A Traveller's Guide To The Allotment, Part II.

Besides Melcasarile, now known as the Unfallen King, there are three other tales of people surviving - in a sense, at least - their crossing of the wall.  Two of the three are mage-lords, and came much later, but the first was a commoner, less than a decade after Melcasarile's army was slain.

His name was Marsegel, and in the failed revolution that had sent them here, he had been a troop captain and a recruiter.   He did not for a moment believe in the cause of the mage-lords, but he did believe that by serving them, he could make his life and that of his family better.  He wanted not only to bring them wealth and comfort, but a legacy - to make their names worthy of remembrance, despite their common stock.  Perhaps, if the revolution had succeeded, that would have been true.

Here in the Allotment, however, it was swiftly evident to him that those not of noble birth would lead even harder and less privileged lives than in the country they'd been cast out of.  And here, with their borders so eeerily inviolate, there was no need for an aging armsman - no place for his skills in service to any lord.

Again in the name of granting a better chance to his family, Marsegel became a bandit.  For years he preyed upon young, unimportant lordlings who made their homes close to the Wall, disguising his attacks as fairy raids, disturbing the fragile peace between one side of the Wall and the other.  When at last he was discovered, and the mage-lords were riding after him, Marsegel decided to take his band out in one last attempt at glory.

Very carefully, he brought down a small section of the Wall, and then he lured his pursuers across the border.

The fey indulged him - slaughtering both bandits and lordlings to a man, save Marsegel himself.  Him, they brought back across the all, into the Allotment, and made him watch, as in a mockery of one of his bandit raids, they slew every member of his family, no matter how remote the relation. 

Then, they told him, they would grant his wish.  They would make his name, his legacy, into something that would matter to the lords of the Allotment.

As with the Unfallen King, they made him immortal - stealing the life from his flesh to replace it with magic, cursing him so that he must drain the life of others, or go mad.  Then they set him a task:  to find those who trespassed - not across the Wall, or not only those, but to find any who went where they should not go, and punish them.  Thus, the man who had spent years as a bandit found himself feeding off the lives of robbers, and even eight hundred years later, when parents in the Allotment wish to frighten their children, they tell them not to go out after dark, or Marsegel will get thim.

And once they've said it - once they've forbade them - it might even be true.