The Marchhold¶

See Marchhold's geographic and room maps in the Regional Atlas.

Roads Beyond Thirty separates the level-31-to-32 outer work, Scald Hall at 33–40, and the Toll Vaults at 41–47.

On the east bank of the Emberrun, above the old mooring stones, a castle stands with its roof on and every window dark. The Marchhold was the river-lords' march-fortress — raised in the War of the Wains, seat of the province that held the north's door, and when the Sundering's killing frosts emptied the north, the castle did not empty. It sent its children and its silver south, and the garrison stayed, and held, unrelieved, for nine winters. Nobody stormed it. Nobody relieved it. The household died at its stations in perfect order, and it has held them ever since.

One castle, seven hunting grounds, level 26–47, banded floor by floor: the deeper and higher you go, the older and colder what keeps the place. The whole zone reads its difficulty out loud through its architecture — when the floor changes, the band changes.

Getting there: ferry to the east bank, east along the Wrackline to the Old Mooring Stones, then NORTH up the shore stair. Ninety-one steps. The Toll calls the climb the Long Receipt.

The Muster Green (the waystation)¶

The trodden green under the south face is the zone's haven, waking place, and front desk. Hesper Cole, the March-Clerk — thirty-first hand of an unbroken line of one — keeps the standing desk where relief columns were meant to form up, and keeps the March Ledger: three hundred and twenty years of wages owed to a dead garrison, carried forward, compounding, the receipts column blank and ruled. She trades gossip and answers for the castle, the march, the winter, the relief, the ledger, and the way (ASK COLE ABOUT …). Muster Clerk Ada Mere posts ordinary work, Quartermaster Fen Wold exposes convoy delivery and shortage on the shelf, and Chaplain Edrin Toll tends the injured without pretending the dead house has regained a chapel. A postable muster board hangs on the shelter post. The castle's dead wake nowhere else; Cole's is the pen that rules the line under whatever happens to you inside.

The geese on the green are the muster's one line that still answers its name. She counts them at dusk. The count has never been short. Leave them be.

The Relief Stable¶

The old stable court is now a second protected institution rather than another combat room. Relief Archivist Mara Venn links household rolls, strong-room issues, evacuation lists, southern receipts and living field claims. Stable Courier Tor Aldren carries closure notices outward and returns with receipts and kin statements. Road stretchers and remount tack occupy one stall; the chained archive occupies another. The staff do not make the inner keep safe—they make its evidence socially and economically consequential.

The seven floors¶

Ground	Band	What keeps it
The grounds — orchard, kennels, midden, tilt yard	26–28	Ban-hounds of the kennel's masterless line, midden boars, and the muster geese (peaceful, counted, off the menu by every instinct you own)
The walls — gatehouse, curtain, inner ward	29–31	The Toll — road-thieves wearing the castle's old authority: cutters, a hedge-hexer, and the Tollreeve, who half believes the story and keeps the camp swept
The great hall floor — hall, kitchens, stores	32–34	Grainmother rats (the east range's other guild), scald-haunts still working the kitchen's service, hall retainers keeping the laid boards
The upper floors — solar, gallery, library, chapel	35–37	Standing harnesses that answer disorder in the gallery, and the chaplain's ghost, still on his round of hours
The towers — the leads, turrets, horn turret	38–40	Watch-wights walking the rotations, wall shrikes ranking their larders, and the Hornkeeper, who has rehearsed the relief call ten thousand times and spent it zero
The undercroft & gaol — cellars, cistern, cells (dark — bring lanterns)	41–43	Vault eels in the pillar-forest, cell-wights on their keyless rounds, and the Turnkey, whose key-board is missing exactly one hook
The crypt — the rows, the court, the undervault (dark)	44–47	Bier moths, pale courtiers enforcing a court's peace, the Seneschal at his three-century audit, and the Castellan, the Unrelieved (L47), at the last post

Beasts skin (goose down to bier-moth wing, 150–980 silver); the household's dead and the Toll carry coin. Anonymous material still sells on the west bank, but seals, issue marks, household objects and room-specific evidence are worth more as claims routed through the Relief Archive than as treasure stripped of provenance.

The house's law¶

The castle is not a ruin and does not behave like one. The floors are swept, the fires are laid, the doors shut themselves at night, and the household enforces order, not territory: walk the aisles, wipe your feet, touch nothing, and much of the house merely watches. Theft, force, and disorder are corrected at the band's full strength. The Toll will not sleep past the keep porch. Attend to what the Toll will not do.

The keep doors open to a push and are always shut again by morning. Nothing has ever been seen closing them.
The dungeons are dark: undercroft, gaol, and crypt are lantern country, all of it.
Somewhere on the upper floors, the muniment room keeps more than records. The household's papers left the castle exactly once, in a hurry, downward. What served the clerk's predecessors may serve you.
Before the Lord's Door (past the Castellan's post) the deep keeps its lamps lit. The door has no keyhole, no handle, and no key, ever. The Castellan sealed his lord home in the ninth winter and assigned himself the watch. The ladder's last room is a sight, not a fight, and the warmest light in the deep.

Notes for the unrelieved¶

The well yard shaft drops straight to the undercroft's well chamber — the veterans' run past the house to the deep bands, and the way back out when the crypt has had enough of you.
The Toll swears a drowned gate opens into the bluff somewhere off the old mooring stones, at the bottom of a dive nobody sober attempts. The Toll, notably, does not swim, and has never explained how it thinks the gate answers. Strong swimmers with good steel draw their own conclusions.
The Castellan is the zone's boss and its whole biography: the housekeeping's hand, the ledger's cold entries, the honed kitchen steel — all him. He opens warded. Bring a band that belongs at the bottom of a 47 and manners for the gate's silver plate: the doorkeeper does not warn.
Deaths anywhere in the castle wake at the Muster Green, under Cole's blanket, in her ledger.