Places
Freemarch
Freemarch is a frontier, the last outpost of civilization and the church, the place where roads end. Beyond lies the frozen north of Vos and Breithdal, and to the east, the all-devouring forest of the Valdres.
It is also a crossroads where deep-delving Dwarves, Vosiri trappers, and treasure hunters mingle, all seeking southern gold for their wares. Year after year, there is less to go around.
It is a dangerous country; a hiding place for outlaws and rebels. In the hills, there live a people older than the old kingdom, who honor their gods with the blood of civilized people. Beasts and monsters dwell here, in places unconquered or abandoned by men. Marchmen may gather on churchdays, but they also remember the words and offerings of old, the rites which keep the night-things at bay.
History
The Old Kingdom of Aebor
Ages ago, before the rise of the Pearl Emperors, the Seris valley was not a mere march, but the heart of a great kingdom.
The land was called Aebor, from the old-speech for the constellation now called the Northcrown. The deeds of the kings of Aebor are the stuff of legends. It is said that they led their people out of the east, after the great flood; that they were friends of the Tormen, and enemies of the Southmen and the Vosiri. The kings of this time built no cities, but ruled from a castle built on Mount Arda, at the heart of their kingdom. The old kings were buried at the great temple of Poliad, for the holy mountain was not yet swallowed by the forest.
The Epic of Seimar's sons tells the story of the kingdom during the Second Age of Sorrow, when the world froze. King Seimar, as he lay dying, divided his kingdom and followers between his sons, Toriach and Morach. Toriach, the elder son, brave and stubborn, delved with his followers into the caves below the Dragonmounts, in search of the inner fire. Morach the Clever founded a stronghold atop the hotsprings beside diamond lake, and called the place Morad. Winter besieged the settlement, and terrible monsters rose up to threaten the weakened king: giants, thunderers, and dire-wolves. The winter lasted a generation, and it was Morach's children who stepped forth to reclaim the kingdom. Toriach and his followers were never seen again, though the children of Morach delved deep in search of their lost kin. The spring of the great thaw is marked as year 0 in the northern reckoning (23 years before the start of the imperial count of years).
The Dwarves first appeared in the years after the thaw, and the king swore friendship with them.
The last of the line of the old kings was Falrerk the Unlucky, thought to have been murdered by his usurper, the first of the Sorcerer Kings. They wielded dark powers stolen from the School of Arnis, and led Aebor against Tormar and Serulai in the War of the Torch. They abandoned the old gods, breaking menhirs and desecrating temples to appease new patrons. The last of them, Guirn the Cruel, was slain in battle against the Serulaians in 531; he was the last king of Aebor.
Their black dynasty lasted four generations; all but Guirn are entombed within Mount Olek, which is still sometimes called the Black Mountain.
Conquerors from the South
The kingdom was exhausted by the wars of the Sorcerer Kings. The Valdres-wood crept over the boundary stones in the east, swallowing first the holy mountain and then the eastern district. The hillmen, long suppressed, returned to ravage the outer settlements and exact a bloody vengeance. Most towns found what protection they could as vassals or clients to the lords of Serulai. Gloamingwatch, the castle of the first kings, was left a crumbling ruin.
With the southern rulers came southern priests, emissaries of the Church of the Authority. The lordly patrons built the first churches, tore down shrines and temples, and even built a monastery at the edge of Diamond Lake.
In 663, Serulaian patronage gave way to imperial rule. Work was begun on a new fortress at the south of the march, to secure the imperial frontier. The church was now backed with the strength of imperial law, though the region was largely spared the horrors of the great inquisition.
For a brief time, the March prospered; Imperial rule brought trade and investment along with its taxes and tithes.
This prosperity was not to last. Costly wars in the east drew gold away from the northern frontier. Thirty years of bloody civil war made things worse. The War of the Three Emperors was fought far from the March; mass conscription, famine, and finally rebellion brought the chaos home. By 759, the last of the imperial garrison had been siphoned off to fuel the conflagration, and the Lords of Morad fought with Serulai for control of northern trade. In 811, the last of the border forts fell to the northern army. After a long and bloody war, the March was free of the Empire and their Serulaian vassals.
The Dawning Age
It was not to be a happy peace.
The returning army brought back plague. For fifteen years, disease wracked the country. Trade ceased entirely. Crops rotted in the field as rich and poor alike died shivering in their beds. Some outlying villages died out entirely; others were simply abandoned by the survivors. Even today, eight years after the last deaths, many bear the pox-scars.
