Falmond Mournsword

One Telerian League hero of the Gaellen War was Falmond Mournsword, a legendary Sacred Order marshal. Dour, taciturn, and grim, Mournsword was famed not for his substantive military capabilities or his great fighting skill, but his indomitable will. His resolve was as iron, his faith was unyielding. Falmond first came to fame as commander of the defense of the Land of Rebirth. With the Order’s armies elsewhere, the region’s defense fell to penitent laborers, retired veterans, and would-be clergymen, who Falmond rallied to battle again and again against crack Gaellen war-hosts. Even as he fought, he heard whispers that the true architect of the assaults was not the Gaellen Pact, but someone or something else. Even so, Falmond had no time to pursue these rumors. Casualties mounted and he was hard-pressed to hold his dwindling army together as the war went on. Wherever the defenders faltered, or the enemy threatened to overrun, the marshal appeared, exhorting the faithful. No matter how often they threw off an assault, another followed. Even the mightiest defenders feared defeat was inevitable; all save Falmond, whose resolve hardened with every battle. To bolster the fighting spirit of his drained soldiers, Falmond had the blades of the fallen forged into a single weapon: a sword of swords, so that he and the other survivors might remember and persevere in the name of the faithful, glorious dead. Thus, he earned the name ‘Mournsword’, and it was with this grim weapon that he led the final defense of the Land of Rebirth. The Army of the Unready, as it came to be known, retreated to a narrow pass close to the Eternal Citadel, outnumbered five to one. The battle ground on for several days, the Order troops slowly withdrawing. The Pact army believed victory was inevitable and pushed on, but had no idea they were being lured within range of the Citadel’s outer defenses, where hidden artillery and wounded troops grasping crossbows were stationed. They only fired when the Gaellens were a hundred paces from the battlements. They couldn’t miss. Thousands were killed within minutes. Order casualties were monstrous, but the battle was won. For this victory, Falmond Mournsword is remembered as a saint and is held in the highest esteem by Order members, who seek to follow his example in all things. His face graces busts and tapestries, and his statue stands silent sentinel over the Eternal Citadel’s entryway. His story is recounted on the anniversary of the final defense of the Land of Rebirth, and Order trainees are taught his story in full. He is the pinnacle of all that a warrior of the Sacred Order could and should be. But Mournsword’s story does not end with the Gaellen War. After victory over the Gaellens was won, Falmond was freed from the burden of immediate duty, and finally able to pursue the truth of the whispers he’d heard during the war, that the attacks on the Land of Rebirth had not been solely the work of the Gaellen Pact, but some other party. Falmond questioned survivors and prisoners, studied old texts and accounts forbidden to all but the most privileged, and slowly came to learn the true nature of his foe. A being that sowed dissent wherever it prowled, bringing only confusion and pain. For months, Falmond sought the location of the creature he came to know as Karnage the Anarch, a Demonspawn that cared only for chaos. Though his superiors in the Sacred Order doubted the creature’s existence at first, Falmond won them over with his stubborn insistence. He led expeditions into the Redspike Mountains and the snowy wastes of Frostheim, and then into the swamps of Peltas, following a trail of broken communities and treachery. Wherever he went, he found more evidence of his enemy, as well as survivors of the creature’s machinations, and his determination to see it destroyed grew. Finally, he came to the ancient ruin of Roshad, at the edge of the Krokhan Desert, where he at last met his foe. There, the Anarch subjected the Mournsword and his followers to a torturous mind-hex that caused them to relive the battles of the Gaellen War over and over without respite. Falmond never broke, and he shattered the spell’s control over him with force of sheer will and pure hatred for his enemy. Karnage escaped before the Sacred Order commander could have his revenge, but not before scores of bewitched soldiers of Lumaya had killed each other in terrified rampages. Falmond himself was mortally wounded. Falmond’s body was never found. One survivor insisted that as the Mournsword lay dying, propped against a shattered and bloodied statue of Lumaya, a strange figure, shimmering with a sacred radiance appeared and knelt beside him. When the figure rose, Falmond Mournsword had vanished.