Book - History of the Sumber Hills
Beneath the Sumber Hills lies a vast network of caverns. These caverns have existed far beyond recorded history.
Thousands of years ago, these caverns were claimed by a renegade faction of dark-elves who venerated a terrible god of primordial evil. They built a shrine to their god and worshipped there for many centuries. Over time, it appears this ancient dark elf was wiped out, or faded away, and the temples and shrines they created in the caverns were forgotten for centuries.
Centuries later the site was discovered by the dwarves of Besilmer. Besilmer was a realm of pastures and cropland. The dwarves established an underground stronghold called Tyar-Besil beneath the Sumber Hills to defend against the trolls and giants that plagued the region. The dwarves discovered the ancient drow hold and its temple below their own delvings. They lacked the strength to clean out the ruins, so they abandoned their deeper excavations. Trolls and giants soon broke the realm of Besilmer, and the remaining dwarves abandoned the place altogether.
Over the years, adventurers occasionally stumbled across the buried stronghold of Tyar-Besil and the drow vaults below it. Few made any lasting record of their explorations, and their names are forgotten. But in the year 893 DR (about 600 years before the present day), a band of adventurers called the Knights of the Silver Horn found the place and commenced an exploration of the ruins. The adventurers came back to Tyar-Besil again and again, and when they decided to establish strongholds and tame the territory, they raised their keeps over each of the known access points leading to the ancient dwarven ruins. The adventurers feared something in the deep caves below the Sumber Hills, and they intended to set a permanent watch over the area.
History didn’t cooperate. A generation or two after the Knights of the Silver Horn established their strongholds, an orc horde swept through the North, and the keeps were overrun. For centuries they stood empty. Locals came to know them as the Haunted Keeps, and various monsters occasionally occupied the ruins.
The abandoned keeps and the dwarven stronghold beneath them might have been forgotten forever, but a few years ago a drow named Vizeran DeVir returned to the ancient Fane of the Eye. A renegade drow wizard of great power, DeVir was no servant of Lolth; like the forgotten sect that created the temple long ago, he devoted himself to the nameless power of the Elder Elemental Eye. His beliefs led to his exile from drow society, but his faithfulness to this dark power did not go unrewarded. Guided by visions, Vizeran DeVir created four mighty weapons imbued with Elemental Evil: the spear Windvane, the dagger Tinderstrike, the trident Drown, and the war pick Ironfang. He left these weapons on the altar of the Elder Elemental Eye for their fated bearers to discover.