Damn, I'm bad at writing these.
The corpse of a warlord is slumped over an elegant pine table, his throat slit, a bloodstained letter sits next to him, unsent. It's contents read as follows:
I thought I told you to not kill anyone! I don't know what's up with your berseker but tell him to calm down, we came here to trade our steel for food for the winter, not raid! Make sure to get that into his head or I swear to the gods I'll kill him!!
-Gunnar.
/-/
In Heathmoor, such thing as neutrality is almost non existent. Samurai straw hats won't take jobs from Vikings, exiled knights will still fight for Ashfeld, even the border towns, whose people rarely care as to which banner is raised on their land, will show some bias towards any one faction depending on where it's located.
However, there is one place in which you can see people of every corner of Heathmoor coexist with each other, a place where your origins don't matter, a place amidst the chaos where the exiled and the fallen can live in relative peace.
To understand the history Deserter's Retreat, one must first understand the why the city exists where it does. Centuries ago, a few decades before the first settlers arrived, the three factions fiercely fought over the land, the why is very simple to answer: the soil.
Located right in the Ashfeld / Valkenheim / Mire border, the ground is ten times more fertile than anywhere else in Heathmoor due to the combination of the Myre's more humid climate, Ashfeld's volcanic soil and Tárár river, which flows down from the cold mountains of Valkenheim.
It is with this knowledge that comes the first neutral settler; a desperate knightess by the name of Rose, who sought for a place to hide after being exiled. She built a small shack in a relatively hidden position and lived there for years in relative peace, her presence, however, did not go unnoticed forever, soon catching the attention of others under similar circumstances, deserters tired of fighting or civilians whose villages had been ransacked and had nowhere else to go, after many weeks of begging from the people, she finally helped the settlers to be in trying to make a life. The first months were nightmarish, having to constantly fight in a three way conflict against the other three factions which didn't take too kindly to them settling on the land that they had been fighting over for decades, but after months of non stop work, the first houses were built, and once that happened, the town of Deserter's Retreat was born.
Of course, that was a long time ago, Deserter's Retreat now stands as one of, if not THE largest city in Heathmoor. It's a hub for merchants, mercenaries and craftsmen which are sought out by the three factions, the city welcomes their business, as long as they remain on their best behavior and respect the city's neutrality, those who break this rule have been known to disappear for days, only for their lifeless corpse to appear sometime later with their mouths stuffed with rose petals.
Though Deserter's Retreat has come under attack many times since the first walls were built, they have all resulted in failure, as more people arrived, the less the attacks happened, the less the attacks, the more people come, and so on and so forth, it has come to the point that no such attempt has been made in two hundred years, no one alive can remember Deserter's Retreat ever being attacked, and the Merchant's Guild building their main trading hub within the city's walls has further helped to keep things this way.
In Heathmoor, neutrality is indeed almost non existent, but for the people living inside the walls of Deserter's Retreat, neutrality is the only way they know how to live.
But what about the inner workings of the city, what about it's criminal underbelly, and who, or what keeps the bloodshed so relatively low?
That is a story for another day.
You're still here? Shoo, go play skyrim or something.
