The Drowning Men of Meridian

The Nosgothian capital of Meridian had always been home to its share of criminals. And as the vampires were embroiled in their own internal conflicts and Meridian was rebuilt during this distraction, these criminals returned to the city. When the city had been rebuilt, civilization returned and a government of sorts had been founded, with power centralized upon an appointed chancellor. The Chancellor of Meridian, however, would not stand for rampant crime, and soon he organized squads of watchmen to sweep through the known smuggler dens and suspected criminal areas. Many were captured in these raids, even a few innocents, but none were out to the axe. Human life was too valuable in a vampire-ruled Nosgoth, and so siezed criminals were made useful through forced labor.

Unfortunately, some proved too dangerous for this labor, often murdering guards and civilians alike in escape attempts. The Chancellor needed them gone from his city. The Patriarch of the Waters, head of the ferrymen who traditionally sunk Meridian's dead into the ocean to prevent vampires desecrating the corpses, offered this. The most dangerous of Meridian's outlaws, unfit to co-exist among the living decent folk, were chained into boats to serve as ferrymen or else imprisoned upon the Isle of the Dead as morticians to embalm and shroud the dead prior to the routine sea burials. In either place, they were watched at all times by hardened and brutal overseers. Over time, these prisoners became known as the Drowning Men, alive only to serve the dead.

But when war came to the Isle of the Dead, these men finally got their death sentence. While largely protected by the sea around the island, the winged Razielim had nothing to fear from the waves and set upon the stranded humans with vicious cruelty. While the priests were easy prey and even the Patriarch was mutilated upon the jagged rocks, the overseers were a stronger sort. Led by their highest member Marshal Torstein, they and their charges retreated into the mortuaries carved from the very cliffs, the most defensible point on the island.

As the Razielim began to break through, they were met with flurries of thrown hatchets or swept to the floor by flailing chains, heads and wings and limbs crushed beneath the heavy shields of the overseers. As these shields kept up a defensive wall and vampire claws strived to break through, time passed in the torchlit funereal vaults. After many hours, the overseers and their convicts emerged from the darkness and breathed fresh air once again. Any vampires who hadn't been killed had retreated. They had won the day. And as they departed by ferry to the docks of Meridian, they were no longer overseers in charge of convicts or convicts oppressed by overseers. Traveling together, slowly through the dark night waters, they were united now as equal victors of fiercest battle.

Creeping through Meridian's sewers to meet up with those who had defended the city proper, the former overseers rallied for clemency on behalf of their former prisoners. And so it was granted, with these men being assigned as first-wave troops, a vanguard of strength and steel. Over time, rumors of the battle at the Isle of the Dead spread and Merdian's docks became crowded with ships full of men seeking to join the war, morale boosted by the tale. But while many preferred the discipline of the Ironguard or the self-sufficiency of the Watchers, others saw no future there. Battlefield medics whose dreams were haunted by dying cries, wide-eyed sole survivors of brutal combat, guilt-ridden deserters, criminals escaping execution, and pirates looking to retain their lawless methods - the traumatized and the lost, the shunned and the wicked - sought a different way of life. They sought the way of the Drowning Men.