Hello, Embers,
This is the Embers of the Uncrowned Team.
Introducing Saltern Harbor, a map currently in development.
A land where even death is packed white: 'Saltern Harbor'. What is that uneasy feeling hanging over a washed-up admiral's estate?
A strange estate that packs its dead into mummies and waits for them to rise: 'Saltern Harbor'.
Guess the tragedy of the dead who will not rot, and of what happened to the count's daughter.
The dead, still uncorrupted, stacked in the white pits.
What's hiding under this eerie funeral custom?
Mummies that will not rot, a torn-open Saltgrave, and Lady White's coffin shut tight. See the cruel truth waiting for Count White, lord of Saltern Harbor.
(Spoiler text)
Saltern Harbor used to yield a fine salt. Then the grade dropped, and they mostly sold a cheap grade for the burials. The custom was interesting: they laid the body in salt so it would not rot, buried it as a mummy, and believed the dead would walk back someday. The lord is Count White, once a navy admiral. He won the emperor's favor. Now he is a has-been, left on the sidelines. He had a daughter late. From childhood she carried a maternal hereditary illness. They said she would not live long. He hunted for a cure, and in that hunt he met Bella.
Bella came for the funeral custom and the bodies that would not rot. She saw the girl's illness as the same sickness that hits women of the royal house, inherited generation after generation.
Elves who wanted the Royal Glaze, which only royal blood can make, needed a test subject.
Bella promised a cure, took the salt pans, brought in mages in league with the elves, and ran a secret rite.
She got a few low-grade Royal Glazes. The girl could not take the rites. She died.
To the devastated count she put a terrible hope: the girl could live again.
She drove stakes into the salt pans. Corpses in that ground got up and started walking. The count saw it, believed his daughter would return, and went mad for the stakes.
"If I have the stakes, my daughter comes back as many times as I want."
"They don't dig graves there. They just lay the body in a pit filled with salt. Come night, you hear something stirring under that white pit."
A white estate where even death has gone stiff. What is waiting at the far end?