Ironically, Tilverton had originally been built not only as a trade hub between north and south, but with its greatest strategic and military purpose being to guard against the elves and Dalelands folk launching a "War to Reclaim Their Homeland."
Thus, this frontier city was not only one of the largest cities within Cormyr, but its walls had also been built high and thick. In theory, they could accommodate up to two hundred thousand soldiers for a coordinated defense.
Yet Faerlthann, Cormyr's first king, likely never could have imagined that the elves he regarded as a dire threat would instead continue to decline.
The rise of Myth Drannor had been no more than the final afterglow of the elves.
With its destruction and the departure of the High Elves, the elves had completely sunk into a stagnant state of isolation.
So much so that this imagined enemy had never once launched a formal attack upon this military stronghold, leaving it utterly bereft of the purpose it should have possessed.
Then, as Zhentil Keep in the north gradually fell under the control of Bane's strife-worshippers, northern trade began flowing away from official channels and into smuggling operations formed by small merchant guilds and adventuring parties banding together. With its tax revenues sharply dwindling, this great city—whose only remaining value was commercial—finally slipped into decline as well.
At its lowest point in history, it had only a few hundred soldiers stationed there as a token border defense. It was not until Orcs appeared in the Stormhorn Mountains over the past decade or so that this city, ruined until it resembled a City of the Dead, regained a faint trace of life with the increase in border guards.
Yet at this very moment, with nearly thirty thousand elven warriors, half-elven Rangers, and more