfist's Metal, merchants selling brellium and ore and the smithy hammers and sharpening stones that are the tools of the dwarven trade.
The heart of Kaladim's greatness, and the source of the envy that would repeatedly bring war to its gates, lay in what the mountain held. The mines of Kaladim were rich in gold, and the stone-cutting skill of the dwarven kingdom was renowned throughout the world. This combination of mineral wealth and craftsmanship made Kaladim the forge of Norrath in truth, a place that produced not only weapons and armor but the very reputation of dwarven quality that spread across the continents. But wealth attracts covetous eyes, and a city built on gold and skill would learn, again and again, that its treasures made it a target.
The Ogre War: The Rakthokian Invasion
The most storied conflict in Kaladim's early history came during the rule of King Grimmly Fireforge, the twelfth dwarven king, and it is a tale the dwarves still retell with a mixture of horror and fierce pride. Under Grimmly's reign, the ogres of a nearby kingdom, the Rakthokian kingdom, grew envious of the gold-rich mountain mines and the stone-cutting mastery of Kaladim. What began as envy curdled into an intense racial hatred, and many small fights broke out between the two kingdoms over the years, a simmering hostility waiting for a spark. That spark came in the middle of the second age, when the great Elven wars were raging to the east and the dwarves found themselves suddenly beset by a bloody war of their own.
The ogres chose their moment with cunning. Knowing that the elves were consumed by their own conflicts and could not afford to lend aid to their dwarven allies, the Rakthokians launched a campaign against Kaladim, confident that no relief would come. The fifth warlord of the Rakthokian kingdom devised a strategy aimed at the very foundations of dwarven strength: he believed the key to annihilating the dwarves lay in destroying the trading centers and mining villages scattered through the northern Butcherblocks. He marched his army of ogres and orcish slaves west across the Hills of Shade, driving directly north without fear of elven intervention, and fell upon the outlying dwarven settlements.
The dwarves still retell the horrible tales of those first ogre attacks. They were unprepared to meet such an unanticipated invasion, and the peaceful outlying cities of northern Kaladim were overrun in the opening days of the war. The ogre warriors showed no mercy whatsoever. They killed hundreds of dwarves, and no quarter was given for women or children, for the old or the infirm. The bloodthirsty ogres and their orcish slaves were thorough in their destruction, so thorough that to this day very few hamlets outside the capital of Kaladim itself can be found. The devastation of that opening assault permanently reshaped the settlement patterns of the dwarven mountains, erasing communities that never rose again. It is one of the darker truths behind the ruggedness of the Butcherblock Mountains: the emptiness of those slopes is in part the scar left by the ogre war.
The Turning: Crakthorn Ridge and the Cunning of King Grimmly
But the Rakthokian warlord made a fatal error. While his army reveled in its wicked deeds, dawdling over the eradication of the dwarves outside the gates of Kaladim, King Grimmly Fireforge was not idle. With the speed and resolve that his people prize, he rapidly gathered a defense, mustering stalwart miners and axe men, trained warriors, and the devoted men and women of Brell Serilis's temples. Anyone strong enough to lift an axe, a sword, or a pick was outfitted and called to arms. Within days of first hearing word of the threat, Grimmly was ready to make his wrath known, and on Crakthorn Ridge, just south of the Gates of Kaladim, the largest force of dwarves ever assembled stood ready to meet the invaders, their king at the fore.
Now it was the ogres' turn for surprise. The fighting on the ridge was savage and brutal, but the dwarves held and then pressed, and the ogres were forced to retreat to more favorable ground. The dwarven army pushed the invaders back into the Hills of Shade and pursued them closely, refusing to let the enemy regroup. Yet Grimmly was not merely a berserker; he was a tactician, and here the story reveals the strategic mind that separates a dwarven king from a mere warrior. Unnoticed by the Rakthokian horde, Grimmly sent a small band of seasoned warriors south and east to scout the enemy's disposition, and near the edge of the Faydark they observed a fighting reserve of the ogre army guarding its southern flank.
