The Rimward Well-Keepers

Overview

After the first great Pact war over reserves and sworn passage, the well-holding side of the Windscar Pacts gathers into the Rimward Well-Keepers.

Guarded reserves, cisterns held by sworn guardians, a basin rim that must answer for its gates, and a shared burden of taking in the thirsty make the Rimward Basins the Pact world's anchored centre, still short of a basin kingdom.

After the War

In The Rimward Passage War the well-holders of the rim and the escort bands of the Scars killed each other over the same water, and the Pacts had to swear new terms to stop it. Keeping the reserves and honouring sworn passage are no longer one thing.

The rim feels it first. Its strongholds, cistern guardians, and well-keepers start meeting more often, because shutting the gates, holding arrivals back, turning them aside, and guarding the reserves are now plainly their doing, and the war showed what it costs when they disagree.

The rest of the Pacts now expect the rim to show how hard its reserves are kept, to say plainly how many it can take in, and to keep basin survival from sliding back into hoarding dressed as caution.

Cisterns, Wells, and Spears

Defended cisterns, deep wells, reserve moots, and walled strongholds on the terraced spurs come to work as one. The guardians must be strong enough to hold off both a panicking crowd and a raiding party with spears, for raiders know which reserves are thinly guarded and come in the dust storms when no one can see them. The guardians answer with hunts: war-parties that follow a raiding band's tracks across the pans for days, take back the water-skins, and leave the raiders' spears planted upright at the well-head as a warning. Some raider chiefs of these years became legends on both sides of the rim, and one is said to have buried a whole season's taking of cistern-silver and water-gourds under a marker stone on the pans that no one has found since. Those who hold the water hold the rim, and those who arrive thirsty take what terms they are given.

Before a Basin Kingdom

No basin kingdom follows, and the Pact world does not break in two. What thickens is shared guarding of the reserves, watch kept on them, and the strongholds of the rim acting together, all still inside the Pacts that keep the harsh land liveable.

That opens later paths: rivalries between basins, harder reserve federations, and a counterweight on the route side, which arrives with The High-Scar Escort Orders.

Historical Significance

These orders part the well-holding Orcs from the Pact settlement that made them possible. The line runs from the harsh-land kindreds through the Pacts and the war over reserves and passage to the rim's hardening around its water.

The rim becomes no river league and no farming kingdom. Its wells, cisterns, and guarded gates make an Orc order of their own, and the rim strongholds still carve on their cistern lips the names of the guardians who held a cistern through a drought siege, and chip out the names of the ones who opened it and lived to regret it, or did not.