The Sarn Encampment: Hope in the Shadow of Ruin

[Isaac Morris]

The refugees arrived with nothing. They arrived with less than nothing—with memories of harvests burned and children taken, with hands still stained by the earth they fled and the blood they could not wash clean. The Sarn Encampment clings to the outskirts of the Eternal Empire’s former capital like moss on a tombstone, insignificant and persistent. POE 1 Currency does not offer these survivors as quest givers or plot devices. It offers them as testimony. The empire fell. Its legions scattered. Its emperors returned as gods and were slain again. Through all of this, the people endured.

Sarn itself is a corpse. Its causeways, once the pride of Imperial engineering, now channel sewage and the occasional militant bandit. Its botanical gardens, where the empire’s botanists cultivated flowers from across Oriath and beyond, have reverted to jungle, their exotic specimens outcompeted by Wraeclast’s native predators. Its arena, that monument to Imperial spectacle, hosts only the exiles who seek the Labyrinth’s entrance and the traps that guard it. The capital died when the empire died. Its population fled or starved or were absorbed into the martial hierarchies of General Adus and his eternal campaign against the empire’s enemies. Yet some refused to flee. Some remained. Some built, from the rubble of Sarn’s outer districts, the encampment that bears the dead city’s name.

Hargan conducts his trade in the shadow of the causeway. His inventory, that rotating selection of prophecies and follies, attracts exiles who seek not merely equipment but direction. His predecessor, Eramir, abandoned this post when his visions exhausted themselves and his patience followed. Hargan persists, not because his prophecies prove consistently accurate—they do not—but because the alternative to prophecy is silence, and silence in Wraeclast is indistinguishable from surrender. The exiles who purchase his cryptic promises understand this distinction. They do not expect revelation. They expect the slender thread of possibility that connects their present struggle to some future resolution. Hargan sells thread. It is enough.

Clarissa mourns beside the causeway’s eastern arch. Her husband, Fairgraves, abandoned her for immortality, pursuing the rumored afterlife of the ghost pirate who shares his name and has, perhaps, achieved the peace that always eluded his living counterpart. Clarissa does not pursue him. She does not curse him. She simply waits, her vigil uninterrupted by the league mechanics and expansion content that periodically reshape Wraeclast’s geography. She was waiting when the exile first arrived in Sarn. She will be waiting when the exile departs for the Atlas’s infinite depths. Her grief is not narrative. It is architecture, as permanent as the causeway stones and equally indifferent to the travelers who pass between them.

The encampment’s craftsmen work without acknowledgment. The blacksmith, his forge fed by charcoal rendered from Sarn’s ruined timbers, produces blades that will never be exhibited in Oriath’s galleries and never require exhibition. The armorer, her stock supplemented by the salvage of a thousand expeditions, equips exiles for incursions into territories whose very geography has forgotten human habitation. The gemcutter, that patient artisan, shapes the raw magic of Wraeclast’s corrupted crystals into tools of survival. They do not seek gratitude. They do not seek recognition. They seek only the continued opportunity to practice crafts that outlived the empire that patronized them and will outlive the exiles who purchase their products.

The Sarn Encampment does not celebrate victories. It does not mourn defeats. It simply persists, as it has persisted since the empire’s collapse, as it will persist through whatever catastrophes await Wraeclast’s future. The exiles arrive from the Twilight Strand, progress through the encampment’s narrow corridors, and depart toward the acts and maps that await beyond the causeway. The refugees remain. Hargan continues his trade. Clarissa continues her vigil. The craftsmen continue their labor. The encampment continues its patient endurance, not because it believes in redemption or resurrection or the eventual restoration of the empire that abandoned it, but because endurance is the only strategy Wraeclast has ever permitted its inhabitants. The sun sets behind Sarn’s ruined towers. The refugees build their fires. The night advances. The encampment waits.