The Gorgon Incident

The following files are the sum of the intelligence Havath has been able to gather regarding the Gorgon Incident a few years back. Much of it is unverified, and a good portion is likely Skyhold or Sydapsyn counterintelligence. This document is restricted, and may only be read with Duarch permission. 

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Official Duarch Report on Gorgons:

The gorgons are one of the less populous sapient races on Anastis, and the only major bipedal sapient species other than humans. (There is a small minotaur population, but debate as to whether minotaurs are actually intelligent remains fierce. Tool-using, certainly, and dangerous, absolutely, but language use has still never been observed among them. Of course, not much has been observed from them other than fleeing from strangers or attacking in rage if cornered.)

Like the naga, gorgons appear to have once been human, altered into servitors by the dragons of the [redacted]. They can be found across many worlds, and are even more widespread than the naga. With the collapse of the [redacted], they no longer serve dragonkind, and tension between them and the dragons tends to remain high, even on Anastis, despite the fact that Anastan dragons were never affiliated with the [redacted]. Relations between the naga and the gorgons are quite close on Anastis, unlike on many worlds. Neither, of course, have anything approaching good relations with the hydra, the only other dragon-engineered species on Anastis in any significant numbers. 

That’s entirely unsurprising, of course, since the dragon-engineered hydra are hyper-aggressive carnivorous weapons who view everything smaller than them as food- and most everything is smaller than they are. (Not to mention, they aren’t sapient. It could be worse, though— at least true hydras aren’t present on Anastis.) 

Gorgons are significantly taller than humans, often half again their height or more. There have been some gorgons well topping twice the height of a tall human, though that is rare. Gorgon bodies are less dense than humans, though they still massively outweigh them due to sheer size.

Gorgons can live for around two to three centuries, unlike naga, who only live one to three decades longer than humans. Rarely, some gorgons can reach four centuries in age. There are, apparently, physical traits that allow gorgons to know if they’ll be among those especially long-lived among their species. We’re unsure exactly what those traits are, but it is publicly known that Karna Scythe has them.

Gorgons have a unique symbiotic lifecycle. They are born without their characteristic snake hair (gorgons give birth to live young, they don’t lay eggs), and only acquire them as they near adulthood, when they bond with living snakes, becoming a single organism. The primary benefits to this are, contrary to popular claims, cognitive and sensory, not for combat, at least for most gorgons. It should be noted that the snake tails don’t go into their skulls, but rather sweep back their skull, merging with their spines.

Gorgons do NOT have the ability to turn people into stone, despite folktales to the contrary. They do, however, possess significantly larger proportions of stone mages than humans do— this, however, is might be due to the rocky environments they prefer, and humans living in similar environments often have high proportions of stone mages as well.

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The following interviews are the most detailed we’ve gathered regarding the incident, which is, frankly, a depressing statement, given how unreliable most of them are. For clarity purposes, we’ve spliced the interviews together, to give a more coherent narrative.

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Interview with Sharp Jon, lumber merchant and captain of the Drunken Drake:

Sharp Jon: You’ll buy the whole load?

Interviewer: Provided your story is as detailed as promised, yes.

SJ: You’d better not be holding a knife to my anchor rope, now.

Interviewer: I’m unfamiliar with that idiom, but I’m telling you the truth. Now, the story?

SJ: It’s just, I can’t go to Sydapsyn anymore, and it’s been hurting my coffers.

Interviewer: I understand, and we’re here so you can tell us why you can’t trade in Sydapsyn anymore.

SJ: Fine, fine, don’t get yourself all worked up. I used to run the paper triangle— it’s what we call the loop between Emblin, Theras Tel, and Sydapsyn. Lumber, wool, and fish from Emblin; luxury goods, spices, and glass from Theras Tel; stone, alchemical products, and paper from Sydapsyn. One of their big carved mountains is dedicated towards all sorts a’ nasty alchemical processes, including turnin’ Emblin lumber into paper. Some people add Skyhold in as a fourth stop, I never felt the need.

Interviewer: And which direction did you run the triangle in your sandship?

