“Listen close to everybody’s heart,
Hear that breaking sound.
Hopes and dreams shattering apart
And crashing to the ground...”
The Hedge is a strange land, inexorably linked to the dreams and
nightmares of the mortal coil, reactive and reflective of the thoughts and
feelings of the nearby daydreamers and schemers of mortal man.
And mortal man does nothing so well as despair.
The minds of man turn to a dark future. A dystopia where the haves
and have nots are all but at war.
A nightmare world where everything is claimed and noting is free.
Not food, not water, not safety. Where anyone could be at risk for the water in
their bottle or the fruit in their bag or the money in their pockets. A place
where roving gangs control turf by bloody violence and intimidation all the
time dodging the brutal heel of The Man. Ecological cataclysm, nuclear holocaust, viral pandemic: mankind has always held deep in their hearts stories of the apocalypse because deep down they know that THEY fucked up the world.
And in the hedge... it’s true.
The Norwich hedge is a mismatch of desolation and ruined
splendour. Their once were great spires touching the heavens, a skyline to
match anything New York or Paris could boast. The ruins have fallen, overgrown
with twisted roots or wire and tangled in the deadly thorns of the hedge.
Brutal gangs or strange beasts made their homes in the dungeons of the fallen
spires and strange dreams invade the minds of changelings who have never seen
them. Dreams of beauty and terror just beyond the cellar doors...
At the centre of the city is a Castle, and in the depths of the
hedge it is no different.
Well, there is a castle in the same place.
The Denizens of the hedge refer to the Castle on their side as
“the Iron Garrison” if you can get them to speak its name at all, always in
hushed whispers, lest one of the "Jacks" is listening to drag the speaker beyond
those black doors.
The Jacks. Hulking great hobs, large and strong as any Ogre, the “Jacks”
are fanatically brutal enforcers of...somethings will. Presumably they are
under orders of some immense being of unquestioned loyalty for if they are seen
they are always moving with purpose. These are the Brutes in black dress coats
and red arm bands that find transgressors of the esoteric laws of the Garrison.
These are the masked Stoßtruppen that tear arms from sockets for crossing the
Rivers without an oak leaf in your hand. These are the monsters that jump from
the other side of the wall and crush the spines of anyone who does not wail
back at the Wall of skulls.
These “Jacks”.... these silent, perhaps mute, killers, guardians,
thugs, thieves, and assassins... these guards...
These jackbooted thugs are
omnipresent on the walls of the Iron Garrison, to protect their domination and
their ‘Custodian’.
Innumerate patrols of approximately four maintain constant patrol
the fallen city and the seven fallen towers. Not to keep them free of
interlopers, they don’t need to, but to tally the foolhardy souls who enter the
ruins.
How else would the Custodian know how many bodies are down there?
The thorny wilds of the
Norwich hedge vary in climate, weather and foliage from day to day. From
tangled wrecks of cars buried in sand to twisted and gnarled forests of gallows
trees to salt flats or bombed out cityscape.
Only one constant ties these landscapes together, the twisted
cameras dotting the sky, streetlights, adorning walls of caves, even the
wildlife is tainted with film. Birds with glassy eyes, wolves with cameras for
heads, twisted fruit that record the sounds of their digestion. Everything is
seen. By something...
The edges of the city are easily discerned by the Rambling Ring,
the only Trod in Norfolk. Well, the only one people have come back from. It is
maintained by the Trifling Troubadours and Purveyors of fine Goodes, the
travelling Goblin Market led by the Raggedy Prince, a Ram-like Beast with a
penchant for shiny objects.
The market walks the Trod on an ever moving loop, stopping to set
up its ragtag circus tents and put on a show. Anyone is welcome to see the
show, and it is always a thing to amaze with tumblers and acrobats and magic
and song.
But be wary at the market, for nothing is free, and a look could
cost you your soul...
***
The seven Towers can be seen from the Trod sometimes, if they are
welcoming or hungry. They are all similar in design, great sweeping towers that
if compete would likely scrape the sky, elegant in style, complex in decoration
but it is there that the similarity ends. They are known by the Materials they
are made from.
The Tower
of Gold
A beautiful tower, bright as freshly polished gold that radiates a
sense of welcome and safety as though everything is going to be all right in
the end. Witnesses have heard an angelic choir beckoning them to explore this
most Blessed Tower.
The tower itself is half buried on its side, a single, unbroken piece
according to changelings who have seen it from afar.
