Editing Acrozatarim/Gazetteer (section)

=The Great Eastern Plains of Huron=

'''Icons''': The Lord-Commander Razheman White-Mane-Clan, who rules from Dar Urazel

The Great Eastern Plains of Huron are a large region of grassy plains and wooded hills with few rivers that has served as homeland to the Huronese since time immemorial.  By the time of the Drakkath Empire's emergence, the horse-clans had entered into a formal pact with the lesser Elder God Hammasztu, a being of twisted flesh and swirling wind which is reputed to have been the Father of Horses after petitioning Hashrukk to create equine-kind.  Despite the pact, Hammasztu did little to aid the Eastern Huronese during their conquest by the Drakkath, possibly due to the influence other Elder Gods; however, the seventeen great lakes that dot the centre of the plains are known as 'Hammasztu's Tears' that it wept to see the proud horse-steeds that died in the battles that ensued.

The Plains are today divided into many smaller administrative areas, although wider regions often retain their Empire-era province names - Jhah, Kaishan, Haunshun.  The heartlands of the plains, especially those near the great cities of Dar Urazel and Garan Sen, are well ordered and bear a thriving population.  Huronese roads are well maintained and patrolled, running all the way from the ports of the Fractured Coast to the Great Cliffs themselves.  However, moving out of the heartlands, safety and civility becomes far less guaranteed, especially amidst the densely wooded hills and the few rugged mountains that erupt up from the alluvial soil.  It is easy to stray far from civilisation on the great plains, and easy for threats to hide.  The mountain ranges play home to some monstrous terrors, in particular the Longfangs in the north-east that split the coastal states there from the Myrmec - for it is there that Sharaz Longfang, a dragon matriarch who served the Elder Gods until their defeat, now lairs and broods.

The horse is the symbolic heart of Huron, and even sedentary city-dwellers and bureaucrats tend to hold the beast in a special respect.  The broad plains and few rivers of the Great Plains served the early Huronese well, and in the modern day cavalry play a heavy part in their military.  The breeding of steeds is a matter of pride and fine details amongst the horse-clans,and there are several notable rare strains like the precious and prestigious blood-sweating horses and the wyrdspawn steeds of Hammasztu's bloodline.  So too are horses a focus of fearful Huronese tales of beasts and monsters - bizarre terrors like the mare-dopplers that shift their forms and hide amidst herds to prey upon horsemens' minds, or the ravenous diomedics that are said to hunt in packs, wolf-like and hungry for meat, or hippogriffs that make off with prized horses to mate with.

Urazel is the patron deity of Huron, and his worship is dominant.  Dragon iconography is thus particularly common in Huron, especially around temples and organs of the state; the elite Dracoverr, the Lord Commander's personal troops, bear the red dragon of Urazel on their armour.  A rare few dragons are known to dwell in the farthest and wildest reaches of the Great Eastern Plains, and some of these still hold to old pacts with Urazel; in theory, they might be called upon to aid Huron.  The wider pantheon is worshipped in Huron as well, supported with the usual reverence of ancestors - an oddity of Huron is that certain famous horses are also held worthy of worship in this same structure, and many clans have two or three such steeds that members pay homage to as well as their own forefathers and foremothers.  Ishrak and Immar are both held in reverence just below Huron; Huronese tradition holds that the two deities are actually married.

Aasor holds a position of particular import in Huronese society; rather than widely being venerated, his priesthood officiate over the area of oathes, duty and binding agreements, especially over warriors who wish to form blood-brother bands and those who swear themselves into the service of another.  This appears to stem from the chain-cults that grew up around the Eighteen Cold Pits in the north of the plains, a series of deep sinkholes that lead to strange Elder confinement devices; ancestors of the modern Huronese are said to have sworn a pact, apparently overseen by Aasor itself, with the weird and inhuman creatures that once lived in the Myrmec that they would forever keep eighteen terrible beings locked away beneath Huronese soil, the bindings refreshed regularly with Huronese blood.  Most Huronese have some business with the Aasorian chain-priests at some point in their lives but, overall, leave veneration of the deity aside from their worship and offerings to the wider pantheon.

