Citadel of Black Ash

The Citadel of Black Ash was an underground temple to Gilgeam located in the eastern Smoking Mountains in the land of Unther, East Faerûn. Its entrance was a pair of large blackened steel doors shielded by an overhang of rock, all carved to resemble a fiendish visage.

Geography
Approximately 30 miles (50 km) straight north of the town of Firetrees, the entrance to the Citadel of Black Ash could be found excavated out of a cliff face on a meager ledge at the apex of a 3-mile (5-km) long valley. The ash-filled valley ran due northeast of the Black Ash Plain.

Government
The temple was governed as a theocracy by the clergy with a rigid hierarchy made up of clerics, specialty priests, and crusaders, led by the Lord High Autarch. Second in command was the Lord High Commander with the Lord High Captain given the responsibility of directing the troops.

Trade
The mines beneath the temple produced gems and precious metals and were the only export of the dry and desolate enclave. The only food they could produce was either conjured by create food and water or from fungus farms.

Defenses
The broad valley leading up to the entrance was filled with powdery ash. What little moisture that reached the vale formed a damp layer beneath the dry surface and medium-sized humanoids sank to their waist in the silty mess. Both sinkholes and boulders could be found unexpectedly under the treacherous surface. Footwear similar to that used for walking on snow could be employed to avoid most of the natural hazards to traveling in the Black Ash Plain region. Giant scorpions scuttled across the surface and ant lions built conical traps for the unwary. Near the entrance to the Citadel, the valley floor sloped up steeply to the base of the cliff and the ledge of the entrance was 30 ft (9 m) above that, making it difficult to use siege weapons within range of the iron doors. Rope ladders used for scaling the cliff could be retracted in times of need.

Militarily, the Citadel was protected by the Lords of War and Victory, crusaders that were the bulwark of the church of Gilgeam, which numbered over 200 circa 1370 DR. These elite troops conducted drills at dusk and dawn on the plain at the mouth of the valley and patrolled the temple and environs in the daylight hours. The Gilgeamites also had an alliance with a large clan of fire giants from the western end of the Smoking Mountains.

History
Sometime around –3000 DR a clan of dwarves from the Brightstar Lake region went in search of new veins of ore and lava pits to power their forges. Inadvertently, they awakened a great brown wyrm named Vulpomyscan who easily overpowered (and ate) their brave leaders and made slaves of the remainder. He put them to work excavating a magnificent redoubt and mining a hoard of gems that outshone the wealth of any king of the time. The dwarves and their descendants labored for centuries and eventually came to worship the desert dragon in his Citadel of Black Ash.

After a millennium, in –2087 DR, the god-king Enlil found pearls on the west coast of the Alamber Sea and directed a city to be built on the site, called Unthalass, City of Gems, which eventually became the seat of the Untheric Empire. When the human settlements encroached on Vulpomyscan's territory, he flew out and wreaked havoc on their farms and villages. This angered the gods of Unther and eventually they challenged the wyrm-king with an army led by the greater deity Marduk the Justice Bringer. As Vulpomyscan's dwarven legions fought Unther's army on the ground, the ancient wyrm battled Marduk in the skies above the Black Ash Plain. Losses were heavy on both sides until finally Vulpomyscan was slain and his cultists were defeated. Their bodies were unceremoniously left to be consumed by the blowing and shifting ash as the victors plundered the vast wealth of the dragon's lair and returned to Unthalass in triumph.

For several centuries the mountain stronghold sat empty except for the infrequent monster or occasional beast that managed to find it. Sometime around –1000 DR, Gilgeam, son of Enlil, happened upon the Citadel while surveying Unther's territory and reclaimed it, but it is unclear whether or not any permanent residents were installed at this time. Many more centuries passed until the Second Great Flood of the River Alamber in 731 DR, the Year of Visions, inundated much of Unther and destroyed historical documents and records in Unthalass. Gilgeam tasked a group of scribes to take the soggy and moldy books and scrolls to the remote Citadel and restore them, creating an everlasting archive of his magnificent deeds as ruler of Unther. The scribes and their descendants toiled at transcribing the deteriorating documents and cataloging new ones brought by yearly courier until the Year of the Fist (1311 DR) when the annual visit brought the plague to the already dwindling population. In less than a tenday, the monastic inhabitants sickened and died, leaving the Citadel uninhabited once more.