The Tower
of Flesh
A twisted nightmare of bleeding faces and protruding bones and
anguished cries. This dreadful broken ruin calls out – literally- for
destruction. The sounds of those poor souls locked together through some
twisted witchcraft, or bored keeper, rends at the sanity of those who have
escaped it. Wretched hobs have built a sickening settlement around it, a cult
that is in constant need of sacrifice to feed their home. Black cloaked
acolytes with gnarled hands and spiral painted faces that will do anything,
ANYTHING to sew more flesh to that blasphemous prison, or to their own body in
twisted worship.
The Tower
of Smog
A burning desolate field always seems to accompany the stump of
this pitted and crumbling Tower, choked in burning corpses and choking hobs
that cower and cough and scurry on some inscrutable endeavour that only makes
sense to them.
The tower is made of some non-substance, it moves without moving,
like a block of smoke or a cloud on a windless day. Yet out of every crack and
thick choking smoke comes out and you can feel a heat from the edges of the
field. The door is always unlocked, according to the stories. Nothing ever
stops a changeling from going in; the hobs seem barely to notice those brave
enough to go in...
The Tower
of Water
At the top of a cliff sits the stump of the Water tower, a tower
of solid water. Not ice for it is warm to touch, and yes, the hand can splash
in the tower and through. Exotic and colourful fish of every description swim
in those walls, but the edges are crushed and broken.
Off the edge of the cliff, propped against the cliff at an angle
like a cylindrical waterfall, is the tower proper, dozens of metres down from
the top of the cliff where its base stands, accessible only by the rope of
vines that someone knotted together in the past.
The Tower
of Jewels
To find the Tower of Jewels one need only follow the heat and sounds
of Flapping.
And the Dragons are a dead giveaway. The tower was once,
presumable tall as the others but it is nigh impossible to tell. Dragons like
their Jewels... every mating season they come and tear more of the jewelled
tower away leaving great fortunes of cast of and broken chunks of precious
stone. They fight fiercely over anyone not of their Ilk taking a stone from
this ancient site of their race, for in their view all precious things are
Dragons by right.
There is a story of how Jenny Pearl, a changeling of Norwich
bargained and tricked one into giving her a chest of jewels. She struck the
bargain that the dragon would fill one of its cups with the most valuable
things in its nest and she would give him 5 cups of her most valuable things. A
bargain was struck and the dragon was upset when it realised that she was
poorer that she appeared.
Since then they say that the Green eyed dragon mistrusts
changelings and has been seeking revenge on the race ever since.
But jenny got rich enough to live a long life of luxury.
The Tower
of Lightning
The tallest spire standing is bright and deadly, a shattered
bright tower of sparking copper veins constantly struck by the bolts of thunder from the angry black clouds that cling to its battered roof. Between the
blinding strikes and unimaginably loud thunder clashes whirling beasts on the
wing can be seen diving and hunting the grounds around this once proud tower.
The thunderbirds are a beautiful and terrible sight, fully 20 feet
across the wings and 2 metres tall they would be imposing enough, but their
beaks are hooked and sharp as a cleaver and all 7 of their eyes crackle and
buzz with primal rage and electric energy. The call of the Thunderbird is where
they get their name, a screech, a bellow, a roar, a Noise unlike anything the
survivors ever witnessed it hits like a physical force. The cry of the Thunderbird has a concussive quality and has been known to throw whole convoys
to the ground or shatter the legs of a single prey animal. Or changeling...
The Tower
of Joy
I can’t describe the tower of joy...
You have to see it.
It looks like your first kiss.
The first time you won a race.
The look on your fathers face when you beat him at chess.
The rewards only a keeper could give you...
The face of it is broken, I can tell you that. A great rend in the
centre of its home coloured walls.
The siren song of the tower...
The sirens beyond the doors...such beauty...
Who would ever want to leave...?
***
Beyond the realms of the twisting desiccated streets and barely
habitable twists of the Hedge City, the deep hedge is nigh impenetrable, only
the fearless, mad or desperate go beyond the goblin overrun suburbs. Patrolled
by unstoppable golems and flying metal beasts that pierce the permanently night
sky with their twin searchlight eyes, directing the grinding heel of the
tracked Golems to anyone stupid enough to venture beyond their place in this
twisted world.
To the East of the city is the only known landmark outside of the
safety of the world. The Font of Hatred overshadows the city with its red haze,
a mushroom cloud hanging in the air in perpetuity, a great rend in the sky
spewing forth red destructive energy. Known as the Cloud, the Red Eye and most
notably , and cynically, “The Monument to Mankind’s Indomitable Hate”; everyone
has a theory- or at least a story- about how it came to be, what it means, what
it is...but no one has ever come back from attempting to find it. Maybe they
found their souls behind a red cage under its base, maybe the dragon that is
roaring the Font into the sky ate them. Maybe the Golems of steel crushed them
under their tracks long before they made it...
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