Many also noted a steady shift in the weather, a chilling which had contributed to the famines of the eighth century, and which was now almost certainly growing more severe.
Serulai, stricken earlier by the plague, and with a better climate, was faster to recover. In 825, the old bonds of patronage were revived. A powerful Serulaian lord rules the March as far north as Nestic; he has learned something from the Imperial bureaucrats so recently driven out of Serulai, and taxes as heavily as he can manage. North of Nestic, the March is "Free," but lawless might be a better term. The petty lords of the Seris bicker with each other, and look south with hatred.
And each passing winter is a little colder, a little longer than the last.
Important Places (WIP)
Morad, the Old Capitol
The city was founded by Morach the Clever on four low hills overlooking diamond lake. It was built in the days of the Good Kings and their champions; it suffered in the iron grip of the Black Dynasty; it was sacked by St. Garlaian the Redeemer.
The tallest of these hills bore a hotspring, which already held a shrine to Gasa. Today this hill is the Hightown; the old spring is a now a subterranean temple. The wall-houses, the oldest dwellings in Morad, rise 4 stories from street level to the top of the hill. Only Steep Street runs up to the King's square, winding up the hillside through two ancient gates. The Old Keep, the seat of Morach's heirs and now the council of stewards, overlooks the whole city. The Sorcerer Kings abandoned the keep as the royal seat (they ruled from the fortress Gloamingwatch), but they did greatly expand the dungeons beneath the keep, creating a prison called The Pit.
Sarlai Square (named for southern traders) holds the city's major market, and great merchant houses surround it in the district called Redgate (for the bloody battle when the conquering Saint Garlaian breached the city). The finest of the noble houses within the city surround the true civic center, the Old Square, which is not far from the Hightown gates, in a district called the Blue Quarter. Three other, smaller squares can be found within the walls, including St. Rislan's Square, known more often as the Witchmarket. Hedge mages, witches and druids gather here once a month, offering their services and peddling numberless trinkets, talismans and amulets.
Nestic, the Boomtown
The Valdres
The Valdres is a forest, but this word is insufficient. It is a kingdom unto itself: it has its own customs and laws, its own gods, and it defends its borders.
It stretches east as far as the Dawn Mountains, a sea of beeches, maples, and the ancient oaks. The mightiest of these are the ghostwoods, which, it is said, never shed their leaves, except in the long night of an Age of Sorrow. Dark things move beneath the canopy, and the leaves whisper endlessly. Beneath the tangled roots, the moss and fallen leaves, there are ruins in the Valdres; villages, tombs, and shrines abandoned to the forest, and the things which live there.
In the north, past the Holy Mountain, the forest turns to pine. Unlike the south, this region has never seen human settlement. It remains perfectly desolate and untracked; the rare travelers through this area prefer the bleakness of the Rustlands to the northern forest.
To the merchants of the Empire and the explorers of the western kingdoms, the Valdres is as impassable as the towering Dragonmounts--the edge of the world.
As the old stones and swallowed villages tell, it was not always thus.
History
Ancient Tormar
The Tormen have lived and worshiped at the edge of the Valdres for millenia; their legends stretch back into the darkness of prehistory. Certainly they predate the coming of the Marchmen in the Age of Glory, and before this time, only their own legends exist as a record.
The oldest sagas tell that they were first men to walk the earth, freed from ice by the sun god Shaulk. They tell of the deeds and the tragedies of kings and champions, the wars of the ancient clans, and of the people's struggles with the western giants and the wood-elves, and other, stranger creatures of the Valdres.
They trod paths through the Valdres, sunken, mossy roads which flood in fall and freeze in winter. They hunted elk, ironboar and the lumbering visent with spears of ghostwood. Theirs was the Kingdom of Tormar, though the kingdom was more often contested or divided between the chiefs than it was united under a strong king.
Each petty chief held his own little stronghold, but the kings kept no permanent fortress or capitol. The only constant was the Necropolis of Hansalk, the burial site of the ancient kings and the great legendary heroes. Here, amidst the great stones and the ghostwoods, the court assembled each spring to seek the counsel of the ancestors, the forest spirits, and the gods.
