Soren's Fist

History
Many millennia ago, prophecy foretold of a great calamity. Far to the south of what is now Sorn, a human man named Soren ruled over a nation whose name has been lost to history. King Soren the High gathered together twenty of his greatest warriors and marched north to meet their destiny. For twelve months they marched, abandoning all hope of return. Their great journey is recounted in other texts, but when they arrived at what would become Soren’s Fist they found a lush forest inhabited by elves and other strange beings. Soren and his companions, weary with travel, sought shelter in the Elven city of Briande deep within the forest. They were welcomed by the elves whose own seers had seen the portents of doom to come. Soren offered his guard and himself to aid in the fight, but found that the elves were preparing to abandon their forest and retreat to the Feywild. Angered, Soren argued for days with the elders of the city but to no avail. Soon after they arrived, the entire city vanished overnight. The forest lost its magical protection and all Soren and his men could do was wait for the coming disaster.

They built a small fort in what is now the Palatial district and set about preparing for whatever horrors awaited, but the danger did not come. They began to trade with nearby Karthfield, which was at that time a much larger city than its current size. Five years passed with no sign of the promised battle and Soren’s fort became a town. His men found wives and took up the plough, clearing sections of the forest and expanding the town into a small fortified farming city. Soren himself remained vigilant, always watching the northern skies for danger. One by one, Soren’s great warriors became old and died. Soren stayed young, bound by the gods to face his destiny, unable to die until it was fulfilled. He trained the sons and daughters of his great friends and founded the Reidargärd to protect the new city.

Although contemporary poetry from the time claims that Soren waited another five hundred years, modern scholarship estimates that it was closer to two hundred before Stathia arrived. Stathia was an ancient, monstrous blue dragon. She took roost in the northern section of the forest and the trees immediately began to die. Soren marched out with his Reidargärd, now swollen to a company of fully 500 and they did battle. Accounts differ on the battle itself but what is consistent among all historical texts is that after a full week of combat, Soren was alone, his compaions all destroyed, and the forest had withered and died. Stathia, wounded but not crippled, flew away from the battlefield to attack the city that Soren had built and defended for centuries. In desperation, Soren cried out to the gods that had kept him alive for so long, begging for a way to defeat his enemy before she destroyed his home.

Here is where all reasonable certainty is abandoned. We are certain that Soren and Stathia had their final confrontation, and that it was during this confrontation that the land was abruptly changed to what is now the Great Sand Sea, but accounts of the battle itself are many and contradictory. Of course every child in Soren’s Fist knows the fairy tale: that Soren was at the last moment granted the power of the gods themselves and smote the great dragon with one blow, but poetic fragments from the time seem to describe not only a transformation of the land but of the man as well. The most popular theory is that Soren was transformed into a dragon himself and defeated his enemy by tearing her heart from her chest, but there is also evidence for a great and awful sacrifice: that Soren surrended his own soul and became a powerful lich mage, draining all the life from the land to destroy his enemy before begging to be destroyed himself lest he become an even greater monster. The latter theory is supported by the dominance of the Raven Queen within the city, however the evidence for both is patchy at best since Soren vanished immediately after the battle. The city was renamed Soren’s Fist in his honour and to this day stands guard at the edge of the desert, keeping watch against dangers from the north. Several of the southern cities pledged their friendship and over the millenia Soren’s Fist became the capital city of the nation of Sorn. The Reidargärd spread through the region, establishing satellite locations to defend the people of the nation and taking the best warriors and mages to the city to carry on Soren’s legacy.