Editing Acrozatarim/Gazetteer (section)

=The Western Reaches=

Journey even further west than the Central Basin, and the traveller comes to the Western Reaches where the hills rise and the Sarokean Mountains loom on the horizon.  The Prefectures are really little more than a vague memory here; local authority is in the hands of the few lords and nobles whose families keep control over small regions, or the philosophical and martial enclaves who live ascetic lives in the higher hills.  It is a dangerous land where even the human settlements can be truly remote and hostile, let alone the more dangerous beasts and servitors that stalk the wilds.  Gnoll clans dwell in the deep forests; goblins, Dreadspawn and worse breed amidst the canyons and valleys.

The most civilised and well-travelled areas of the Western Reaches focus around the trade routes that pierce through to passes in the Sarokean range, and the north-western region that are often travelled by trade caravans, travellers and mercenaries coming round the northern point of the Sarokeans from Naseria, Carthagia and further afield.  Unfortunately, this region is also commonly contested by those nations and the Thorn Circle and are fertile grounds for Dreadspawn and other aberrations, meaning that the towns there are walled and travellers must be wary and vigilant.

Amidst the wild Reaches are any number of strange, isolated phenomena and communities.  One of the most famous would be Lliras' Mouth, a great swathe of poisoned, toxic forest that has been warped by rampant overgrowth and mutation - all towards the purpose of providing a lethal, venomous environment.  Four centuries ago, the great spirit sent down an avatar - a monstrous amalgamation of flesh and timber bedecked with oozing spines and thorns.  This avatar prowled the forest that became Lliras' Mouth, changing the terrain as it passed.  Now, the changed trees glow phosphorescent at night with the chemical poisons seeping from their bark, and even the lesser creatures have twisted into aggressive, dangerous things.  The reason for this divine intervention is not known.

Little more than a rumour, the Valley of Grief's Death is a high and difficult to reach place by all accounts.  Here, the Lord of the Valley presides over a small community of those who were once gripped by despair or woe but who have now found new life through the mildly poisonous flowers that grow throughout their home.  These flowers are said to deaden feelings of sadness, and are also addictive.  The Lord rules over his drugged people with a firm hand, and those who come to the Valley to find peace are rarely allowed to leave again.  Still, a rare few samples of the flowers and their poison have made their way out into the wider world, even if it seems impossible to get them to grow in soil beyond the Valley of Grief's Death.

The Fire Mask are a minor federation of towns and Drak tribes in the south of the Reaches, not powerful or large enough to be considered a nation but certainly possessed of a long lineage.  Fire Mask culture places a great deal of import on masks and other face-coverings, especially for ritual and religious purposes, and this allegedly stems back to (of all the strange reasons) the fact that shortly after the Dawn War, surviving communities dug into the ruins of an old Imperial trade depot and found a cache of ornate Empire-era masks.  Now these self-same masks are the propery of the upper castes of the Fire Masks, although every person in the region has at least a simple ceramic or wicker mask.  The old trade depot has been rebuilt and fortified, serving as the capital town for the Masks; elsewhere, Fire Mask communities are traditionally carved out of stony cliffs and hillsides, leading to a semi-subterranean settlement of homes and storehouses interconnected by tunnels.  The Fire Masks are known to include several particularly wise philosophers and priests amongst their number, and the Unmasked, as they call outsiders, often come to seek the knowledge of these revered ascetics.

A number of dams still hold strong in the higher levels of the Reaches, far enough away from the Central Basin to have been spared the aftershocks of Ephras's meteoric strike.  They are in terrible states of repair and every generation sees more damage adding up; every few generations, one breaks down entire, unleashing a flood of waters into the lower valleys.  However, knowledge of wind power has remained more common here, and several old wind-bastions still stand in good repair - tall towers of Imperial engineering that sprout a myriad of sails, turbines and other air-catching devices, capable of turning to match the direction of the winds.  Kites and streamers are also common here, often for ritual purposes but, in some places, using very old techniques to sift strange substances out of the winds themselves, including the ichorous amethyst bile - a material of great value to arcanists.


==Mirayek==

A truly young nation in a time of fledgelings rising up from the Empire's ashes, Mirayek is a mere generation old.  The Mira Prefecture has been brutally and efficiently reunited under the stewardship of a Husaara warlord called Erustun Gallus, aided by the priesthood of Kevayek.  Gallus and his warband have systematically gone about conquering an increasingly large area of townships and noble fiefs, hammering them together into a simple hierarchy with himself at the top and buttressed by fear of the Kevayeki, who threaten disease and catastrophe upon those who defy the warlord.  It appears that Gallus promised the priesthood both the elevation of their faith and also the restoration of an old Kevayeki holy site, a series of mineral springs and pools that are now once again in Kevayeki hands and properly venerated.  Equally, however, the new power structure sits uneasily, and Gallus has taken steps to ensure that he is increasingly less reliant on the Kevayek priesthood.