They taught the Marchmen the words and rites to appease the High Gods, but theirs was also a pantheon of innumerable minor local deities, nature spirits, and legendary ancestors. They filled the forest with shrines to the spirits, and tombs for the honored dead, and they raised stones to ward off those things that would not be appeased. In that age before the coming of the Marchmen, they built the Poliad, a great carven temple, on the slopes of the Holy Mountain, which rose above the western edge of the forest.
The Fall
The War of the Torch brought about the end of Tormar. The Black Kings brought fire and dark magic, fighting the forest and the Tormen at once. The forest won, and men of both kingdoms lost, but the Tormen most of all. The wood crept over boundary stones broken by the invaders, choking towns and villages already injured by the war. Cleared land, farmed for centuries, was consumed in days. Whatever pacts the ancient Tormen had struck were gone now, and both sides were driven from the wood. Those that could not flee, or who could not flee fast enough, were never seen again.
The Poliad was swallowed, the sacred mountain made an island as the green tide rolled west. The Ballad of Orin tells the story of the last king of Tormar, consumed along with the Necropolis, entombed alongside his ancestors.
Tormen still live in a few towns and villages to the south of the wood, settlements huddled around their ancient hillforts. No roads connect their plain with the west, though southern ships sometimes find their way to the mouth of the Greenwater. Though they may meet Tormen here, they do not find Tormar; it is three centuries dead, and buried within the Valdres.
The Dragonmounts
This mighty, branching range of snowcapped mountains divides the temperate regions of Freemarch and the Valdres from the frigid outer north. Two major passes cross the great range: the Highgate, between Freemarch and Vos, and the Howling Pass, between Vos and Arsek. The Dragonmounts are a volcanic range; the upper layers are riddled with old lava tubes and other passages, often rich with ore. Deep beneath the mountains, there are yawning black chasms and sprawling halls of living stone.
Two Irondwarf holds, Arzinvur and Gurandolim, lie within the mountains. The shattered ruins of a third hold, Menkaashvur, still overlook the Highgate. Mountain orcs, grey skinned and somewhat stooped, also dwell within the deep caves, but they are far from the worst inhabitants. Dragons, undead, and other terrible monsters lurk in the depths, eager to devour would-be explorers.
Vos
The Land of Long Nights. Vos is a cold and barren country; the land below the creeping glaciers is home to little more than lichen, and there are no great herds to match those of the Stormlands.
The Vosiri are clearly distinct from their southern neighbors; taller, with dark skin and slanting eyes. Vosiri legend holds that they originated in the Seris valley, but were displaced by migrations from the east. The Vosiri speak their own language and worship a sky goddess along with numberless lesser spirits. They do not believe in any afterlife or soul, but use ancient family chants to remember their dead.
Most Vosiri make their home on the coast, fishing the long bay and growing a little during the short summer. Wealthier clans commonly keep a breed of woolly cattle as well. On the slopes of the dragonmounts to the west of the Highgate, there is an icy wood, the Forest of Silence; a few hunters stalk these woods for furs to sell in the south. Others, brave or foolish, search the mountains for the rich tombs of the Cold Ones, an ancient and evil race of sorcerers.
Breithdal
Frozen Breithdal, where the ice never melts.
Even more so than Vos, this is a barren land. No humans live here, and few animals. Some courageous explorers have reported structures half buried in ice, but most do not return. If there are ruins within the ice of Breithdal, they must date back to the Drowned Age or earlier; the country has been uninhabited for millenia.
The Stormlands
Beyond even the forest of the Valdres are the Stormlands, the edge of the world. The great plains stretch into the frozen north, home to great herds of elk and the beasts which feed on them.
No men live here; it is said by the Tormen that the gods of the land (said to take the form of great storm-riding eagles) strike down any who dare settle.
The Mistlands
North and west of Serulai, the Plain of Helias ends in the ancient Stonehills. The is the frontier of the Mistlands, the twin kingdoms of Arsek and Norim. It is a land of rain and fog; mossy hills break through the dense forest like islands in a sea of trees.
Great herds of sheep graze the hillsides around the clanholds, each stronghold the domain of a high-blooded lord and his retinue of knights. The lords recognize no authority but the druid-kings, high priests who speak for the gods, oversee lordly disputes, and rule the land in times of great trouble. They are revered as the mortal children of Shaulk, and claim a line of descent which stretches into the distant past.
The knights of the Mistlands ride sturdy ponies, surefooted on the hills of their homeland. They skirmish from horseback, throwing javelins before dismounting to fight on foot; they wear armor of heavy cloth and metal scales.