Lugan the Steadfast

Some fifteen years before the great Gaellen War, in his prime years, Lugan was a minor Lord of Kaerok administering a poor, swampy, sparsely-peopled barony. Disease there was frequent and healers few and far between. Lugan himself had no great stock of learning, since his duties kept him busy and centers of knowledge were far removed from his dismal demesne. He had strength of arms, as every lord must, for all chivalry stems from martial prowess in Kaerok, but his most valuable trait was relentless drive and stubborn determination, wherefore he was called Lugan the Steadfast, a name he earned many times over. Though his advisors deemed it folly, Lugan led projects to slowly but surely drain the barony’s swamps, remove their stagnant waters — as he believed them to be a source of pestilence – and reclaim the land. He spared none of his modest treasury to hire expert engineers from afar. When peasants feared or resented the strange pumping machines Lugan imported, he came to work them in person. He spoke to his people and heard their concerns. Some feared for their livelihoods, having adapted to the bog as the source of their sustenance, and Lugan assuaged them. Thanks to no special boons besides persistence and careful planning, Lugan’s barony grew steadily in population, wealth, and infrastructure. Farmland spread across the drier lowlands, and increased productivity led to increased trade. This helped stimulate new services, and the construction of new roads and outposts. The growing populace yielded more recruits of fighting age, and the Kingdom of Kaerok finally looked to the barony as a significant contributor to the national levies. By this time Baron Lugan was showing his age, but he had lived actively and well, and was little slowed in his tireless work. A fortunate thing, for the Gaellen War came to Anhelt and was soon to drown the land in blood and scorch it with spellfire. Lugan was awarded command of a significant fighting force. His soldiers were loyal to him not out of basic feudal fealty but from a genuine feeling of gratitude. They had seen how Lugan would not give up on their future, how he toiled long and hard alongside them to make it happen. Now, from his elite knights to his fresh conscripts, they were eager to fight and bleed for him. As waves of Orcs, Ogryn, Lizardmen, and Skinwalkers landed all across southern Anhelt, Lugan’s forces were deployed to hold Yaervan’s Dike, a critical marching route across the boggy delta of Delanos. The logic of his military superiors was that his force had exceptional morale, and they were counting on the Steadfast to live up to his name. He and his troops fought long and hard against the Gaellens, but gradually were dislodged from the Dike and pushed deep into the bayou, caught between hostile armies and the unforgiving muck and mire. Lugan the Steadfast led his brave forces through twenty-nine months of bitterly-contested survival. They never gave up probing the enemy lines for weaknesses, hoping for a chance to break free. They refused to allow the Gaellens to reduce the size of their pocket, pushed back against the guard units that kept them contained, and staked out a territory. They took pride in being a significant thorn in the Gaellens’ side in the region and a constant drain on their resources and manpower. Rationing their food and water, and subsequently living off the land, Lugan’s forces starved and suffered. But many among them remembered tales from their parents and grandparents of the hardship that the barony had long endured when it was but a marshy backwater, and how their magnanimous baron had lifted them from such depths of impecunity and want. Knowing this, and knowing Lugan himself suffered alongside them and never hoarded for himself what could be shared with his soldiers, they bore up in stoic solidarity for month after month and season after season. Winters took their brutal toll, but it was during the second winter of their entrapment that they finally got their chance to break their encirclement. A blizzard of unusual intensity struck, and in the whiteout Lugan and the last of the survivors attempted to sneak through the dragnet around them. Sadly, the record of their fate did not survive the ravages of the conflict. Certainly they were never noted again as an extant military entity. Most likely they died of exposure or were captured, but many swear that Lugan and the Steadfast Cohort, as it came to be called, escaped and even went on to fight in other battles.