First of Many

Misplaced
Wildlife Ominous Floating Castle Secret Government Warehouse

The Albatross Vault at The Nightcandle Harbors

               Out on the Dagger-Sea, the
ice-laden gulfs of the Imperial South there are glacier hewn isles, grooved and
scrubby, treeless. The tracks of the
sea-serpents, they’re called and upon one of these tall, inaccessible rocks the
Kannyls of Nightcandle, of old – in their Colonial Vanity did cause a great
vault to be built. Carved into stone,
hard to achieve by ship – but inapproachable by any other means – save the once
in a lifetime freezing over of the harbor.
The vault is carved in the cliffside and the hewn out rock was recovered
to form a great dome overtop the handmade caverns. Once constructed the great edifice had a
purpose known only to the founder of the vault-
A Kannyl of Nightcandle’s earliest days called Zarraw (of a now lost
line of that family) – but after the earliest dynasts of Nightcandle were
replaced by their latter Imperial lords the place was put to rest as a
troublesome folly, impossible to access – except by the albatross, tern and
seahawk – all of which creatures nest there in their seasons.

But
later innovation of an existing folly is a hallmark and a point of pride for
the Lords of Nightcandle – who have turned the use of the inaccessible,
impossible vaults to stranger ends than any could have imagined. In the hunts and journeys into the Utter
Dark, into the fallen realm of Sorrowblood and into the Raindrinker interiors,
and as well into the Rimal Steppes they have gathered those strangest birds –
by eggs, all hand raised and let loose in the aviary at the Albatross
Vault. So that the inner chambers and
the inmost rooms are haunted by man-eating birds larger than horses, or by
plump water birds, four pawed and wingless, or by the paw-winged trunk clinging
feathered monkeys. A vast panoply of the
pinioned beasts gathered from the Imperial East, exotic and peculiar, all are
housed in these vaults. Or were, for the
impulse to gather the menagerie, like the impulse to build the vault was a
fading fancy of a dynasty replaced and replaced again here by avid naturalists,
and there by spirited hunters, and oftener than not by the complacent and
neglectful lords who rather rightly turned their interests to human
affairs. And so by sporadic
interventions and avoidances in alternating turns the Albatross Vault (for the
Albatross never varied their devotion to the spot) came to be a strange and
haunted ruin – a wild menagerie of strangely-bred and otherwise extinct creatures. Some new, some forgotten – and on nights of
fatal consequence there have been seen great, fathom-winged birds leaping from
the place, blotting the moon and stars from perception – and the sailors of the
ice-clad harbor know too well the uncanny calls of the prisoned raptors that
are of no place but this one.

Here
and there, a Lord of the Bay, a Tunkannyl, feeling secure in his walls, or a
Rinkannyl goaded to present the trappings of heroism will send out from their strongholds
at Wormstone or Weatherrock some gallants or vagabonds – whichever is in the
vogue of the time – to try and reclaim or rediscover or to merely revisit the vaults. Invariably this fateful enterprise is doomed
to a fatal end, but here and there, someone does return. These few survivors maimed and broken will
tell a tale that is retold until the next lord of the Bay decides to spend his
surplus heroes on the exploration, motivated by the stories he must have heard
at a young age – of a lone survivor – who had seen the great toothed-storks,
the sealbird or the spiderhawk – mad and deadly creatures that certainly
frightened the child-lord, but always with the succulent coda- “and the man returned with a feather of solid
ivory, inlaid with gold, clutching only this one beautiful treasure, he washed
at last to the shore.”