In the last generations before the Blight of Arcanus, when Deoric command was still a working trade and not yet a sentence of death, a mage named Vakhreon built an estate in the temperate woodlands that now lie inside Bestacia. The land belonged to no country then. The great Deoric mages of that age took the ground they wanted and answered to each other, when they answered to anyone, and Vakhreon wanted quiet and distance for the work he did behind his walls.
He kept no living staff. This was ordinary among his peers. A body of the recently dead, bound by the right command over the space of an hour, would rise as a servant that did not age, did not tire, and asked for nothing its maker was obliged to give. Vakhreon made his household this way: butlers and maids to keep the estate, and a longer roster of subjects for the experiments the household existed to support. The made things had no spirit. The command moved the body; the soul it had carried in life was already gone to the Astral and did not return for the reanimation. What rose obeyed, and felt the absence of what it had lost as a hunger it could not name.
Somewhere in the deep woods stands the floor of a great hall, or what the trees have left of it. A rectangle of pale stone the moss will not hold, and always swept clean. The hunters who have seen it say it is always swept clean. Whatever still keeps that house has not been told to stop.
Then the Blight came, and using magic killed the one who used it. Vakhreon died in the first season of it, as nearly every mage of the age did, unable or unwilling to set the work down in time. His servants did not die with him. They had no spirit the curse could reach and no magic of their own to turn against them, and so they kept the last shape of their instruction, which was to continue. The ritual that had made them was worked into them; any of them could perform it, needing only a dead body and a living one to spend. Masterless, untended, they continued.
Twelve thousand years separate that estate from the present, and in that span the household became a population and the grounds became the haunted interior of a country that did not exist when Vakhreon laid his first stone. Bestacia inherited the forest and what lives in it. The gnomes did not make this and cannot undo it. They can only keep to the roads.