It was once called the Shrouded City but the shroud around Kiiska has fallen. The city was built within the deep jungles of southern Sundara and it very much formed part of the landscape. The city was layered in tiers. On the forest floor, between columns of hollowed out trees was the Undercity, where the paved streets and laneways winded under a canopy of timber decks and vine webbings. It was the domain of half-breeds, beggars and those deemed unworthy of scaling the dizzying heights of elven society.
Above the Undercity, the elves crafted a network of timber platforms and walkways between the branches that was connected to everywhere but led nowhere. The lower trunks and branches were reserved for citizens and artisans and the apartments within the hollowed out trunks were designed accordingly. In this sense, hundreds of elves could live within the trunk of a single redwood. As the branches ascended and the trunks narrowed, the stature of their inhabitants rose. The highest platforms were home to the most privileged. Politicians and the nobility lived a life of hedonism and luxury, protected by mighty spellwards and far from the morass of the Undercity.
At the centre of the city was the White Monarch; a vast whitewood almost three hundred feet high with trunk of over fifty feet diameter. When the old Council ruled, they held court on the highest platform in the White Monarch. The upper tiers now lay abandoned and spell-damaged while the lower sections serve as the stronghold for the new Kiiskan government. The new regime shares their stronghold with the Order of the Morning Sun, who had established a fortified safety zone around perimeters of the inner city. It is from there that they conduct their operations while keeping the city under constant vigilance.
BAKU
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It was a violent neighbourhood; one which the Order and Kiiskan patrols avoided partially because of the stray arrows that tended to find their mark between the joints of armoured plates. It was also the domain of the Harbringers, a faction of Jagon worshippers lead by Warlord Hogarth, a mighty orcish warrior. In an underground storeroom, Baku was among a crowd of singing orcs, goblins, kobolds and humans, strangely united by their circumstances. Incense and smoke filled the chamber, masking the odour of sweat and coupling bodies. They had won a great victory over the Order to which Baku contributed; smashing a supply caravan and freeing prisoners. They passed around racks of salted pork and flagons of spiced wine, exchanging stories and giving in to their baser urges.
At the centre of the room, Warlord Hogarth lay by the stone brazier, straddled by his newest prize. She was one of the freed prisoners, a savage looking woman who called herself Zargen-tesh. She claimed she was human but Baku, among others, suspected she had some goblin blood, with her long hooked nose and filed teeth. Her dark hair was slicked behind her pierced ears and she wore a crude necklace of severed fingers around her thin neck. “JAGON!” Her ecstatic scream rose above the chanting. She drank heavily from the gold goblet, the dark wine running down her chin and between her full breasts. “PRAISE CHAOS! PRAISE JAGON!” The men standing around the room shouted encouragement.
Baku was seated on a low bench in the corner of the room with a leg of roasted horsemeat in one hand. He hadn’t eaten that well for months, and it was his first hot meal since he arrived in Kiiska. Opposite him, sat several of his fellow Harbringers; Rowgar the Orc, Skinny Skreven and Fat Waros.
"baku fought good first time!"* Skreven, a wiry gnoll, raised a steaming tankard to the hobgoblin. “baku shot down three horses!”
"baku smart" Conceded Rowgar, tearing off a chunk of roasted horse. "horse easier hit than metal man"
*Orcish
BRANNA
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Branna had always liked Kiiska. The shrieking of birds in the canopy, the organic architecture of the city and the grey elven devotion to Nai’Tuhra made her feel as comfortable as she had ever been when she was out in the wilderness. She sat on the edges of a treetop platform, Mahb purring beside her in the darkness. The area had once been a popular nightspot, where elves drank their sweet wine and frolicked under patches of conjured illumination. The surrounding apartments were now all darkened and boarded up, one of the first changes under the new regime. Few dared to breach the evening curfew.
Of course, the elves had always been decadent, freely indulging in the pleasures of flesh and dreamweed. In fact, hedonism was encouraged by the Old Kiiskan Council and any who did not partake in such excesses were seen as deviant. But the elves knew their place in nature, never despoiling the jungle in which they made their home. The Order of the Morning Sun were different. Branna had seen huge tracts of forest reduced to nothing more than barren husks by the toxic gas that Order mages had conjured in their warpath to Kiiska.
Branna heard the sounds of feet on the streets below her. From her elevated platform, she could see two figures turning the corner.
DM: Spot and Listen checks from Branna and her animal companion.
KATRIA
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It had only been five weeks since Katria last saw Kiiska. She missed her home, with the raised decks and walkways that twisted between the great redwoods. She also missed the twisting alleyways of the Undercity, where her friends danced between the rare columns of sunlight that pierced the verdant canopy. It was with sorrow that she remembered the last time she saw them, marching off into the jungles with the rest of the Order prisoners. They would all be gone now.
It was evening when Katria left the safehouse and ventured into the streets. The Undercity was almost unrecognisable, empty and lit by torchlight. The acrid odour of smoke filled her nostrils and piles of charred debris were heaped along the rough-hewn pavers. The adjoining buildings and whitewoods were battle-scarred and scorched. The few elves on the streets paid Katria little heed. They may have once been clad in finery but their silken clothes were smeared with dirt and they gave Katria scared, hungry glances before scampering into the darkness.
