Kedge Keep and Phinigel Autropos

A finite people

The kedge were children of Prexus, the Oceanlord: intelligent, enlightened fish-folk who built a civilisation on knowledge, learning and logic. Prexus had watched other races multiply until they exhausted their food and went to war over what was left, and he was determined that his would be different.

So he made them finite. Their number was fixed: a kedge could be born only when another died, the departed soul reincarnated in a new body that inherited the knowledge and experience of the one before. It was said that kedge spirits passed like water flowing from one vessel to another. The race never grew, and it never forgot.

An empire of the deep

In their time the kedge lived in nearly every body of water on Norrath, from the cold seas off Velious to the warm shallows near Kunark. In the depths of the Ocean of Tears stood a great kedge city devoted to magic and the worship of Prexus. Beneath the Timorous Deep kedge labourers mined gems and metals to trade with the surface, and in the Gulf of Gunthak kedge artisans worked coral, onyx and mother-of-pearl.

They were peaceful but not helpless. Treasure-seekers from the surface came again and again for their riches and secrets, and every expedition, however well armed, ended in disaster against a people who knew the sea and commanded powers few surface folk understood.

The last kedge

That empire is gone. Phinigel Autropos is the last kedge. Al’Kabor’s story, The Relic of Brell Serilis, says Phinigel himself condemned his own people to permanent undeath with a powerful spell. Armed with that truth, the wizard went to confront him.

A letter in the game, To Lords of Collegium, gives a reason. Its writer learned from Villigelu that Phinigel had wanted to make his people immortal, but at the cost of their very souls, and that they would never agree. The Realms of Norrath sourcebook now calls him simply the mad kedge sorcerer: an undersea empire embodied in a single dangerous individual.

Al’Kabor threatened him with the same spell. Phinigel, who could probably have destroyed the arrogant Erudite, chose to teach him a lesson instead, and sent out a vision of the Hammer of Dagnor Butcherblock, the first dwarven king’s relic, hidden in a barnacle-crusted tower beneath Dagnor’s Cauldron and guarded by his aqua goblins.

His court

Phinigel is not quite alone. The Gloomwater Mermaids, once led by Estrella of Gloomwater, now serve him, along with blessed seahorses. There are signs he may be reaching into the Plane of Water itself, the realm of the Triumvirate.

His lower chambers sit 520 to 540 feet below the surface of Dagnor’s Cauldron. They are warmer than the rooms above, closer to the geothermal heat of the Fissure to the north, and it is there the mad sorcerer now lives.

In the game

Kedge Keep is reached from beneath the calm surface of Dagnor’s Cauldron on Faydwer, the last outpost of a vanished race. Everything in it is underwater, so every visit depended on magic to breathe, and the mermaids, aqua goblins and seahorses of the keep all fought in their element.

The mermaids themselves are a story: the bestiary of Monsters of Norrath says many have allied with the last kedge and live with their lord in the depths, and that they eat underwater plants and cannot abide the taste of meat or fish.

Legacy

The kedge story is Prexus’s tragedy. He made a people perfect in memory and doomed by number, and it was one of them who finished them.

Read it with Prexus, Al’Kabor and the Triumvirate of Water.