Mirayek lies mostly in a lower basin, one that eventually feeds into the Central Basin, and as such its settlements are mostly steep, terraced towns and villages overlooking wet lowlands and marshes.  It is in those marshes and swamps that several brotherhoods of ascetics dwell, who temper themselves in the hardship of their dismal surroundings; some of them are be dedicates of Lliras.  It appears that Gallus has now sought their support as a counterweight to the Kevayeki priesthood, offering them a chance to hold sway in local affairs and serve as enforcers of justice and law.

Speaking of law, the Mira Prefecture has long been beholden to a particularly strange tradition that emerged in the early centuries after the Dawn War.  It is said that Churaphrat (or possibly Lliras or Kevayek) gave several precious canisters to the people, instructing them in their use as receptacles of life energy.  The original jars are long since lost, but rigorously trained arcanists have made copies over the decades, and these are used in holy rites (usually to all three of the aforementioned gods) whereby truly evil men and women, those who breach society's most fundamental laws, are condemned to have their lives drained into the jars.  These ceramic containers can then be used to provide health and vitality to others, usually those who have been wronged or wounded by the executed criminals or, sometimes, for those who are of most value to the community or who have performed great acts worthy of recognition.

From this has grown out another, less sinister but no less macabre tradition - the inheritance of life.  It is considered that part of the inheritance a mortally wounded or truly aged person gives to their family is the last moments of their life; when someone knows that their death is close, they seek out the priesthood and have their life drained into the jar, to be passed on to family members as a gift from the departed.  A certain (frowned-upon) trade has grown in expended life-canisters, sold as curios to collectors and the wealthy in regions further east - and sometimes unexpended canisters are sold too, inherited life-jars traded on by desperate Mirayeki who need the money more than they need the vitality.  This is considered a taboo action in Mira society and hence is essentially a black market trade.

As well as the marsh-ascetics, there is at least one Umbral tower rising from the mire of the Mirayek lowlands.  Inaccessible due to the depth and treachery of the waters around it, the dark sentinel remains mostly untouched by human hands; bands of would-be looters have yet to puzzle out a way of reaching the ruin.  The only figure to have reached it in recent years is Gallus himself; stories say that he swam naked through the leech-infested waters and back again to prove to the Kevayeki priests that he was worthy of their aid, surviving the subsequent weeks of sickness and fever to return to good health - seen as a sign from the Kevayeki that the Overseer of Disease approved of the warlord's schemes.


==The Thorn Circle==

'''Icons''':  The Thornmaiden

The Thorn Circle is not constrained to one location in the Western Reaches; rather, the entire region is where the Circle is at its strongest.  Their doctrines are followed in many a remote village; those of the gnoll clans who paint their muzzles red heed the call of the Circle; well-hidden valleys host their gathering points.  The Thorn Circle are blood-priests, mystics and wildlanders, followers of certain doctrines of certain Younger Gods (most notably Lliras) that have been blended into philosophical beliefs from a different, old source that the Thorn Circle keeps well protected.  Despite the Circle's scattered nature, it has several bastions within the Reaches and can call upon many capable woodsmen and gnoll warriors when it needs to make its point in violent fashion.  Some of these bastions are rumoured to be literal living fortresses, great outgrowths of thorns and cancerous bulges of wood, and are home to esoteric orders of Circle warriors and mystics who undertake extreme blood rites of sinister fashion.

The Thornmaiden is the current leader of the Thorn Circle, and pursues an aggressive agenda - seizing sacred sites of elemental energy and hunting out Elder taint regardless of the petty complaints of nations and peoples.  The Circle's influence has waxed and waned with the passing of the years but, for now, it is on the rise.  Recent large-scale clashes between gnoll tribes and the Carthagians along that nation's eastern border have dragged in the Thorn Circle to aid their allies, and for the first time in a while the Circle is having to commit resources against a genuinely powerful foe - and finding out that it has strengths it never knew in the process.  This conflict has the worrying possibility of serving as a crucible from which the Thornmaiden will be able to forge the Thorn Circle into a truly powerful militant organisation.

A number of old stone pillars littered across the Reaches seem to be of particular import to the Thorn Circle.  Known as the Storm Pillars, these rocky columns are riddled with crystalline veins and serve as lightning rods during the violent storms that often clash against the flanks of the Sarokean Mountains.  The power so gathered is fed into the lines of energy that the Circle maintain across the landscape, presumably for geomantic purposes.

The most well-known of Thorn Circle holdings is Bloodstone Cascade, a town amongst the crags of the Sarokean range's northern point.  Here, a series of breathtaking waterfalls crash down out of cave mouths, flowing through a series of pools and falls before feeding into a river far below.  What is notable, however, is that the water is all slightly bloodied; not just red-tinged, but actually containing diluted blood, apparently seeping out of a vein of bloody rock deep in the mountainside.  The water is drinkable, albeit always possessing the coppery tang of gore.  The settlement itself is a brightly coloured place of streaming banners and ornate, ritual kites dancing in the winds that batter the crag-face; temples to both Ishrak and Grumand stand proud atop the highest terrace of the town.  A very old community, Bloodstone Cascade's ties to the Thorn Circle are deep and intricate; a strange tree, its bark carved with sigils and its leaves the colour of crimson gore, is rooted at the edge of the crag's high blood-pools and drinks deep of the mystical water, and this tree is apparently central to the Circle's strange doctrines.


