INQUISITION OF MANOR SEVERSOVA
Once the Horseman of War’s onslaught was quelled and the Ministry lay in ruin, the Old Lights of Solstitheo withdrew into the Umbra at the heart of the central sea. Their estates along the Canals stood abandoned, and in Edelith a desperate vacuum of power yawned wide. In the Eastern Fringe and beyond, military orders like the Steelside Legion rose swiftly, offering rank and recognition to any who would swear the blade. The Western Fringe splintered among rival New Light houses eager to seize authority in the Ministry’s absence. Yet lacking legitimacy, these would-be rulers found their subjects slow to trust them after the devastation of the Great Schism.
On the eve of a great battle in the Singedlands, a Goliath woman from the northeastern reaches arrived beneath storm-dark skies, flanked by a retinue of silent knights. Their shields bore the owl-crest of the Septentrional Expanse, and their lady carried with her an air as cold as winter iron. A New Light nobleman received her into his keep, hoping to secure her allegiance. He sought a militia strong enough to crush his rivals along the Canals and knew her to be affiliated with a mercenary corps of rare skill.
He did not survive the night.
The woman wore a visor of steel that concealed a jagged scar across her eyes. Before the hearthlight, she is said to have looked into the duke’s very soul and spoken aloud his hidden crimes: adultery, murder, and the torture of his own servants. By dawn he raved of specters clawing at his mind, phantoms dredged from his past. Madness claimed him; death soon followed. With no clear heir and little appetite among the court to assume his disgraced mantle, the northern lady was reluctantly granted the deed to his estate.
What followed was remembered as an inquisition.
Nobles whose hearts were impure and who sought audience with the lady found their sins laid bare. The scandals of the Great Schism, buried by the New Lights in their scramble for power, were unearthed through her uncanny clairvoyance and brought to judgment. From the husk of the fallen house rose a new name:
Manor Seversova
Severed from the authority of Bjornguard and the Iron Fang Sect alike, it proclaimed itself a bastion of elite judgment.
Within the Court of the Viscountess, trespassers and condemned aristocrats were delivered in chains. There, before the northern lady, each soul was weighed. Her justiciars dispensed sentences befitting the crime, enforcing a harsh but unyielding order across the Eastern Fringe. Few dared challenge Manor Seversova. Many instead offered patronage, bending knee to the new axis of power. Though she seldom appeared in public, the Viscountess’s presence pressed upon the region like a drawn blade, shaping it through fear and grim reverence.
Thus, when word came of an inventor responsible for the sterilization of the Stillight District, Viscountess Erda Krastov did not hesitate. She dispatched her legion of knights to the war-torn peninsula of Edelith Gothitas, where judgment awaited.