This reserve was large and potentially capable of swinging the entire war back in favor of the ogres, but Grimmly's scouts noticed something crucial: it was populated primarily with orcs, the enslaved troops of the ogre masters. And so there occurred one of the strangest events in all of dwarven history, for the only time in known record, the dwarves and orcs entered into an alliance of sorts. Appealing to the innate cowardice of the orcs, Grimmly's representatives convinced the enslaved troops to slink away into the wilder lands of Faydwer, avoiding the risks of battle and the misery of continued servitude at the feet of the ogres. The dwarves promised the orcish slaves that they would leave them to their new freedom if they would simply stop fighting for their masters. The orcs agreed, retreating east from Lesser Faydark and leaving the ogres' southern flank wide open to a second amassing force of dwarves.
Caught between the two pincers of the dwarven army, the ogres were decimated. The vile warlord fled south with his few remaining soldiers, escaping Faydwer altogether, and Kaladim was safe once again. It was a victory won not only by dwarven courage but by dwarven cunning, by a king who understood that the enemy's slaves could be turned into the instrument of the enemy's defeat. The Battle of Crakthorn Ridge and the campaign that followed became a defining legend of the kingdom, a story of a people who met an unanticipated invasion with fury and finished it with wit.
The Bitter Legacy: The Founding of Crushbone
Yet the ogre war left behind a poisoned legacy, one that would trouble the dwarves for ages to come. While Kaladim intended to keep its pact with the freed orcs, one group of orcs failed to keep their end of the agreement. A third of the freed orcs, rather than vanishing into the wild places as promised, opted to settle much too close to the civilized lands of Faydwer. There they founded Crushbone, and the dwarves regarded this as a breaking of the limited alliance, an act that reignited the ancient feud between dwarves and orcs.
The consequences rippled outward. It was these orcs, loosed by the dwarves' bargain, who would go on to trouble the wood elves of nearby Kelethin, and the Kingdom of Kaladim, accepting its role in unleashing the orcs upon its elven neighbors, has ever since maintained a standing bounty on the orcs of Crushbone. There is a certain tragic irony in this. The very cleverness that won the ogre war, the decision to turn the enslaved orcs loose rather than destroy them, sowed the seeds of a new and lasting enmity. The dwarves gained their freedom and their victory, but they also gave Faydwer the orc menace of Crushbone, and they have spent long ages paying down that debt with bounties and blades. It is a fitting lesson in the dwarven manner: even their triumphs come with a stubborn, grinding aftermath that must be worked through generation by generation.
The Kingdom in Its Prime: Stormhammer and the Politics of Pride
By the later ages, the crown of Kaladim had passed to the line of Stormhammer, and King Kazon Stormhammer ruled the golden kingdom from his castle in the eastern part of South Kaladim. The dwarves of this era carried themselves with the pride befitting a people who had produced many of the strongest warriors and most devout priests in all the land, and their politics reflected that same unyielding character. One episode captures the temperament of Kaladim in its prime better than any battle. In more recent times, the taverns and papers of the city buzzed with news of an official trading embargo that King Stormhammer had placed upon the distant human city of Qeynos.
The cause of this embargo was, on its face, almost trivial, and yet entirely characteristic of dwarven pride. It stemmed from a case of discrimination against dwarves by a tavern in western Antonica known as the Lion's Mane. In response to this insult to dwarven dignity, the king of Kaladim called for a complete halt to trade with Qeynos until a proper apology was made by the tavern. That a king would leverage the economic might of an entire kingdom over an act of rudeness at a single tavern tells us much about the dwarves. Their honor is not a small thing to be swallowed for the sake of commerce. An insult to a dwarf is an insult to Kaladim, and Kaladim does not forget, does not overlook, and does not simply move on. The embargo over the Lion's Mane stands as a small but perfect emblem of the dwarven character: proud, stubborn, and utterly unwilling to let a slight pass unanswered, whatever the cost.