SJ: I ran it widdershins, normally, so Emblin to Theras Tel to Sydapsyn and back to Emblin again. This time I lucked into a good deal on lumber meant for pulping— the ship that had been meant to pick it up was taken by pirates on its way to Emblin. So I reversed my course to Sydapsyn, even took the faster route along the mountains, rather than looping farther out into the Erg. More risk of rocks beneath the sands, as well as monsters and pirates, but I made it through no trouble with time to spare. It was risky, but I ended up making a tidy profit from it, and if I…

Interviewer: Why don’t you jump ahead a bit to the passenger?

SJ: Sure, sure. She showed up as we were finishing loading for the trip back to Theras Tel, wanted passage. Not to Theras Tel, though— she wanted to go to the Whistling Cliffs. Not too far out of my way, and Calavandia is decently friendly for a lich, if a bit crazy.

Interviewer: What did the passenger give her name as?

SJ: Some gemstone or other. Aquamarine? Lapis? Something blue, I can’t recall what. Paid handsomely for the trip, though— I’d have happily settled for less, not that I told her that. 

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Excerpt from interview with Ollin the Stout, Theran merchant clerk residing in Sydapsyn during the incident:

Ollin the Stout: Her name was Citrine, and she bribed me for access to the shipping schedules for the sandships in the docks. I would have given them to her for free if she’d asked, they were public information the ships provided. They keep their routes secret, but no sense in hiding their schedules.

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Sharp Jon interview continued:

Sharp Jon: Anyhow, the trouble hadn’t started yet when I’d left.

Interviewer: There’d been nearly two dozen grisly murders, and someone melted a restaurant.

SJ: Alright, well, the trouble for me hadn’t started yet.

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Official Duarch report on Sydapsyn:

Sydapsyn, the only gorgon city on the continent, is northeast of Theras Tel, in the Skyreach Range between Skyhold and Highvale. Following the collapse of the Ithonian Empire and the regained independence of the gorgons, Sydapsyn remained something of an enigma to the rest of the world for centuries. 

A century and a half ago, Karna Scythe came to power. She is a significant great power in her own right, easily rivaling Chelys Mot among the great powers of the Endless Erg, though not quite on the same level as Kanderon, Ilinia Kaen Das, or Indris. (Meaning it would take her most of a day to level a major city, rather than merely an hour or two.) Unfortunately, she’s easily on a par with any of our own great powers in strength, and is likely considerably harder to kill. 

Sydapsyn itself is a majestic sight— the gorgons, over the centuries, have carved and reshaped seven adjacent mountains into massive circular ziggurats, with homes and businesses carved into the walls of the tiers. 

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Excerpt from official Sydapsyn statement on the incident:

The violence was the beginning of a campaign of terror to seize power by a rogue archmage. The Queen personally ended his poorly-planned campaign when she was made aware of it. The citizens of Sydapsyn have nothing further to fear from him.

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Anonymous Gorgon Bureacrat within Gorgon government:

Anonymous Source: There was no archmage. The murders and the melted restaurant were a heist gone awry. I’m not highly placed enough to know exactly what was stolen, but it was apparently a huge deal. A lot of people lost their jobs or worse over the matter. 

Interviewer: Did the woman who fled on the Drunken Drake commit any of the murders? 

Anonymous Source: At least four. The crew that performed the heist fell out afterward, for whatever reason. They killed each other off, along with a number of witnesses and bystanders, as well as melting the restaurant they’d based their operations out of. 

Interviewer: Do we know the woman’s affinities?

Anonymous Source: I’ve heard, alternatively, that she was a hair mage, a vine mage, a wire mage, a fiber mage, or a mold mage. I’d wager it was one of the first four, given the obvious similarities there. The last seems an odd inclusion, and was probably one of the other members of the heist.

Interviewer: Were any other members of the thieving crew captured?

AS: No, they all perished during the infighting. 