==The Great Sarok Expanse==

Where the Storm mountains turn southwestwards and the Sarokeans curve aside, the Great Sarok Expanse is the wide corridor between the two mountain ranges that opens out into the Ascarian tundra.  The landscape here is a mixture of taiga, steppe and the occasional outbreak of rugged, geologically active hills that vent acrid steam and rumble with the underlying mutters of Grumand.  It is a colder land than the rest of the Drakkath, and wilder still than the Western Reaches; the Expanse remained an unconquered region when the Drakkath Empire still faced the full fury of the old Ascarian civilisation.

Now, the shattered wreckage of the Obsidian Wall crops up across the landscape here and there, the vast warding sigils mostly obliterated by the passage of time.  The crumbling wall is a mess of shattered pieces of volcanic glass, marking the perimeter of a dead Empire against a foe that has been equally reduced by the passing of the ages.  The northmost of the Great Wolf's Scars break into the Expanse - the thrashing, wounded rents torn by the Younger God when vile Shauku shattered its back, quenched its flames and threw it to earth to suffer and die.  The ground still rebels at memories of that catastrophic event, burbling lava out in viscous streams that soon cool and mark the landscape with another eerie dribble of solidified rock.  Sometimes, the smoky plumes that emerge from the vents have other, stranger properties, forming into cloudy wolf-daemons that howl and hunt, or turning what the agonising chemical mists touch into raw iron.

There are a few regular inhabitants of this remote land; the south-westernmost Drakkath settlements cling to an existence, hardy men and women who live here because their fathers and their forefathers before them did.  More than a few mines pockmark the landscape, digging mineral treasure from the earth.  Further south, the northern of the Ascari tribes dwell, the tough folk of the tundra who have themselves lived for long generations in this region.  Under usual circumstances, the two cultures here rarely clash; the landscape's harsh nature inspires co-operation more than conflict, and both have goods to trade that the others want; Ascari and Drakkath merchants trading ivory, herbs and furs need safe passage throug the region.

Unfortunately, times are no longer normal.  The growing wrath of the Ascarian people is being encouraged under the Wolf-Chosen's guidance and thus, for the hapless men and women of both sides in the Great Sarokean Expanse, life has just gotten far more interesting.  Already raider-bands have crossed the Expanse to plunge into the Western Reaches and Central Basin; they've mostly left the people of the Expanse alone, but two warlords under the Wolf-Chosen's command have moved into the region to fortify Ascari power there, and have taken to using local labour to create their fortifications - labour that is not always willingly given.


===The City of the Hekatonchiere===

There is one power in the Great Sarok Expanse that is unmoved by all that goes on around it - the hekatonchiere.  An enclave of these ancient servitors survived the Dawn War when the hundred-handed ones retreated to their bastions and waited out the conflict.  With the War past, little changed; from time to time, their towering figures can be seen striding across the Expanse either north or south, off to make bizarre demands, give strange gifts or just travel through the lands of the nations under an unknowable agenda.

For the people of the Expanse, it is considered unwise to bother the hekatonchiere and instead one should avoid their settlement at all costs; the strange beings are sometimes serene and peaceful but can become enraged or violent without any apparently cause, so best not to take any risks.  The Expanse-folk often entreat the gods at small shrines to keep the eye of the hekatonchiere away, but they also wear amulets in the servitors' likeness to ward off beasts and evil magic, and most families make a pilgrimage at least once a decade to leave offerings at one of the high ridge-temples that they have established to the hekatonchiere themselves.  What the hundred-handed ones think of this fearful reverence, if they notice it at all, is unknown.

The City, as it is known, is an odd sight; a cluster of hemispheres that themselves bulge more spheres out like metallic blisters.  Regardless of the scourging elements, the entire structure possesses a faintly red cast, like rusted iron, although close inspection reveals this to only be the natural colour of the metal itself.  More than this is hard to ascertain since so few people have ever approached the hekatonchiere settlement, but these accounts do match with reports of other hekatonchiere architecture elsewhere in the world.

The City does have one export, although probably not a purposeful one.  Every year, one or two hekatonchiere emerge from their home and deposit large pieces of metal in the surrounding landscape.  These chunks of discarded metal are not simply rubbish, however - they are (to human eyes at least) incredible works of art, wonderful mixtures of irridescent metallic alloys wrought into three-dimensional patterns.  It's abstract work, not imagery but impression, warped and shaped into intriguing forms that vibrate with fluting music whenever the wind blows through the tunnels and hollows of the object.  Locals retrieve those of the objects that they can (some are too large and heavy to move easily) and sell them on; hekatonchiere 'art' has pride of place in many an eastern merchant's or noble's hall.