This same fierce loyalty and martial spirit made the dwarves of Kaladim valued allies in the great conflicts of Faydwer. The dwarven military, the Stormguard, mustered during the War of the Fey to support the elves of Teleth and Felwithe, marching to the aid of their old allies against a darker foe. They were engaged by the trolls and ogres of the Neriak Alliance in the Lesser Faydark, and the fighting was hard. But the dwarves prevailed at the crucial Battle of Brute Hill, where King Kazon Stormhammer and the Ogrebane Brigade won the day thanks to the Stormhammer itself, a relic of Brell wielded by the royal line. Having broken through to the Greater Faydark, the Stormguard supported the elves through the Teir'Dal's last spiteful assault, when the dark elves set fire to the forest in a final act of malice. That desperate battle became known as the Fires of Faydark, and the dwarves stood with their allies through it. In these wars the dwarves proved that the martial purpose for which Brell had first created them, to stand against the great enemies of the world, still burned undimmed in their hearts.
The Prophecy and the Pilgrimage
The greatest catastrophe in the history of Kaladim did not come from ogres or orcs or dark elves. It came, as the deepest tragedies so often do, from faith and from the deep places the dwarves loved best. Before the Age of Cataclysms, a gnomish construct came to Kaladim, city of the dwarves, bearing an image of the Vaults of Serilis, a temple built by Brell Serilis himself in the deepest reaches of Norrath. To the devout dwarves, for whom Brell is the center of all things and the deep places of the world are holy, the revelation of a temple raised by the very hands of their god in the profoundest depths of Norrath was a call that could not be ignored.
The response was overwhelming, and in hindsight, catastrophic. Most of the dwarves, including the army itself, left Kaladim on a great pilgrimage to find the Vaults of Serilis, journeying into the deep in search of the holy temple their god had built. They left behind only civilians, the ordinary folk of the city who did not march with the pilgrimage, and in doing so they stripped Kaladim of the very defenders who had protected it through every war of its long history. The golden kingdom, which had turned back ogre invasions and stood in the Fires of Faydark, was left nearly undefended, its warriors and its devout drawn away into the depths by the promise of touching the work of their god's own hands.
There is a terrible poignancy in this. The dwarves' greatest strength, their unshakable faith in Brell and their love of the deep, became the instrument of their undoing. A more cynical people might have questioned the gnomish construct and its image, might have kept the army home and sent only a cautious expedition. But the dwarves are not a cynical people. They are faithful to the bone, and when their god's temple called to them from the deep, they answered with their whole strength, leaving their home exposed. The pilgrimage to the Vaults of Serilis is the hinge on which the fate of Kaladim turns, the moment when devotion opened the door to disaster.
The Cataclysm and the Horde of Serilis
Then the Cataclysm struck. In the great upheaval that reshaped the world, Kaladim suffered a severe cave-in, and the collapse trapped many of the dwarves who remained within the city. The dwarves who had been outside, whether on the pilgrimage or otherwise beyond the walls, mounted a rescue expedition to reach their trapped kin, and at first the effort was aided by the trapped dwarves themselves working from the inside, both groups laboring toward each other through the fallen stone. For a time there was hope, the sound of dwarven picks ringing from both sides of the collapse as the two groups fought to reunite.
And then, before the cave-in was cleared, all sounds from within Kaladim ceased.
When the dwarves outside finally broke through into their city, they discovered the full horror of what had happened. The Cataclysm had not merely caused the cave-in. It had opened a path for the Horde of Serilis to leave the Underfoot and invade Norrath. These were creatures of Brell's own dark realm, denizens of the Plane of Underfoot loosed by the tearing of the world, and they had poured through the breach into the trapped and defenseless city. The Horde of Serilis slaughtered the dwarves remaining in Kaladim, every one of them, and then set up the conquered city as their new home. The rescuers broke through only to find a tomb, their kin dead and their ancestral capital occupied by the monstrous children of their own god's dark domain.
