The Auramkil Era

(through AK 579)

By the early sixth century AK, the Nirduks were a successful merchant family much like their arch-rivals, the Barshen clan (well, apart from being evil). Some suspect that the Nirduks were responsible for Senneth Barshen's "accidental" death aboard ship around AK 500, though nothing was ever proven. The clan's objective appeared to be the Barshen dop smuggling network; combining this with their own holdings would have made them a significant power in Auramkil politics. The Nirduks were nearly able to force Mena Barshen to marry Kalek, primarily by sabotaging the Barshens both economically and politically, but were thwarted when Mena was able to arrange a marriage between her son Ganeth and Solera Parnos in AK 555. They took their revenge by murdering the entire Barshen family, plus retainers, the night before the planned wedding (though they somehow missed the groom and his sister Milana, who each escaped and fled the city).

The odd thing about all of this is that so far as anyone knew, at that time the Nirduks weren't powerful enough to orchestrate the decades-long siege of the Barshen clan or the final massacre; they had help from somewhere. According to Lady Ylena, the Nirduks didn't have strong elven allies, but they had access to technology that nobody else had, including a ring that made objects from shadow (much like the shadow ring Ganeth received before Kambheer), so the clan may have been allied with the Shade Lord as early as the start of the century.

We don't know who took over the Barshen dop trade, but we do know that by AK 579 the Nirduks had become powerful enough to rival the Elite Guard. In Auramkil, they ran the city guard and controlled passage though the city gates. (Apparently the Emperor, in his growing paranoia, had decided to split the Empire's defense between the Guard and the Nirduks, perhaps on the advice of his good friend Streck, with whom he liked to discuss philosophy). In the surrounding countryside, they collected protection money and were generally feared by the populace (and loathed by highwaymen, for whatever that's worth). On the frontier, they were associated with an extended group of operatives we knew only as the Organization, whose magic item supply ran exceptionally deep. (The Organization also included hag covens and wererats; we later learned that our one-time wererat nemesis Ramola was one of Streck's students. I don't think the party encountered any non-Organization high elves on the frontier before the time jump, unless you count G, but I'm not sure about this.)

Of course, when mage magic failed and Auramkil fell, dominance in the Empire turned out to be pretty irrelevant.

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