Location: Eredran Fields
War: The Ascendant March
Heroes: Lord Thamior Avenloré
From “Chronicles of Dominion: The Evergild Ascendancy, Vol. IV”
Chapter IX: The Securing of the South — The Battle of Eredran Fields
In the culminating days of The Ascendant March, as disorder clung to the southern plains like mist over the Fens, the Evergild Council identified one final pocket of resistance: a fractured network of ideological agitators who called themselves Rememberers.
These seditionists, though dressed in the trappings of scribes and scholars, posed a dire threat to the realm’s unity. Their aim was not physical conquest, but ideological unraveling — they sought to corrupt the minds of the people, to destabilise trust in the Council, and to muddy the clarity of sanctioned truth.
This final stronghold had taken root in the lowlands of Eredran — a swathe of untamed territory bordering the Shrouded Fens. There, amid black-barked elms and fog-choked hollows, the rebels had hoarded unsanctioned texts, unverified histories, and dangerously fragmented myths. The Council could not — would not — allow their infection to spread.
To lead the final campaign, the Council turned to a rising star of noble lineage and iron discipline: Lord Thamior of House Steel.
Young, untested in high command but lauded for his precision and loyalty, Thamior was granted full authority. The command was clear: restore dominion. Leave no ember to reignite.
His strategy was swift and elegant.
Encircling the grove in silence, he allowed no envoy, no declaration. The rebels, deluded by their own words, never expected the flame. In three days, it was done. The grove fell. The texts burned. The echo of heresy was stilled.
Thamior returned not in parade but in silence. His blade was clean. His eyes, sharper than before. Only his armour bore marks — dark streaks across the gauntlets and breastplate. Not blood, they say, but ink. Ink from the so-called “final record,” splashed or smeared in the chaos of collapse.
Thus the bards called him:
The Ink-Stained Knight.
For his clarity of action and unflinching resolve, Thamior was elevated — first in esteem, then in alliance. Soon after, he was joined in union to Velarienne Avenloré, heir to the House of Scholars. The marriage, like the campaign, was seen as a sealing of the new era: strength and knowledge, united under one truth.
The Battle of Eredran Fields marked the final turning of the page. No monument marks the place. The grove was not rebuilt. The ash was scattered, and the fields seeded anew.
All that remains is order.
So the histories would have you believe.
The Evergild account is crisp, composed, and complete. It leaves no room for hesitation, no place for questions.
But history — real history — rarely wears such polished boots.
Those who still walk the edges of the Shrouded Fens tell it differently. There, the name Eredran Fields stirs not pride, but silence. And if you press gently enough — in a moss-choked inn, or beside a flickering fire — someone might mention the grove.
Not a stronghold, but an archive.
Not rebels, but Rememberers.
Not enemies, but guardians of lost truths, forbidden lineages, and forgotten names.
They say Thamior did ride at the front. But he did not leave unmarked. That the ink on his armour was no accident. That it came not from a shattered tome, but from a hand, desperate and defiant, pressed to his chest in the grove’s final moments.
And they say he never spoke of it again.
Not to his wife. Not to his children. Not to the historians who carved his name in marble.
But the land remembers.
And long after the Evergild burned the grove and salted the silence, someone — or something — returned to bury a fragment in the earth. A single page, folded like a pressed flower. Unfinished. Unforgotten.
One day, Gwynviène Avenloré will find it.
And she will not be alone.