The cruelty of this fate is difficult to overstate. Kaladim was not conquered by an ancient enemy or a rival kingdom. It was overrun by the Horde of Serilis, creatures from the very Underfoot that the dwarves hold sacred, the realm of the god they claim as their true father. The dwarves who had marched into the deep seeking the temple of Brell returned to find that the deep had disgorged monsters into their home and butchered those they left behind. The forge of Norrath, the golden kingdom that had stood since the days of Dagnor Butcherblock, fell not to gold-hungry ogres but to the dark bounty of its own god's plane, in the moment its faithful were away seeking that god's holy work. It is a tragedy shaped like a bitter irony, and it left the proud dwarves of Kaladim a people dispossessed, their capital a charnel house occupied by the Horde.
The Living City: Warrens, Forges, and the Dwarven Way of Life
To walk the halls of Kaladim in its living days was to move through a working monument to the dwarven way of life, and the character of the people is written into the very layout of their city. The two great districts, North and South Kaladim, are not arbitrary divisions but reflect the ordered priorities of a practical folk. Everything is carved from the mountain itself, winding ever deeper, and the guilds have each hewn their own niches into different areas of the caverns, so that the city is a network of interconnected warrens rather than a sprawl of open streets. The dwarves would have it no other way, for they find no comfort in the open air and every comfort in the enclosing embrace of stone.
The northern district is the industrial and spiritual heart of the city, where the fires of the forges never cool. Here stands the Everhot Forge, where merchants deal in blunt and sharp weapons, in small chain and plate armor, in the molds and metals of the smithing trade. Here too are the assay office and treasury, where the wealth drawn from the mines is weighed, catalogued, and secured, and where merchants sell the mining supplies, the brellium and ore, the smithy hammers and sharpening stones that are the instruments of dwarven craft. The Greybloom Farms grow what can be grown in the deep, and the brew barrels and ovens turn the harvest into the food and drink that a dwarf considers among the finest pleasures of existence. Nearby rise the temples and guild halls of the clerics and paladins, the devout servants of Brell whose faith anchors the whole enterprise of the city.
The southern district is the seat of power and of dwarven conviviality. Here the king holds his castle in the eastern reaches, guarded by his household warriors, and here the warrior's guild trains the axe men and shield-bearers who form the backbone of dwarven strength. The arena rings with the clash of martial contest. Pub Kal and Irontoe's Eats, the latter the domain of the Irontoe family, serve the alcohol and meat pies that fuel dwarven good cheer, and a bard's song can often be heard drifting through the tunnels. Redfist's Metal and the other smithies keep their forges burning, and merchants deal in the leather, cloth, and steel that outfit a working population. In every quarter, the dwarves go busily about their labor and their trade, protecting their community from the pressures of the hostile world outside, and they carry themselves with an unmistakable pride, for they know that many of the strongest warriors and most devout priests in all of Norrath hail from these very halls.
The Perils of the Butcherblock
Kaladim has never enjoyed the luxury of safety in its own mountains. The Butcherblock range is a vast expanse of rugged terrain, and though the dwarves have scattered guard stations across it, they have never been able to claim the region entirely for their own. Dangerous monsters wander the slopes and passes freely, and the dwarves of Kaladim have always lived as a civilized island in a sea of threats. Chief among these are the very kin-races that dispute the dwarves' claim to Brell's favor. Kobolds lurk in the tunnels and mines, those bulky, stooped, dog-like creatures who share the dwarves' subterranean nature and their divine parentage but none of their civilization, some of them fallen into the worship of Rallos Zek through the demigod Rolfron Zek. Goblins of the Runnyeye Clan press at the edges of dwarven territory, and minotaurs and other beasts haunt the deeper and wilder places.
The geography of Kaladim's surroundings tells the story of a people positioned at a crossroads of the world, and thus perpetually exposed to its dangers and its trade alike. The city's entrance lies along the northern border of the Butcherblock Mountains. To the west of that gate lies the port where ships arrive from the distant continent of Antonica, carrying travelers to and from Freeport across the sea. Far in the other direction, through the mountain passes, lies the entrance to the great forest of the elves, the Greater Faydark, home of the dwarves' longtime allies. To the south runs the narrow pass toward Dagnor's Cauldron. Kaladim thus sits astride the routes between the elven forests and the human lands across the water, a position that has made it a hub of commerce and a bulwark of the free peoples of Faydwer, but also a prize that enemies have repeatedly sought to seize. The dwarves have held their crossroads through war after war, and the guard stations scattered through the hostile mountains are the visible sign of a people who have never been able to rest, and who have never once considered abandoning their post.