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Sharp Jon interview continued:

Sharp Jon: She was a nervous sort— jumped whenever anyone spoke to her, spent most of her time either locked in her cabin or staring back towards Sydapsyn from the deck. Never left the ship to stretch her legs when we stopped to check the ship’s sand runners or anything.

Interviewer: Did she bring much in the way of personal effects?

SJ: No, just the one bag. Never left it out of her sight, and kept her clothes clean with cantrips, never changed them. 

Interviewer: It didn’t arouse your suspicion that she only had one bag and never changed her clothes? You never thought she might be running from something?

SJ: She was paying well, I didn’t much care.

Interviewer: And when did you realize you were being followed?

Sharp Jon: So I wake up one morning, come to deck, and what do I see? No less than twelve sandships cresting the horizon behind us!

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Gavram Tell, mercenary mage (probable pirate) interview:

Gavram: There were seven ships to start out with, but two were sabotaged and fell behind— not all of us were hired by the same patrons. My company and I were all hired by [redacted], but . Three more joined the pursuit over the next few days, including a pair of warships from Sydapsyn, but open fighting didn’t break out until we were just a few hours out from the Whistling Cliffs. 

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Anonymous Drunken Drake Crewmember interview (name withheld by request):

Crewmember: There were six ships, cap’n was just seeing double as usual. He was drunk at the least, had probably been chewin’ or smokin’ somethin’. Ah’m not sure ah’ve ever seen ‘im sober.

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Sharp Jon interview continued:

Interviewer: What did you do then?

Sharp Jon: Well, I knew something was up, so I ordered more sail tacked on, and began evasive maneuvers.

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Gavram Tell interview continued:

Gavram: The ship we were following was steering so badly from the get-go we had no idea they were heading towards the Whistling Cliffs until we were less than a day out, or we would have cut ahead. No one else made a move on the ship because we were all watching each other.

Interviewer: And that’s when the Radhan ship appeared?

Gavram: Not right away— the Whistling Cliffs were already in sight when the ship joined the stern chase.

Interviewer: And what was so unusual about it?

Gavram: Well, that’s easy enough— it was carrying more sail than I’ve ever seen on any sandship, let alone one that small. It’s simply not possible to fit masts that large onto the ship— it was a huge crescent, wrapping around the sides and top of the ship, easily three times the hull’s width. If not more.

Interviewer: And when it drew closer?

Gavram: That was the funny bit. That giant sail? It was made of paper.

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Official Duarch report on The Whistling Cliffs:

The Whistling Cliffs is the demense of the lich Calavandia. She was a powerful stone mage in life, like many other liches (between a third to over half of all known liches are stone liches), and carved the Whistling Cliffs out of a mid-sized mesa jutting out of the sand. Unlike Theras Tel, the Whistling Cliffs aren’t volcanic in origin, but are actually a coarse-grained sandstone. At the heart of the demesne lies a labyrinth, providing ample mana for the city.

During the construction of her demesne, Calavandia carved a winding maze of canyons into the mesa, deep enough for the sands of the Erg to run through. She carved countless homes, markets, and even palaces into the cliffs of the canyons, where they keep cool in the shade during the day, and are well-protected from sandstorms. 

Immense magical pumps, designed along the same lines as those of Skyhold and Theras Tel, pump water from the aquifers below-ground. Piping systems run through the cliffsides, providing ample water to all the buildings, as well as watering countless hanging gardens along the cliffside.

The Whistling Cliffs should have been a bustling city in the Endless Erg. It should have been a rival to Theras Tel— at the very least, it would have certainly surpassed it in beauty. 

There were, however, two major problems that doomed Calavandia’ efforts. 

The first was the destruction of Louthem. The mining city’s fall precipitated a massive southerly and westerly shift in trade routes that moved them well away from Calavandia’ demesne.

The second and larger problem was the labyrinth.

A few years after Calavandia’ demesne was completed, and near the end of the construction of the city within it, something changed within the labyrinth. We suspect it connected to a new world— one with immensely higher air pressure than Anastis. The entrances to the labyrinth were blasted open by the wind rushing through the labyrinth, and most of the labyrinth’s contents were expelled. (Thankfully, most of the creatures were killed in the process.) 

