Nighthaven, long since whispered to exist, reveals itself like a full moon beyond a pale night cloud. I’ll tell you the tale of Nighthaven, as my Baba once told me every night before I lay my head to sleep.
The land is ruled by its domineering King with an ill-tempered fist. The populace and peasantry serve the Crown, gutted by both the unfair taxation and the horrors of the dimly lit woods which engulf it. Nighthaven’s currency is not just gold and wheat by the barrel, but nightmares and dreams and memories that fade to wisps. Charms, totems, and talismans guard the doorframes of every villager, patient for the relieving chime of a bell’s new day. For there are secrets, darker than the imagination, that lurk behind the corner of your eye.
The traveling troupe of the Grand Carnival leads a rebellion, stashed away in the deep recesses of the territory. Hidden from the aggressions of the ruling House and its lower court: House Varlaam, House Bathory, House Carmilla. These few oligarchs who command the rabble are just as vicious in their rage as they are in their gluttonous everyday excess. Servants of the castle-rich speak in hushed tones beyond cold steel gates and dark dungeons, willing to look past the atrocities committed in the dead of night for a few more coins, or a few more days of sanity, whichever is most needed at the time.
The capital of the realm, the King’s own castle, expands on the horizon as if a great wailing behemoth. Impossibly immense—a man-made mountain that grips the mind in its lavishness and enormity. A castle keep that swallows the horizon like the whale swallowed Jonah, but without the promise of God’s return or saving. Once the Castle has claimed you in its bowels, you are nothing more than another fixture, another book of memories lodged on a dusty shelf to never be remembered again. The King’s Castle is a fortress that is said to be as wide as it is tall, and burrows just as deep as its towers graze the moon.
And standing in it all, the great reminder: the Clocktower, a looming and ever-present monument to the truest of secrets, that eternity is not forever. Death comes for us all. Even in Aeternum.
Baba said there once was the promise of a nation now steeped in misery, and none can look further than the abandoned villages, farmyards, and animal pens of the smallfolk in the Manorlands. Their daily toil and the sweat of their brow feed this nation—yet the pigs, chickens, and cows are not the true livestock.
Deep in the Hinterland, a bounty amasses of perfect pumpkins and golden apple orchards. Left untended, these wild sprouts give way to wild things. The forests run red with persistent fall colors to the north, to Highmarch, and these perfectly splendid colors soon fade along the borders of cursed woods and tumbling sorrowthorn briars, thick enough to strangle the reindeer that still call this land their home. Wild and dangerous, the cursed woods are home to apocryphal beasts that walk on two legs like man, but are urged by a mammalian instinct of true predation.
Nighthaven is full of secrets, Baba says. So many secrets hidden beneath the surface like flesh-eating ticks hiding underneath your skin. For all its liminal shades, the crust of Nighthaven and the overworld are but fleeting, like ghostly dancers still stepping to music unheard.
But Baba said, Nighthaven is a carcass. And the worms and maggots below are the real Nighthaven. Endless miles of catacombs, caverns, caves, and crevasses are the permanent home of so many fresh and unsightly horrors. To step into the Underworld below Nighthaven is stepping into your own doom. If the risen dead, or the madness of ghosts, cannot claim you, then the eight-legged children of Uttu certainly shall.
But what saving grace is there to run from these terrors? These soul-wracking phobias? Baba says there is hope, if you cling to the Towers that dot the land. Rising above the darkness, as if built as a means to escape the thickness of dread below, you’ll spot dozens of safe places above the treeline. Like the jagged teeth of a rabid beast, the Towers of Nighthaven promise sanctuary if you can decipher their runed, magicked stones. These places are infused with the magic of the old ways, but they can betray you if you do not master your own mind and memory. Shadows of the past will rob you of your senses if you cannot withstand the torment of your own mind.
Baba also says there was once a group of people who tried, and failed, to cut and burn back the horrors of Nighthaven. Their shrill cries and religious texts and fervent dedication to their church were their sword, their shield, and their sanity. But after marinating in so much hatred and rage, they lost the latter, and became just as mindless and corrupt as the terrible things they swore would be eradicated. And now their story is just another red brushstroke on the canvas of Nighthaven, their angels fallen and their priests inflamed with an unconscious need to destroy.
Like all things, Baba says, all things in Nighthaven are to be feared. Fear is what keeps us alive. Fear is what keeps us moored to our own minds and not lost in the ocean of darkness, the moon our only loose connection to what is real and what is not. In Nighthaven, you cannot trust your own eyes or your own thoughts, but you can trust your own fear.
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