The Estate of Unrest

The murder

Garanel Rucksif was a dwarf of Kaladim. Savil Tranquilsong, a follower of Quellious in the Butcherblock Mountains, tells the tale: to all who knew him Garanel was a peaceful, hard-working dwarf with a prestigious post in the Kaladim mining guild and a loving family. Then, for reasons nobody knows, he lost his mind and murdered his wife and three children. Savil suspects the hand of Innoruuk.

Kaladim took up arms against him and he fled into the mountains until he reached Dagnor’s Cauldron and the estate. Its builder, a cleric of Quellious named Calim Malsiv, heard his twisted tale and took him in. At the top of the tower, while Calim and his kin tried to find the cause of the madness, it rose again; Garanel tore through Calim’s kin and then turned on Calim himself. Quellious, the goddess of tranquility, cursed his ghost, and it remains bound to the estate.

The Faceless bargain

The dead family did not stay at peace either. An Erudite priest of The Faceless, Cazic-Thule, bargained with Garanel and sacrificed himself to make the family undead. The estate filled with corpses that still walk its halls.

The house before

EverQuest II’s books describe the Estate of Rest as it was. It was built by Nicadius Quellborn and his daughter Jessa, with the mason Viktur Rucksif, father of Kyll. A troubled younger brother appears in the story, and the hint is clear that he is Garanel.

Savil Tranquilsong, in the Butcherblock Mountains, remembers the place as a beacon of hope and worship to her goddess, and says she hopes to see it as one again.

The RPG’s account

The EverQuest RPG adds more detail and more villains. In its version the lich Tintragen holds the hostelry, while Garanel took the monastery. It also names Calim as the builder, by Savil Tranquilsong’s telling.

It adds the priests who came later. A few years after the deaths, a band of Quellious’s priests came to reclaim the lands and cleanse them, though she had decreed the estate anathema to all good folk. She did not withdraw her favour entirely, since they acted from faith, but the undead attacked them until only a handful were left, and those few fought to the end inside their nearly finished monastery.

Garanel had watched them with a plan. He ordered his followers to leave the priests alone and even protected them from the lich; once they were wiped out, he claimed the solid, defensible building as his own, as close to the manor as Tintragen’s hostelry. He holds councils with his lieutenants in the dead abbot’s office, though he has no body to sit in it.

In the game

In the game the estate stands by Dagnor’s Cauldron on Faydwer, a haunted manor of rotting dead with a ghost dwarf at its heart. Baenar Swiftsong in the Southern Plains of Karana remembers it as open once to all, wood elves, high elves and even the occasional gnome, before Garanel’s name became one Quellious herself would not let anyone see.

Legacy

Unrest is a story about faith used wrongly on every side: a murderer of a priest, a god of fear answering, and well-meaning priests who disobeyed their peaceful goddess.

Read it with Quellious and Cazic-Thule, and with Kaladim, Garanel’s home.