Northern Gate: History and Rumors
Northern Gate is a very solid-looking city. The buildings, of imported timber and local stone, are built thick and squat with much evidence of patching, some which probably date back to the founding by Agrandosie Fogg in 866. Agrandosie was an old pirate, tired of the life and looking for a place to settle and enjoy his ill-gotten gains. Bringing a few of his longest-standing crew members and their families, he landed just north of a cove on Corsain on sunny spring day, astounded that the area was open for settlement. It wasn't until that fall that he discovered why the land was uninhabited. But Agrandosie was a man who'd seen a little weather in his thirty-two years on the sea, and hurricanes just made him dig in deeper. He brought up the settlement to a reasonable size and passed away a content great-grandfather.
After his death, his grandson Baris led the fledgling town and it was Baris who built what is now called Fogg's Wall to hold back floodwaters in the inevitable bad weather. A century later, Baris's great-granddaughter Zephyr oversaw the creation of the huge North Gate with the leaders of the Dragonsong Dominion. The gate was ostensibly to provide a method of controlling traffic from Northern Gate docks headed north and east; many whispered it was actually to keep the rough, independent Northern Gaters in. Whatever the reason, the gate was the first and only joint project of Northern Gate and Dragonsong. The gate is local stone with massive timber doors that can completely shut off access to the south via the Valley Path, although those gates have only been closed once, when Bloodstone's armies razed across the island. While this did not spare Northern Gate entirely, it did leave many of the buildings standing; many refugees sheltered deep in those timbers while the army flowed over the Corsain countryside like locusts on a ripe field.
In polite circles, the people of Northern gate would be called the independent sort or spirited. While ostensibly under the rule of the Dragonsong Dominion, there were frequent harsh words and minor military actions between the Dominion army and the Northern Gate Guard. When Elena Starphire formed the Kingdom of Driran, the town's Captain (a holdover title from the days of Agrandosie) swore fealty not out of any great desire to follow her but because her ideals gave Northern Gate less scrutiny that it had chafed under as part of the Dragonsong Dominion. Since then the Northern Gate Guard has come to the aid of Elena and she has, in return, left them alone, despite the rumors of pirates sheltering in the east fork of the cove.