There is, we suspect, something wrong with the labyrinth itself— labyrinths usually seem to prevent situations like this from occurring. (The mechanisms, like so much else about labyrinths, are unknown, save to the long-vanished Labyrinth Builders.) 

The wind that began rushing endlessly from the labyrinth began weaving through the canyons, filling them with constantly blowing sand. This is where the name Whistling Cliffs comes from— the wind howling through the cliffside dwellings produces whistles, shrieks, and howls ceaselessly. Calavandia’ city once had another name, but none use it now.

Calavandia proved unable to stop the wind from blowing— the wind was simply too powerful to even cap the labyrinth, and numerous secondary and tertiary entrances seem to have been opened throughout the city. Overlap events are also fairly common, producing random destructive bursts of wind throughout the city multiple times a day.

The Whistling Cliffs are, simply speaking, too noisy, windy, and unpleasant for anyone to want to live there. Most of the great hanging gardens are dead and torn apart by wind, now. Calavandia’ project is a complete and utter failure.

Calavandia is still alive, for lich values of life, but we suspect that won’t last much longer— she has retreated farther and farther into herself in despair and loneliness, and we predict that she’s likely to end her own existence sooner than later. She spends most of her time dormant as it is.

Given that the wind emerging from the labyrinth is similar in composition to that of Anastis, and contains no poisonous gases, we suspect that it is coming from a world similar to [redacted], if not from [redacted] itself. For obvious reasons, we are unable to test that hypothesis on [redacted] itself.

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Sharp Jon interview continued:

Interviewer: Why did you agree to enter the Whistling Cliffs? The canyons are notoriously hard to navigate, and the Drunken Drake is hardly the most agile of ships.

Sharp Jon: Money.

Interviewer: …would you care to elaborate on that?

Sharp Jon: Lots and lots of money. A passenger offers me that much, I’ll do just about anything.

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Anonymous Drunken Drake Crewmember interview continued:

Crewmember: Say what yeh will about ‘im, but the cap’n is no coward. Well, maybe ‘e is while sober, but given that ah’ve never seen him sober, who knows. Ah thought we were about ta’ die as we entered the Whistlin’ Cliffs.

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Gavram Tell interview continued:

Interviewer: Was the Radhan ship with the paper sails still pursuing you as you followed the Drunken Drake into the Whistling Cliffs?

Gavram Tell: Not all of its sails were paper, just the extra ones. 

Interviewer: Regardless.

Gavram Tell: It was ahead of us by then. I’ve hardly ever seen a ship going that fast, save when it was propelled by an archmage. Which I suppose this one was.

Interviewer: And the battle?

Gavram Tell: It had started about two hours out from the Whistling Cliffs— the pair of gorgon ships started firing spells first, but it quickly became something of a free-for all. We were all spread out, though, so there were only two sandships lost in the early battle— one small scout ship destroyed by the gorgons, and then I severed the mast of one of our rivals, who were forced to fall behind.

Interviewer: Do you mind telling us how you did that?

Gavram Tell: I’m a steel mage, specializing in spells halfway to being siege magic. I can launch these big sharpened steel rings, about as wide as I am tall, a little farther than the average ballista can launch a bolt. I can only launch a few per battle, but that’s all I usually need, especially in a stern chase.

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Anonymous Gorgon Bureacrat interview continued:

Anonymous gorgon: I wasn’t actually there, but my [redacted] was, so I can share her version of events and the reports I have access to.

Interviewer: That’s fine. 

Anonymous gorgon: So, apparently, just after the battle entered the canyons of the Whistling Cliffs, one of the ships started eating another. 

Interviewer: It what, now?

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Gavram Tell interview continued:

Gavram Tell: I won’t talk about that.

Interviewer: You’re willing to talk about everything else.

Gavram Tell: Everything else didn’t give me nightmares. 

Interviewer: It was destroyed, though.

Gavram Tell: Died, you mean. And I never saw it die. Let’s talk about something else.

Interviewer: I’m willing to increase your fee.

