The Incident at Coridii

The Conflict

Prelude

Coridii is a seaside town on a promontory jutting into the western Feryll Sea, deep in the western expanse of Saibh, and multiple weeks of travel away from the Etoile Capital City. Its distance resulted in a miscommunication that started the incident in 716.    Early in Third Season 716, a famous troubadour, one Elizabeth Ruvenne, went missing in Coridii, and missed her singing arrangement. Local guardsmen inspected her hostelry and found evidence of a fight, and their investigation led them to the estate of one Lady Nadia Koenig, head of House Koenig the Lesser, a cadetry of the Foremost House of Koenig of the Capital. The estate was found ransacked and Lady Koenig was missing; at this point, the local guardsmen requested a Magisterial investigation. Magistrate Orus Dural arrived two weeks later from Archos to find the gates of Coridii barred to him. Perplexed, he and his marshals sourced a fishing boat and entered the town through its docks, to find the town abandoned.   Coridii had been hastily evacuated, and the only people left in the town were a few guards that had volunteered to be left behind. The explanation was simple; the House of Koenig of the Capital had received word of their cousin's 'murder' and had placed an emergency contract with the Mercenary's Guild to identify her killers (the reasoning being that the Mercenaries would be faster to respond than the Magistrates). The main guild informed the chapter in Coridii that a battle team had left the Capital and were on their way to Coridii; the local chapter misinterpreted this to mean that Coridii was to be *attacked* by the team from the Capital, and duly left town (as mercenaries may not fight each other). Their leaving prompted the mayor of the city to leave town overnight, and the panic that followed saw nearly everyone in town pack their valuables and escape in fear of a 'looming siege'.   This was, of course, all quite preposterous - the Mercenary's Guild cannot wage war within the Principality. When the mercenary battle team arrived at Coridii the day after, Dural conscripted them into his service as additional marshals and left to find the mayor - the mercenaries were under instruction to investigate the fate of Nadia Koenig, and Dural convinced them that their goals were aligned.   The mayor was found barricaded into an old pre-Unification towerhouse an hour's travel northwest of Coridii, with guards maintaining a cordon and refusing entry to Magistrate Dural.

Historical Significance