| 263 Kal Murda. So much has been said and written of this small village that it is hard to separate the legend from the fact. No one lives in Kal Murda now, it has been deserted since the end of the last Horde War, a ghost town filled with the cries of the innocent, a place of infamy. Here the most important battle of the Seventh Horde War was fought and won. A desperate engagement that saved the four nations of Man but condemned the villagers of this small outpost to butchery. It was in the final days of a bloody border conflict between the Faeyen to the west, and the Kalborean Union to the south, that the Horde took the opportunity to invade Kalborea and quickly move southwards. Taken completely by surprise the Kalborean outposts near the Rift were overrun and the Horde spread south, burning and pillaging as they went. With both the Faeyen and Kalborean armies many days travel to the west there was little standing in the way of the rapid southwards advance of the Horde Army. Only the small fortified community of Kal Murda lay between the Hordim and the heavily populated cities of southern Kalborea. Without any chance of escape the small contingent of Kalborean soldiery dug in and awaited the approach of the enemy. Cut off from all help they had little chance of survival but fought anyway. Using a series of cleverly constructed ditch defences and the high stone wall of the village, the soldiers held the masses of the Hordim at bay for three crucial days. It was inevitable that Kal Murda would fall to the Hordim. On the evening of the third day the inner defences of the village were breached and the garrison was overwhelmed. No one survived the fall of Kal Murda, but the delay it caused to the advance of the Horde Army allowed a reserve force from the southern Kalborean city of Das Nephorem to reach the enemy as they lay exposed on the open plain. From the west, a thousand axe-men from the Dwarvendim Stone Kingdoms intercepted the Hordim as they organised to meet the threat of the Kalboreans in the south. Attacked on two fronts the Horde Army fell into disarray and was halted on the grasslands. When the battle was over the Horde were in a full retreat, which became a rout when the diminished Armies of Men finally caught the Hordim at Maenum Pass and expelled them back into the Sanhar Wastes. But for the courage of the garrison at Kal Murda the Horde would have swept all before them, the village however, never recovered from the destruction that followed its fall. Since that time of infamy the village had never been resettled and has remained a silent testament to the violence of war and the destruction it brings. As you stand on the rise and look down into the ramshackle streets of the village, you can almost hear the sounds of ordinary village life that would have filled its homes and markets. There is something else here though, something that has left the village with a reputation for the sinister and the spectral. It has been a place avoided by all who know of its existence and now it stands before you, awaiting your arrival. Urging Pallenten forward she canters cautiously towards Kal Murda's gates. You can tell the horse feels the atmosphere of brooding fear that encompasses its walls, and you have to nudge her more than once to keep her moving forward.
| Turn to section 275.
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