House of Lisport: Lisport

Long ago, Elisabeth Port was little more than a dock where horses could rest and feed while dragging boats upriver, a small way station between Fork and Black Stag. By 1500 AD, however, the riverboat culture was calling it Lisport, and the name took. When Abraham Courlander moved from Fork to Lisport in 1752, he chose to use the port’s name for his manor. As the Courlander family rose to power, the manor became the town.

Abraham Courlander moved from Fork because Fork had already become the hive of scum and villainy it is today—but he didn’t move so far that he couldn’t continue to benefit from it. The Courlanders established Lisport as a warehousing and trading town outside of Fork for river merchants.

If they arrive by boat, Captain “Black Pete” Ashton will dock the boat at the pier and remain on the boat to guard the ship.

Black Pete turns the boat westward into the slow-moving waters of Lisport, and docks his ship beside the stone pier. “Ready?” asks Meril. “Let’s go.”

The rising sun drives your shadow before you. Only the barest outlines of roads remain in the town, and the buildings are mounds of bushes and flowers with the occasional black beam poking through ferns and grass.

On the west end of town a many-gabled manor rises. Meril identifies it as Lisport Manor. As you follow the slow rise westward, Lisport Manor looms before you, a wide, tall, two-winged building almost as much a castle as a manor home. The roof is covered with gables, and as you come closer you see the ornamental line around the top of every floor come into focus as gargoyles and angels.

Lisport Manor is a relic from a lost world, guarding a dead town, its prewar grandeur oozing like blood from its crumbling masonry.

It is one mile from the port to Lisport Manor, with the town spread between, along the overgrown roadway.

Because of the storm coming in from the north, the boat will move to the small town of Maryvale another 18 miles downstream at about noon.