Part 3 of me writing lore for my Knight House: “Fishing”
Arctan is an ocean with islands for visitors, as the old joke goes.
The Fellwaves are a gargantuan expanse of deep and incredibly biodiverse waters that make up no less than 80% of the surface of Arctan. So deep is the ocean that some areas fail to return readings when attempting to measure how far down the bottom is, leading some Magi to theorize that the ocean either simply lacks a finite depth and tunnels through the core of Arctan. The remaining 20% of the world is made up of thousands of scattered island archipelagos, with four larger landmasses that form the four nodes of House Friedrich’s political holdings. As a great house of the Imperium, House Friedrich is the sole noble house upon Arctan, with holdings upon the single moon of the planet and enclaves throughout the Arctan system.
Widespread as House Friedrich may be, all nobles and their mechanical steeds able to do so return to Arctan every summer for the annual Fishing Tournament.
The sport of Fishing traces back to the ancient days of Old Night. The sudden deluge of warp storms across the galaxy cut off Arctan from any aid, and the twisting corruption of Chaos threw the already enormous sea creatures of the Fellwaves into nonsensical spirals of mutation. In those horrible days, the early Knights of Arctan merely defended settlements and terrified peasants from huge monsters that emerged from the surf. Occasionally, the more daring pilots rode their steeds into the waters themselves, seeking to strike at the beasts from whence they came. Records exist telling of crabs the size of hab-blocks, sharks that could stride upon land like a horse, and whales that could swallow a castle. Brave and noble were the pilots who gave their lives to protect the people of Arctan from such horrors.
With the coming of the Imperium, and the ending of the Age of Strife, the creatures f the Fellwaves became more manageable. Not exactly better, but at least not constantly growing fiercer and deadlier. What once started as a practical means of preemptively defending a town became a rite of passage. Now, Knights of House Friedrich compete to catch or kill the greatest monsters of the deep.
The competition begins with two or more Knights embarking onto a wide flatbed barge. As the boat ferries the competitors out to open water, the noble appointed as judge explains any parameters or constraints. Once far enough out from shore, the Knights simply step off the barge into the water and sink to the bottom. For obvious reasons, the areas where no such bottom can be confirmed are prohibited. The Knights must then rely on their sensors, floodlights, and auspexes to find anything of value. Old Night saw a massive wave, pun not intended, of seafaring pirates sailing in makeshift vessels, leaving untold sunken treasures scattered across the sea floor. Most junior nobles, such as those sons and daughters recently granted the honour of piloting Armiger class knight suits, are rarely permitted to participate in the deep water games, and so most of their glory comes from collecting and hauling lost treasure of gold and jewels ashore.
The greatest glory comes from slaying sea beasts.
Only Questoris and Dominus Knights are permitted to participate in such games of Fishing, for the flora and fauna of Arctan’s ocean are deadly in the extreme. Success in such games is measured in how much a slain beast outweighs the knight that killed it, with most common victories being coming in the form of corpses being one and a half to twice as heavy as a knight. In the summer tournament, held every 1.7 years Terran standard due to Arctan’s wide orbit, the overall winner is granted the privilege of taking the catch of their knight for their own personal glory and prestige on top of sometimes being granted political power over rivals they bested, mostly in the form of having the winner take the scion of the defeated as a squire. None of such rivalries are taken lightly, but also none are malicious. Such games and competition foster camaraderie among the cousins of what is in essence a far spread family of nobles, thus ensuring all in House Friedrich know the strengths and weaknesses of each other to compensate for them in war.
The greatest triumph of Fishing comes from M34, when High King Allan Friedrich in his Knight Warden “Main Sail,” walked out of the churning waters dragging the tail of a still living monster behind him in his thunderstrike gauntlet. The beast weighed nine times as much as Main Sail, with a body four times as long as the Knight was tall, and had a pair of muscular arms ending in talons the length of a Baneblade. Its head was like a serpents, with row upon row of needle teeth the length of a mans arm. The beast was called the Fellwave Eel, and its skeleton now hangs as an enormous chandelier in the main feasting hall of Castle Westmorland.