The Bloodfist Siege
The Bloodfist Clan was never meant to march on cities. They were
born in the jagged shadows of the Ironfang Peaks, where blood and strength wrote law, not parchment or coin. For generations, they thrived on raids and skirmishes, guided by the brutal wisdom of war-chiefs and the iron will of their shamans. But all that changed under Agnar Stonehand, a Warrior monk now high chief with visions that reached beyond the mountains.
Driven by prophetic whispers and the promise of dominion, Agnar united the fractured orcish tribes under one banner — the bloodied gauntlet of the Bloodfist.
His eyes turned toward Velmora, a thriving bastion of stone, gold, and human and elvish pride that had always spurned Agnar and his people. To the orcs, it was more than a city — it was a challenge.
A symbol of everything soft and spoiled in the world. His warriors and people would receive not just loot, but legacy.
The invasion began like a hammerblow........
After the champions of the Arena had been named Agnar rallied his troops and set out.
Velmora’s outer farms burned. The trade roads were choked with ash. The city garrison, caught off guard by the sheer ferocity of the Bloodfist charge, retreated behind the towering walls of Velmora, hoping to wait them out.
But Agnar didn’t retreat. He dug in.
Thus began the Siege of Velmora......
The battle dragged on. The orcs encamped around the city, and taking the market square within it and entrenching themselves. Yet Velmora held. The defenders, bolstered by stubborn pride, barricading themselves within separate districts of the city, elven healers in the alleys, underground smuggling tunnels, the king of Velmora sealing himself within the castle behind a magical barrier.
What was meant to be a conquest became a stalemate..... for now a ceasefire.....
Agnar left to ponder on how to take the rest of the city. If it could not be done by force then what?
Diplomacy? Trust?
Velmora and its residents in some districts have begun to starve, maybe this is how we re-bolster our forces — not through just bloodshed but through gaining some of the townsfolk’s trust too.....
(check the quest channel section for more)
Ashes of Velmora
On the twelfth night of Blackfall, as both orc and man stared into fires more for comfort than warmth, the sky above Velmora cracked open like glass under a hammer. A rupture—like a scream without breath—spread across the stars, and from it spilled things not born of this world.
Demons.
At first, they came as shadows streaking through the night. Winged and whispering, talons and flame. They tore through the north quarter—once a proud elven district—like parchment. Buildings that had stood for centuries collapsed in seconds. Screams replaced the silence of the ceasefire. Soldiers who had once guarded the gates of Velmora now died with their backs turned, butchered not by orc blades, but by the abyss made flesh.
The Bloodfist encampments beyond the market square were torn apart, their war-drums replaced by guttural growls of something wrong. Agnar awoke and found his men being impaled upon a smoking obelisk of bone—an altar that had not been there the day before.
Agnar knew war. But this? This was corruption made manifest.
The demons poured forth from three great Hell Gates—massive, jagged portals scorched into the very ground beneath Velmora. One in the ruined elven quarter. One beneath the sewers of the castle itself. And one, most chilling of all, clawing its way open inside the sacred Grove of Irathil, a site of ancient druidic power once believed to be untouchable.
Agnar gathered his remaining warriors. There was no room for tribal pride now. The Bloodfist Clan had come for conquest—but they now stood on the brink of annihilation.
And so, orc warbands marched through burning streets not to pillage, but to fight back the dark—and managed to do so.
With the Hell Gates spewing darkness across the land, Agnar must forge an uneasy alliance with the starving, broken survivors—human, elf, orc alike—and close the Hell Gates, no matter the cost.
What began as a war of conquest… has become a war for survival.
Months passed in flame and fury.
The war for Velmora became legend even as it unfolded. Orcish warbands and human militia fought side by side. Elven healers tended orc wounds. Dwarven smiths reforged shattered weapons using salvaged demon iron. Enemies became allies in the crucible of survival.
Three Hell Gates had scarred the lands, and each required more than blood to close. It took rites long forgotten, sacrifices whispered in ancient tongues, and battles that shattered lands and shook the mountains.
At the final gate, the Demon Lord Vezareth the Maw-Touched emerged—vast, horned, with a crown of seething flame and a voice like broken glass in the mind. He wore the faces of a hundred souls he had consumed and fought with fury unchained.
Agnar led the charge, flanked by what remained of the Bloodfist, their armor cracked, their eyes hardened by loss. Velmora’s last knight, Ser Arthur, stood beside him, wounded but unyielding. The battle shook them all.
In the end, they triumphed. The combined forces of orc, man, elf, and dwarf brought Vezareth to his knees—his heart pierced, his ashes scattered into the void beyond the Gate.
As the last Hell Gate collapsed, sealing the rift between realms, a wave of silence fell over the ruined lands. The demons were gone.
But so was the world.
The victorious were not returned.
The Warding Hollow Prison
They awoke instead in the Warding Hollow—a massive prison carved from stone, surrounded on all sides by a shimmering magical barrier that stretched endlessly into sky and mist. No guards.
A final spiteful act of the dying Demon Lord. But there were no wards of infernal origin. The magic here was older. Colder. More orderly than anything even the elves could comprehend.
They could see no stars. No sun. Just an eternal, sourceless glow. Time passed strangely. Wounds healed faster. Hunger came slowly. Dreams—if they could be called that—were haunted by symbols and voices in languages none could name.
Agnar, ever the war-chief, rallied his people. Routines were established. Walls were tested.
Warriors explored the far reaches of the prison, only to find themselves looped back to the center again, as if the place bent reality.
Escape seeming all too far from reach.
One night, an ancient voice whispered through the Hollow, heard not with ears but in the bones:
"To escape thy bonds you must find thine way, where the walkway frays its jagged lips there near the cracks a shiny gift. It hath two sides and two faces, and ye can flip it and catch it to settle debates."
What could this mean?
We must investigate, but also we must prepare.