The Exiles and the Dream of Return
The story of Kaladim does not end with its fall, for the dwarves are nothing if not stubborn, and a people forged by Brell to endure do not simply accept the loss of their home. In the aftermath of the catastrophe, the surviving dwarves regrouped and turned their thoughts, as dwarves always do, toward reclaiming what was theirs. With the Stormguard still lost in the deep in search of the Vaults of Serilis, King Stormhammer recalled the Irontoe Brigade, and these dwarves now camp in the Butcherblock Mountains, near the gates of their stolen city, planning to build an army and take their home back from the Horde.
This is the enduring image of Kaladim in the later ages: not a fallen ruin abandoned to darkness, but a contested prize with a determined people encamped at its very threshold, refusing to relinquish their claim. The Irontoe Brigade in the Butcherblock Mountains represents the unbroken will of the dwarves, the same stubborn defiance that met the Rakthokian invasion on Crakthorn Ridge now bent toward the recovery of the ancestral capital. The dwarves have lost their city before in a sense, have seen its outlying settlements erased and its people slaughtered, and each time they have answered not with despair but with the patient, grinding resolve to rebuild and reclaim. The dream of return is not idle sentiment. It is the animating purpose of a displaced people who have never once, in all their long history, accepted that a thing is truly lost merely because it has been taken from them.
There is something deeply characteristic in this refusal to yield. The dwarves were created to stand against the dragons at the dawn of the world, made by their god to be a bulwark that does not break. That founding purpose echoes in the encampment at Butcherblock. A people who will place an entire kingdom under embargo over an insult at a tavern will certainly not surrender their holy capital to the Horde without a fight, however long that fight must take. The Irontoe Brigade sharpens its axes in the mountains, and somewhere in the deep the Stormguard may yet be seeking the Vaults, and the dwarves wait, and plan, and endure, as they have always endured.
Conclusion: The Meaning of Kaladim
Kaladim is, in the final reckoning, the truest expression of what the dwarves are. Every element of its long history reflects the character of the people who carved it from the mountain. Its founding on the wealth of the deep mines and the skill of dwarven hands expresses their identity as the forge of Norrath, a people of labor and craft. Its wars against the ogres and its alliances in the Fires of Faydark express their martial origin as a race created to stand against the great enemies of the world. Its embargo over the Lion's Mane expresses their fierce and unyielding pride. And its greatest tragedy, the pilgrimage to the Vaults of Serilis and the fall to the Horde, expresses the depth of their faith in Brell and their love of the deep places, a devotion so total that it left them vulnerable to catastrophe.
The city holds the main temple of Brell Serilis in all of Norrath, and this is fitting, for Kaladim is above all a monument to the conviction that the dwarves are the true children of the Duke of Below. That conviction has cost them dearly. It sent their army into the deep and left their home exposed, and the deep repaid their faith with the Horde of Serilis and the slaughter of their kin. And yet the same faith and the same stubbornness that brought them low also keep them from ever truly falling, for a people who believe they are the chosen heirs of a god, and who were forged to endure the assault of dragons, do not abandon their claims or their home. They encamp at the gates. They recall the Irontoe Brigade. They plan the reconquest. They wait.
Kaladim endures as an idea even when it is lost as a possession, because the dwarves who built it endure. The golden kingdom carved into the Butcherblock Mountains, the forge of Norrath, the seat of Brell's faithful, may pass through the hands of ogres and hordes and cataclysms, but so long as a single dwarf sharpens an axe in the mountains and dreams of the gates, Kaladim is not finished. It is merely occupied, and to a dwarf, occupation is only the beginning of the long, patient work of taking back what was always, by the grace of Brell Serilis, theirs.
