White Tower of Baitenchor

The small fishing village of Baitenchor in the Cantacuzen province is well known in the region for its ruins. Overlooking the village on a hill lie the remains of a once impressive white tower. According to local chronicles it was built during the 5th dynasty by the Mokoí, a powerful family from the North of the country to secure their newly claimed fiefs in the Bardanes Reach. The Mokoí dreamed of establishing a new trade route to the east to bypass the bickering provinces and Changrilese tolls to the south, but the venture sadly never became successful and the dream of a new route to the east was dead within two generations.

After this the tower passed to a junior branch of the Mokoí who made it their primary residence, officially receiving the status of marcher lords of the Empire.

The Mokoí-Baiten would successfully cultivate their local fief for the next 300 or so years and the white tower saw itself expanded several times as the influence of its masters grew. The doom of the Mokoí-Baiten would come at the battle of Tesnar bridge in the final years of the 5th dynasty as almost the entire family perished during the bloody battle.

After this the tower would pass hands between several smaller houses like the Dunhoí and the Ghalam-hé-Kateríos before being declared the capital of the Nanbudoi province as part of the administrative reforms of the 6th dynasty.

Baitenchor would thus become the seat of the Nanbudoi governors for almost a thousand years.

During this era the region started to stagnate as the governors would inevitably be of Western extraction, men of the court that resented their posts as wardens of an increasingly isolated province. The region saw little investment as a result and the famous white tower slowly fell into decay.

This only worsened from the 8th dynasty on as it became common practice for the governors to not live or even visit their postings, preferring to live comfortably at the imperial court.

With the fall of the 8th dynasty so fell the old provincial system of the Bardanes Reach and the province of Nanbudoi was abolished and merged into Cantacuzene.

During the 9th dynasty Baitenchor was passed to a local noble family, the Ichoroí in their role as prefects of the Eastern Cantacuzene coast. The Ichoroí were too poor to restore the tower and instead chose to rule from a smaller fortified mansion that still stands in the center of the Baitenchor village proper.

To build their mansion they used white stone from the decaying tower as its 5th dynasty fitted granodiorite stonework far surpassed what they could afford or find in the region.

This started something of a trend and many smaller noble families from the area have since looted the tower in search of material for their own constructions. Baitenchor itself is also known as the white city as most of the richer burghers have at least their ftont facades fashioned of the white stone of the tower.

The Ichoroí line ended during the turbulent 10th dynasty and the tower would then pass to the exarch of Cantacuzene, at this point more of a local curiosity than a defensive structure.

Several wardens of the tower would be appointed from the local petty nobility with none accomplishing anything significative. The final nail in the coffin came with the aftermath of the Devil’s Scourge. Nobles and freemen across the region jumped on the opportunity to leave the frontier and settle in the safe coastal regions and the post of warden suddenly became empty. The last warden Deinos of Echorras, unceremoniously left one spring day 146 years ago to claim a fief near Aetia left to him by his wife's third cousin.

Since then the ruins of the tower lie abandoned, nothing but a silent witness of the immense weight of thousands and thousands of years of the Azanese Empire.