A brief history of Alesia

A brief History of Alesia
From the archives at Waterdeep Monastery Library

(With thanks to Patriarch Edinson)

Many have tried, your Excellency, to write down an exact history of Alesia, and how mankind came to make his home in that frozen continent. It is, by all reports, a cold and forbidding continent where only the foolhardy would venture. In times past, it was known only for it's wildlife; beasts that eked out a living amongst the frozen tundra and snow laden mountains. Sailors would avoid heaving to on it's coastline, even to resupply their water barrels, for fear of the denizens that lurked on that continent.

That is, until mithril was discovered by certain hardy explorers in the northeast mountains.

Mithril, often more so than gold, has a strange effect on a mans wits, in that they appear to desert him completely. Upon the discovery, shiploads of prospectors (and their assorted bodyguards) made their way to Alesia to earn their fortune. After the establishment of some shanty border towns, the mithril began to flow from the depths of the mountains, and a rudimentary dock was constructed to cater for the ships that came and went with the precious cargo. It should be pointed out, your Excellency, that at this time (some three hundred summers past) there was a high degree of lawlessness amongst the prospectors, and they lived according to their own greeds and desires. As more intrepid miners arrived, news of the mithril mines spread, and very quickly traffic from our continent to Alesia stepped up tenfold, as did the number of bar fights, robberies, and occasional murders.

It was into this maelstrom of greed and lawlessness that Sir Arthur came, under orders from Vanion, Preceptor of the Pandion order of which Sir Arthur was a knight. The Preceptor saw the benefit of a lawfully controlled mithril flow, the taxes that would come with it, and the opportunity for the Pandion Order to benefit from the trade. At first Arthur and his knights were reviled when they tried to impose order on the prospector community. This revulsion quickly turned to mute acceptance after the knights casually began to lop off certain people's heads. Some number of prospectors still persisted in their protestation against the Pandion Order and its newly imposed rules, but they were either imprisoned or given object lessons in which end of a lance is the sharpest, and order was quickly restored to the border towns.

Arthur first saw to it that a new settlement, larger in size than the shanty towns, was built some two days journey up from the docks. This was to become what we now know as Weddenvale, although the histories are unclear, your Excellency, regarding whether Arthur himself labelled the town such or not. Weddenvale became the hub of the mithril trade, as prospectors and miners were now under law to pass through and pay their levy to the Pandion Knights before taking their precious wares to the docks, and selling there to the merchants.

As you know, Excellency, the Pandion Order is deeply rooted in it's religious beliefs, and in it's devotion to their god, Kord. A church was soon established at Weddenvale, with the flock overseen by Preceptor Vanion's own son, Khallan Vanion, a rather religious man of long temper and kind heart (to remind your Excellency, Bishop Khallan was of no use to the military wing of the Pandion Order after an accident that cost him the use of one of his arms - but that is in the Pandion Histories for all to read). Very shortly thereafter, the flock flourished under Bishop Khallan, and religion became part of the Alesian culture as much as the mithril trade. At this point, some ten years had passed since the prospectors had first come to Alesia, and children were starting to be born. The town of Weddenvale gave families shelter and protection from the wild, and thus families began to flourish. Arthur had achieved what he set out to achieve, the imposition of law and order in Alesia had resulted in a stable, well to do community, reliant upon the steady flow of mithril from the mines.

In the next part, your Excellency, I will try to explain the root causes behind the Weddenvale township Rebellion, an event that threatened all that Arthur had helped to build, some ten years after the establishment of the Church of Weddenvale.