Hello there! Today is another #QuestofFireFriday and a damp one where I live. Very befitting of a discussion about the village of Bracken. When Anargen and his friends first encounter the small collection of homes hidden amidst a forest of dark and wiry trees, they were marching through a downpour at night with a new moon over head (that detail becomes important for them). When I first wrote about, I knew what they would find there but not what I would. It was as they road silently through the rain that Sir Cinaed suddenly began singing “Lament for Father”, a solemn bittersweet tune that embodies the Welsh term hiraeth. That moment transformed the passage and rippled throughout the series, because that song became the theme music for the series (sign up for my newsletter to receive a free download) and raised an important question. I knew why Anargen needed to hear that song in that moment, but why was Sir Cinaed singing and why all of the sudden weeks and so many miles into their journey? Answering that question led to the first novella in the series, Succession, and opened my eyes to the smaller more focused stories that could and needed to be told in the series. It was akin to what Obi Wan told Luke in A New Hope, “You’ve taken your first steps into a larger world.”
Bracken/Brackenburgh
Location:
Middle Era- Braddenlands, Vogteremark
Modern Era – Siochail District, Rehalcyon Empire
Population:
Middle Era – 15
Modern Era – 175,000
First Appeared In:
Middle Era – The Gathering Dark, Chapter 15
Modern Era- The Gathering Dark, Prologue
Important Sites:
Middle Era-
- Bracken Inn
Modern Era –
- Black River Inn
- Elkland Square
- Ministry of Justice
- Lowland Antique Treasures
HISTORY:
Bracken is, like Black River, a place of great significance in the series. Unlike Black River, Bracken survives the Middle Era to become Brackenburgh where Jason ducks into an inn to escape the rain. Anargen and his group did much the same hundreds of years earlier. You’ll have to read The Gathering Dark to see the contrast in their experiences there. But sufficient to say, when they each stepped out of the inn there, in their disparate eras, they were never the same.
Bracken had only been settled for a few decades before Anargen and his group arrived. Sir Cinaed, of course, had been there decades earlier and there sustained some wounds that still ached even to the night he led Anargen and the others into town. The oppressive dark there wasn’t something intrinsic to the village. It wasn’t cursed or laced with a sordid history like Stormridge. Darkness crept into it though. Settled by a homesteader family Bracken was filled with a collection of families and individuals just looking to get away from the conflicts around them. A hundred years into its history a man named Edward Goodby opened an inn in Bracken and transformed it into a place of refuge and warmth for those passing through and those who chose to stay. The Vogteremark, which claimed the lands, was undergoing changes, dimming from the bright beacon of justice and goodness it once was. At the same time, in the seas to the west, Ecthelowall was undergoing change as well. Though at the time it seemed a far more benign sort, a political reshuffling as it acclimated to the impending transition from rule by its Monarch to a council of nobles headed by a viceroy. Ecthelowall’s still simmering tensions with the dwarfs of Ordumair who had long ago marched through those lands and been potential claimants to them wasn’t something Ecthels generally worried of, unless they happened to have emigrated to the nearby Siochail Plains. Everyone in Bracken just wanted to escape the chaos and confusion of the Northwestern Lowlands which were poised to change indefinitely. But we cannot escape our problems or our past as they learned and Jason much later also discovered.
Fast forward to many decades after Anargen’s story seemingly closed, and a certain family’s presence in Bracken again drew others desperate for refuge. Libertias was soon to fall and the Middle Era was giving way to the Modern. As tiny Bracken grew and thrived under the leadership of wise and noble souls, the lands to the south were consumed by the insatiable hunger of the coalition of Rehalcy, Tyreenes, and Lyscea. Together their newly formed Rehalcyon Empire easily pushed the simpering remnants of the formerly bold and grand Vogteremark to near eradication. The new rulers over Bracken’s lands took almost a century to notice its prosperity and development. When they did, they eagerly seized on the city and began appointing the mayors of the town, drawing it more tightly into the commerce and culture of Rehalcyon. Bit by bit, the light within Bracken was marginalized and hidden away. Criminal enterprises found fertile ground at the edges of the Empire’s control and with the elements of good within the city, like the Knights of Light, all but expelled from it Brackenburgh effectively belonged to two crime families: the Wernstrums and the Tyskets. Over time, the two would engage in a bitter feud over who would reign over Brackenburgh. The winner would go on to be something far more than a mafia though. The wealth and influence they wielded gave them means to spread their operations throughout Rehalcyon, until, though far as Brackenburgh was from the capital, Falkirke, even the emperor there paid heed and respect to the Wernstrum Crime Syndicate. It’s leaders soon found themselves not just ensconced in unsavory activities but courted and consumed by true evil.
By the time Jason entered the Black River Inn on Fylleth 24, 355 Modern Era, a physician checking the pulse on hope and goodness would have said the city was dead. But that wasn’t the first time Bracken was nearly ended by the dark forces in the Lowlands. And the High King is known for bringing life back to that which seems dead.
The history of Bracken is somewhat harder to share than Black River’s because of all the spoilers for the books in the series it straddles. What I can say is that thematically, Bracken has always represented us, people, and how we go through bouts of what seems to be good and upright conduct, only to find we’ve allowed awful things to creep in and we get to the point where it seems all is lost, but then the Lord Jesus Christ takes those moments and turns them on their head and we are renewed, alive. That wasn’t a hundred percent a conscious thing at the start for me writing the story, but it definitely became important to cultivate once I saw it in the story.
I hope it’s been an enjoyable peek into Bracken and that you’ve seen enough for a serious visit and choose to explore more within the pages of Quest of Fire. There is so much more to see of the Lowlands and more to Bracken(burgh). Let me know any things you’ve discovered or wondered about from your time visiting in the story and all the more if you choose to join the Quest of Fire!
Brett Armstrong 
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