I know big chunks of text are no one's favorite thing, but if you don't wanna read but are curious about the story anyway, there's an audio version of it youtu.be/533uO9ShICw

Thousands of years ago, when the first signs of the Blood Moon started to manifest, the magnificence of Ancernan had already faded into a distant memory.

Cut from its allies, crumbling from all directions under invasions by hostile barbarians (namely Uberians in the North, Wolves in the South, dogs in the West), Ancernan and the whole Gnomist empire had already acquired a reputation of being an incredibly unhealthy and evil place; the few communications that could be maintained with other cities spoke of an unbearable stench; piles of rotting corpses littering the streets, ritual murders, mass suicides, necrophilia, cannibalism, and other unspeakable acts. A literal cult of Death.

But the event that immortalized the city as a place forever cursed, was its last military expedition. Similarly to Ancernan, the ruins of Ghot are remarkably well-preserved given their age : no later civilization ever took over, or razed the city, or even took its stones for their own buildings. It was left intact, avoided by all, to stand alone in the desert.

For years, the people of Ghot had failed to send to their liege the tributes they owed, on which Ancernan's dwindling population was increasingly dependent. And for years, the Ghotians waited anxiously for the consequences of this act of rebellion.

Finally one Winter day, diplomats from Ancernan arrived. They looked so incredibly sickly and emaciated, that their entrance immediately sucked all life out of the streets. Upon their slow irregular passage, shutters and doors slammed. The horrified silence was interrupted solely by involuntary screams, and the ghostly music the diplomats' servants were playing. Terrified eyes glanced through the cracks at the delegation as it made its way to the king's palace.

There they found no one to greet them; the gates were closed, and they remained like this.
"Fools, they screamed; do not think you can deny our city the tribute she now demands!"
After pronouncing these words, the diplomats all stabbed themselves in the stomach, and layed there dead, as did all their guards and servants. Moving the corpses was said to be a difficult task; the guts, that looked like they had been rotting for days in the sun, spilled everywhere, and some accounts say that the corpses were still moving, and kept moving for days after they were unceremoniously dumped in a nearby pit.

Several months passed in fear after this event. And then, in the Summer, a clamor filled the valleys with panic : an army was marching from Ancernan...
And what an army! witnesses described a horde of walking corpses, brandishing macabre totems made of gold, skulls, bones, and dead animals... in their footsteps, the crops would rot; the trees turned grey and grass fell to dust and ashes... cattle was slaughtered and burned. People felt sickly and aged, and few managed to flee the region before dying. Several scouting parties failed to report back to the city.

There, as all communications between Ghot and the outside world got cut off by the siege, the sources cease to be reliable. All that is known for sure is the total extinction of all life in Ghot and the city's abandonment for ever, joining its former liege in its curse. Archeology has so far been able to determine only a limited understanding of the course of events. All the ancient tales insist that the army of Ancernan never entered the city. And indeed, some peculiar findings seem to corroborate these recollections : spearheads and golden masks imitating skulls were excavated in abundance in the fields, and especially all around the walls surrounding the city, but none within the ruins themselves, where only piles of equipments and skeletons attributed to the defenders and population of Ghot, were found : it appears that the entire army died, either pierced by Ghotian archers or by their own swords. The only detail contradicting this theory, is the fact many of the defenders and civilians appear to have suffered a violent death as well...

Legends say that although the army of Ancernan never entered the city, the disease of their minds had no trouble piercing the walls and decimating, in turn, the defenders, who started killing each others, their own families, and themselves, or letting themselves die. For centuries, this was interpreted as some kind of pestilence, but modern science is currently exploring the meaning behind this insistence of ancient sources on the term "disease of the mind". Did the Ghotians exterminate themselves in order not to fall into the hands of their enemies, fearing a worse fate? or was it an orgy of death, as some sort of sick "conversion", a victory for Ancernan?

In the following years, neighboring cities were too busy with their own defenses to give the time of day to those wanting to destroy the cursed city of Ancernan. Only a hundred years later would an expedition from the rising Zeetian kingdom come any close to this, pushing invading Uberians back in the North East and burning down settlements populated by ghoulish creatures; they found a deserted city on which the shadow of Death reigned, dominated by statues of deities with rotting, skeletal faces; they pulled out as fast as they had come, and let the city be forgotten.