Endless Adventures Official Lore
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Silverhold History
Many abandoned Tevinter outposts lie in the shadow of the Vimmark mountains, the most infamous being the City of Chains, Kirkwall. The mere mention of the city's name brings up images of the brutality and malice of the magisters. Outposts such as these were the backbone of the Tevinter slave trade, and some whisper that the slave trade never truely ended.
One such outpost lies on the northern side of the Vimmarks, west of Kirkwall. The Marchers know Silverhold as it is today: a small fortress surrounded by poor farmland that can barely sustain itself, a city that only exists because of the silverite mines in the nearby hills. But this is only part of the story. Each step in the path of the slaves and their masters has a terrible tale to tell.
The area surrounding Silverhold is known as Sorrowmarch Moor, a name commonly associated with the poor farmland around the city-state. However, this name originated from the elven slaves who managed to escape their Tevinter masters, who would watch their friends and family forced to march on without them over the sparse land. The few remaining legends of this time maintain that many of the elven slaves were eventually recaptured, and only a fortunate few managed to escape and tell of the "sorrowful march" of their families.
Silverhold itself was merely a step along the road to Kirkwall, and was a nameless outpost to the Tevinter slavers. To the elven slaves, it became known as (translated to the trade tongue) the "Dread Wolf's Fangs". From here, there were only three places to which an elven slave would travel: Kirkwall, the Shrieking Forest, or the Firepeak.
To this day, the Shrieking Forest is known to be haunted by demons and spirits from beyond our waking world. A scholar from Tantervale once suggested to me that the Veil that separated our world from the Fade was torn ages ago by Tevinter's blood magic and their executions of escaped slaves as "examples" to the others. These examples would be sent into the forest with a weapon of their choice and, as the stories say, were told they would be free if they could escape a demon. If the legends are true, the shrieks of the slave as could be heard all across Sorrowmarch Moor.
Those slaves that avoided being thrown to the demons of the Shrieking Forest but had become a nuisance to their masters were fated to suffer even worse than the fugitives on the moor. If a slave became a liability or tried to rebel against the Tevinter slavers in Silverhold itself, they would be dragged to Firepeak. This mountain is known today for its silverite mines and the shadow it casts on Silverhold Keep, but its name came from a much more sinister purpose. The legend varies by the storyteller on how the slaves were tortured on Firepeak, but today the most popular tale is of the Firepeak Dragons. The caves leading deep into Firepeak were home to a family of dragons that had killed any who tried to pass through the Vimmarks on this path, so the Tevinters would feed the dragons rebellious or useless slaves to distract them long enough to pass. This story became popular after the Nevarran dragon hunt, when a scion of the Pentaghast family claimed to have slain the dragons of Firepeak and discovered the silverite veins that would eventually give birth to Silverhold.
-- An excerpt from "Legends of the Free Marches", by the explorer Soren Murtagh.