Gavram Tell: I suppose the nightmares weren’t that bad.

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Innem Witherhand, Captain of the Sand Knife, interview:

Innem Witherhand: I’m not sure what, exactly, it was. It only had a single crewmember on deck, but they were covered in bandages, and never moved away from the mainmast. 

Interviewer: Was it alive?

Innem: I’m not sure. It definitely had a mouth, and definitely was taking huge bites out of other ships, but… I dunno. The few of us that survived the battle have argued over this endlessly. Some of us think the lone crewmember was just a freakishly powerful wood mage manipulating the ship, others think it was some sort of insane mobile lich, and a few others think it was actually alive. 

Interviewer: It bled, though, right?

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Gavram Tell interview continued:

Gavram Tell: Embedded one of my blade rings at least five feet deep into the side. Something dripped out of the hull. I don’t know if it was blood, though— never seen bright yellow blood that melts your flesh if it hits you, though. Killed three of my crewmates. 

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Sharp Jon interview continued:

Sharp Jon: I only caught a brief glimpse of whatever that thing was. Real ships don’t have dozens of legs that unfold from the sides. It was the third pursuer that got close, though. The first two was the ship with the paper sails, the second was some mercenary or other, the third was that awful false ship.

Interviewer: Then what happened?

Sharp Jon: Some fellow in what looked like paper armor flies from the Radhan ship to mine, then my passenger up and flies away down a side canyon. He follows. That awful false ship takes a bite out of the side of the mercenary ship, then swerves off down the side canyon after my passenger and the other flier. That was when the legs unfolded— it used them to push off the canyon walls, make an absurdly sharp turn after the fliers.

Interviewer: And the Radhan ship?

Sharp Jon: All the extra paper sails all fall off, then it swerved down a different side canyon. After that, I got out of there as fast as I could. Never had anything else to do with it.

Interviewer: That doesn’t seem quite enough to get you banned from Sydapsyn.

Sharp Jon: Oh, that’s not why I got banned from Sydapsyn. The, uh, port authorities there took a more detailed look at my ledgers after the incident, figured out exactly how much smuggling I’d been doing. Now, about that cargo of mine?

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Gavram Tell interview continued: 

Gavram Tell: We got out of there as fast as we could after the ship’s blood or whatever splattered our deck. We never saw any legs or anything like that. Whatever that thing was, it wanted the same thing we did, and we weren’t going to fight with it. To make things worse, the lich started waking up after that, and she was angry. She smashed at least a ship or two. You could hear her yelling over the wind. She collapsed one of his canyons entirely, I hear.

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Captain Innem Witherhand interview continued:

Innem: My ship was pretty badly damaged when the false ship bit into it, but we were still mobile. We’d lost a lot of speed, so we were able to make the turn into the side canyon easily enough.

Interviewer: And that was when Calavandia began waking up?

Innem: That’s right.

Interviewer: Could you make out what she was shouting?

Innem: Not a word of it. It was clear, however, that she was angry at the living ship. I’ve never heard of any lich being nearly that incoherent or berserk before. That’s why I mostly lean towards thinking the living ship was some sort of mobile demesne for a lich. It’s happened before, with the, uh… Serpent’s Kiss?

Interviewer: Hydra’s Kiss. That was a water-going ship, not a sandship, though, and it was destroyed decades ago. And why would the presence of another lich enrage Calavandia so much? The evidence seems fairly slim.

Innem: It’s just a guess, but I’d imagine that having two lich demesnes overlapping couldn’t be pleasant. It would also explain the so-called-blood- it must have been some sort of alchemical compound used to help maintain the lich.

Interviewer: What happened then?

Innem: Calavandia collapsed the canyon ahead of us, and we lost sight of the false ship. We barely stopped in time to keep from crashing into the rockfall.

Interviewer: That was when it was destroyed?

Innem: I sure hope so.

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Aftermath:

Alustin Haber, the self-styled “Last Loyal Son of Helicote”, is the subject of numerous reports in our files already, as well as an extensive dossier. This incident, however, is one of the more notable in his career that does not directly involve Havath, and has resulted in a major reassessment of his capabilities and threat level, even moreso than the Vineford Garrison incident. 