She recalled walking past her old home, the treetop apartment that she grew up in with her parents, only to find a half-elven couple living there with their two infant children. She was sure that a few blocks down, she saw a famous Kiiskan dancer, once renowned for her beauty, bent over in an alleyway under a balding human soldier. She quickly continued her pace.
She turned a corner, into a row of boarded up terraces under the boughs of a great white fig.
“Halt!” It was a familiar voice behind her. Katria could hear the sound of wood dropping onto the pavers. “Good goddess... Katria? Is that you?”
SHENRA
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“I don’t know why you fight for those terrorists.”
Shenra stared through the fire-hardened bamboo bars of her cell at her gaoler. He was portly man with a thick neck and a closely shaven head. He wore the steel mail and white tabard of an Order soldier. He sat on a crude wooden stool opposite the cell, sharpening his dagger. She struggled against her bonds but the silken rope held. “You’re lucky the Justiciar is granting you people a trial. If I had my way, I would’ve put a knife through your throat.”
It was her second week of captivity. She was in a small ten by five foot alcove in the building which the Order had converted into a makeshift prison. She still remembered the circumstances of her capture, the screams of her companions as they died around her and the dull throbbing at the back of her head as a solid lead mace found its mark. They had been told by their informants that the Order outpost was undermanned and well-supplied. It seemed too easy, a quick hit and run raid that would feed their resistance cell for the next couple of weeks. They took out the sentries easily enough- two green boys who had probably never seen combat before they died screaming in a spray of blood. What she didn’t realise that it was an ambush. By the time the mages arrived, it was already too late.
She looked around the room. It was dark, probably underground and the only source of light was a flickering torch behind their gaoler. From her position, she could see that he sat in a circular room, approximately thirty feet wide, ringed by six other cells. Two of them were occupied; one by a blonde woman in her thirties wearing a dirty shift and another by a bearded man who may have once had a powerful frame but now looked woefully underfed.
DAELRIC
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Daelric sat by the open balcony, looking at the darkened Undercity streets below. For the man who had never been to the jungles of the Deep South, the experience was deeply unsettling First, was the heat. When he had first seen Khallis, he scoffed at the girl’s exposed midruffs and bare arms. He now wiped his forehead and wished that he had packed a set of more comfortable clothes. He was in Oldentown when he had first met the elf. He was drinking in a tavern called ‘The Mermaid’s Pearl’, trying to maintain a low profile when she approached him.
He didn’t find her attractive – he thought she looked too much like a boy with her small, slim figure and rather flat chest with thin legs. However, she had a different proposition for him – join her in the South in a band of rebels. She had promised the usual incentives. Women, gold, magic items. But it was also the prospects of fighting the Order and running to a place far from civilisation. She had told him that the Order of the Morning Sun had taken the city and there was now a resistance forming against the occupiers. After two weeks of riding and three days of being eaten alive by jungle bugs, he had finally arrived in the outskirts of Kiiska.
The room in the safehouse was comfortable but sparsely decorated. The walls were formed out trunks of the ashen whitewood and the ceilings were coiled from the knotted tangles of the strangler fig. A small round table with four wicker chairs was placed in the centre of the room, the pale timbers illuminated by the pale glow of a magical cantrip. He heard the sound of steps from behind the door. Khallis would be coming.
FEEONA
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She was a small sun-kissed girl with almond green eyes and auburn hair. Gods, those eyes! Feeona remembered staring at them as Khallis recounted the sacking of Kiiska and the rape of women by Morning Sun soldiers. It seemed at odds with everything the Church of the Morning Sun had taught her; the lessons of love and respect for her fellows. Of course, her own experiences as part of the campaign taught her otherwise.
Most women who fought for the Order of the Morning Sun were hardened veterans, trained to kill and defend the cause of the Goddess. The ones who were not often entered the convent and served Mornay in other ways. However, some of the men were a different story. Several of them would have been green boys with no experience of war or women before they signed into the army. Many others were plucked from their farms and workshops across both empires, and sailed to a strange land far away from home or family. They would have fought in the putrid jungles for months, seeing their friends die around them. Of course, when the Sol Jeremiah Bradford preached that all creatures were made to serve the will of man, she could see how a few of her former compatriots would have interpreted the message.
She met Khallis when she was working in Oldentown as a waitress at the Constance, a higher-end restaurant in the fancy part of town. The elf seemed to look beyond Feeona’s menial job and they spent the rest of the evening after work discussing religion, politics and the resistance forming in Kiiska. The way that she spoke; in an accent inflected common, captivated Feeona. That was when she decided to make a return to the Deep South.
Feeona followed Khallis up into the safehouse. She could not help but notice the elf girl’s bottom, tightly wrapped in black leather trousers and swaying as she ascended the stairs formed from the spellwarped tangles of a strangler fig. “This is just one of our many safehouses,” Explained the girl, “Hold onto the railings and watch the steps.”
The Forbidden Land of Sundara: Insurgency IC
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