Heelspike sits in a vast curved mountain range that acts as a natural border between three mighty empires. It was originally founded by wealthy merchant families from each of those empires sick of the heavy taxation of their empires rulers and keen to monopolise the merchant route over which traders wandering between empires must tread.
Initially, this led to a vibrant and culturally diverse city where culture, high art thrived, the people growing wealthy and the wealthy growing rich from the trade route that was the life blood of the great empires. However, one of the Empires rulers Ikandoor the Great, grew jealous of this new mountain city-states wealth and sent his armies to bring it under his command. They laid siege to Heelspike for over a year. Catapulting its walls daily with boulders, flamings balls of rags and plague infected rags.
After such a sustained assault the city was on its knees. Ikandoor would kill them all and take the city for himself it seemed, when, the richest families in the city, in a desperate bid to save their home, did something terrible. They made a pact with the dark gods, the evil deities of the world whose worship is outlawed and whose names it was illegal in many places to even speak.
In return for destroying the invading troops, the noble families would swear eternal loyalty each to one of the six malevolent gods and, the seventh and most powerful, would be worshipped by the Royal Family of the city.
Each family would take on the gods name as their own family name. In the hundreds of years that have past the pact has irrevocably changed the city - it is a place despised and feared by the rest of the world.
They let in the sinister creatures who had once hidden in the most remote and inhospitable mountains - Unknowns, Unknowns, Unknown, and Unknowns.