(It should be noted that the mother hydra is still nesting in the ruins, where Alustin lured it after he stole its egg. Attempts to recover and rebuild the garrison have proven fruitless, and there is no other suitable location for a garrison in the nearby jungles— until several of our Great Powers can be assigned to drive the hydra off the Vineford plateau, the region will remain porous to smugglers and spies. One great power will NOT be sufficient to drive away a nesting hydra of that size.)

We still don’t know what the false ship was, exactly. The mobile lich theory has the most supporters, and though we’ve kept the evidence concealed, the overlapping demesnes would explain Calavandia’s belligerence and incoherence. We certainly had enough similar difficulties during the construction of Havath City, though we’ve thankfully kept those under wraps. It has to be noted that there are a number of problems with that theory, and a large number of our scholars believe that whatever the false ship was, it didn’t meet the technical requirements to be a lich. 

All the plausible alternatives, however, are far more disquieting, some even outright horrifying. Worst of all, several of our [redacted] have speculated that it might have been a [redacted]. Until any physical evidence can be found, we can’t be sure what it was. Calavandia has been absolutely no help— she claims to have no memory of the incident.

Regardless of which theory one ascribes to, it is best to hope that Calavandia did actually destroy the false ship. It hasn’t been sighted since.

We don’t know what the mysterious package was, only that Alustin managed to retrieve it in the Whistling Cliffs. The fate and the identity of the last thief remains unknown. Several more attempts were made to seize it from him by various forces over the next week, including by a hand of Sacred Swordsmen jumping at the unexpected opportunity— which, unfortunately, would rather come back to haunt us. This all culminated in the Battle of Pochlan’s Yardang, where Alustin, the lone Radhan ship, and a small flotilla of gorgon sandships managed to hold off the combined mercenary and pirate fleet (not that there’s much difference— upstanding people don’t generally become mercenaries) until the arrival of Indris and several of her children. 

Alustin’s particularly noteworthy aerial duel against the pirate lord Bluefang cemented his reputation. Bluefang, a naga archmage with wind, flame, and scale affinities, had been a scourge on the region for nearly a decade, and none of the local great powers had been able to hunt his ship down— largely due to the fact that he spent most of his time lurking in buffer zones between the territories of great powers. Though, by all accounts, Alustin’s landing, undertaken while badly injured and almost out of mana after his victory— was possibly even more impressive, but the story is surely well-known enough that we don’t need to recount it here.

All told, the death toll related to the theft of the unknown item reached nearly six hundred, the bulk of which occurred at the battles at the Whistling Cliffs and Pochlan’s Yardang. 

Forty-two of the total deaths were from clerks in Havath City. We’re still unsure how, but half of our reports about the incident were laced with a fatal contact poison. The same poison, we should note, used so effectively by Helicote in their mad crusade against us. Its most notable feature is the five month “gestation period”, during which contact with the toxin will not harm anyone. It only becomes dangerous as its ingredients begin to decay, and remain dangerous for several years. We can, most likely, safely assume that Alustin somehow infiltrated our intelligence services west of the Skyreach Range to poison the documents. 

Though we were minimally involved in the incident, overall it has proven disastrous for us. Alustin gained the personal favor of the gorgon queen Karna Scythe and is widely regarded as a hero in Sydapsyn. Worse, Sydapsyn and Theras Tel further normalized trade relations. The most worrying thing about the whole incident is that while we were widely blamed for funding the thieves, the mercenaries, and the pirates, (largely thanks to the hand of Sacred Swordsmen who attempted to kill Alustin) we have no idea who was actually funding everything. As a result of all of this, we can safely assume that Sydapsyn are now entirely out of reach as our allies, at least for the rest of Scythe’s reign, which could easily last another century.

Finally, it should be noted that we later discovered Sharp Jon and his crew to have died in a dragon-pirate attack several weeks before our interview with him. We have no idea who we actually interviewed.