(Coastal edge of the Hool Marsh)

During the conflict known as Azure’s Tide, the Kingdom of Keoland sought to fortify its southern frontier against threats from both land and sea. The answer was Bale Keep, a coastal stronghold built to guard the western approaches of the Hool Marsh and watch the waters of the Javan Bay.

The project began in 454 CY, a monumental effort that took six years to complete. The coast was too treacherous for supply ships, so all materials had to be hauled overland from Saltmarsh, along a crude trail more than six leagues long through the swamps. Wagons sank in the mud, beasts were lost to predators, and workers fell prey to disease and the creatures of the Hool. By the time the keep’s walls were raised in 460 CY nearly twenty lives had been claimed by the marsh.

The Fall of Bale Keep

Three years later, the Sea Princes, seized the Dunwater delta and cut off Bale Keep’s supply line. The garrison was isolated, surrounded by hostile creatures of the Hool Marsh and nature's wrath, with no reinforcements and running low on food. The Siege of Bale Keep lasted six months.

No one knows how it ended.
Some say the defenders starved; others claim that something from the marsh crept over the walls in the night. When Keoland scouts finally returned after the war’s end in 464 CY, they found only ruin and silence.

Bale Keep Today

For more than a century, Bale Keep has stood abandoned, its stones walls covered in lichen and its battlements crumbling under salt wind and storms from the bay. The trail is mostly overgrown.

Fisherman off the coast say that on moonless nights, blue lights flicker along the parapets, and the sound of distant bells can be heard beneath the wind, the ghosts of soldiers still standing watch over a lost frontier.