Freewheeling in Freemarch
Freemarch is where the Defiant really arrive in Telara: the first proper look at the world you’re trying to save, and a zone that manages to be both warmly inviting and quietly haunted by what you know is coming. After the apocalyptic future of Terminus, stepping out into Freemarch’s rolling green fields, farmsteads and bright coastline feels almost like a relief—a glimpse of what Telara is meant to be when Regulos isn’t chewing it to pieces. Meridian sits on the western shore as the faction’s first capital, a city of magitech towers and planar research labs that serves as your main hub for training, crafting and catching your breath between forays. The zone as a whole is tuned for characters roughly between levels 6 and 20, with quest hubs at places like Ark of the Ascended, King’s Retreat, Eliam Fields, Scarred Mire and Denegar’s Stand guiding you methodically from one end of the March to the other.
That first impression of calm doesn’t last. Freemarch sits in the shadow of Port Scion, a once‑proud city sealed after it fell to the Deathtouched, its walls now streaked with death‑taint and necrotic sludge leaking into the sea. Death and Water rifts regularly tear open over the fields and along the coast, spewing undead and quivering horrors into areas that would otherwise be peaceful farmland or fishing villages. Lakeside Outpost is a particularly unsettling example: from a distance it looks like any other village; up close, the “villagers” move and breathe wrong, their glassy eyes following passers‑by while Deep Ones scuttle along the nearby beach. Even away from active rifts, you see signs of rot: farmsteads burned out by Endless Court raids, graveyards where the earth has been churned up from below, and Defiant patrols stretched thin trying to be everywhere at once.
Freemarch also functions as a primer on the wider conflict. Telara’s crisis is the rifts themselves—holes punched through to the elemental planes, allowing Death, Water, Fire and other forces to spill into reality. The Defiant response is unapologetically pragmatic: study the rifts, build machines to channel their power, and use that energy to create Ascended—souls resurrected and enhanced through magitech rather than by divine fiat. Guardians, on the other hand, see the same events through a theological lens. To them, the rifts are a consequence of mortals meddling where they shouldn’t, and the answer is to destroy the machines, repent, and fight under the Vigil’s blessing with divinely raised Ascended of their own. Freemarch’s quests put you in the middle of that argument: helping Defiant engineers excavate ancient Eth sites like Arkeen, repelling Guardian incursions near the shattered bridge to Port Scion, and watching cultists from the Endless Court exploit the factions’ hostility to push their own agenda.
The twist that gives all of this extra weight is the Defiant origin story. Your character is not native to this timeline; you come from a future where the Guardians destroyed the last great machines, Regulos broke through regardless, and Telara was reduced to a hollow shell on the brink of being devoured. In that final hour, the Defiant perfected their own Ascended process and hurled their champions back in time through a temporal gate, essentially flinging the last light of a doomed world into its own past. When you arrive in Freemarch, you’re walking through fields and villages that your original timeline never got to keep; every Death Rift you close and every cultist plot you derail is an attempt to carve out a different outcome than the one you remember.
As you push deeper into the zone, the uneasy relationship between Defiant and Guardians becomes more apparent. There are moments when both factions are clearly fighting the same enemies just over a hill from each other, and storylines that hint at the possibility of common cause against Regulos, but the default mode is still skirmishes, sabotage and mutual contempt. Freemarch is, in that sense, a microcosm of Telara: beautiful on the surface, riddled with rifts and old grudges underneath, and held together for now by the efforts of people who can’t entirely agree on why the world is worth saving, only that it is.