Seeing the vast tracts of ordered farmland and irrigation that cover the heart of the Great Plain is a surprise to those who think of the Huronese only in terms of their horse-warriors; moreso still are the massive edifices of city and stone that the Huron people have erected over the centuries.  Engineering on a grand scale, often centred around old Dawn-era structures of the Empire, the bastions and major settlements of Huron are usually wrought from distinctive red sandstone carved out of local quarries.  These cities have ensured a certain amount of stability in the otherwise tumultuous inter-clan bickering of Huron; their defences are far beyond the capability of most horse-clans to actually capture should there be a civil war.  They have also been key in the continuation of a form of currency still based on the Drakkath Imperial Measures, and have served as a home to the merchant classes of the nation throughout turmoil and conflict in the wider land.

The people of this land are mostly Huronese humans, with a smattering of genasi amongst them - most commonly air genasi.  Aasimar and tieflings are both very rare but not unknown.  There are a number of gnoll tribes that live in the wilder regions, some of whom are an active menace and hostile to humans; others have long traditions as nomadic mercenaries, serving whichever clan-lord is willing to pay their fees.  There is something of a tradition of gnoll janissaries; punitive raids against the gnoll tribal federations at the edges of Huron include demands for young gnolls to be handed over as compensation for gnoll marauders' attacks.  These young gnolls are then brought up by the government to serve as elite, extremely loyal slave-soldiers under the Lord-Commander's authority; some are also tithed to the Urazel church for a similar purpose there.


==Zhatan and the Great Cliff==

During the latter stages of the Dawn Era, the Elder God Gilam tore the once-unified Great Plain of Huron into two.  The Leviathan of Flame and Scale shattered the ground at the centre of the Plain, causing a vast cliff to rise up and seperate it into what is now known as the Great Eastern Plains and the Great Western Plains.

Now, the Great Cliff serves as the bulwark between Huron and the Wasteland, serving as an eternal wall against the beasts of the wastes.

The Cliff runs hundreds of miles, stretching from Carthagia in the south all the way to Myrmec in the north.  It is by no means impassable - many gullies, ravines and valleys pierce its barrier - but the massive height of the cliff face does mean that anyone wanting to enter Huron from the west must travel through these passes - and most of the major ones have Huronese watchtowers overseeing them.  These watchtowers, perched atop the Great Cliff, can see for leagues out across the desolate landscape beyond.  Unfortunately, there are also cave networks that run into and through the system of cliffs; there is no way for Huron to fully plug every gap in this natural defence.

The landscape of western Huron, east of the Great Cliff, is extremely rugged and broken, far wilder than the heartlands of the Eastern Plain; this is dangerous country where the threat of Wasteland intrusions is a regular worry.  The provinces of Jaghatun and Oghatan also serve as home to many clans and families that still remember their traditional Western Plain roots, and desire for a Pilgrimage to retake the Wasteland is higher here than in other regions of Huron.  In a culture where a military hierarchy and tendency towards authoritarianism only goes so far to counter a tradition of independent clans and internal conflict, the western reaches are also one of the most troublesome and unsettled areas of the Huronese people.

The apogee of this can be seen in the great fortress of the Black Tower of Zhatan - both it and the surrounding city are commonly just referred to as Zhatan - which dominates the surrounding region and stands in defiance of the Lord Commander's authority.  Some say the Black Tower is the greatest fortress of this age, standing tall at the edge of the Great Cliff; the surrounding landscape is made up of broken terrain and twisting ravines, while the Tower itself is a marvel of engineering and defensive architecture.  Even the city that has grown up in its shadow would be a challenge for any attackers, made of cramped, twisting streets and sloping terraces.  Apart from its reputation as a bastion, though, Zhatan also serves as a centre of trade for those caravans skirting the Wasteland, and its Silk-Hooded Markets are notorious as places where almost anything can be had for a price.  Zhatan has actually started minting its own currency, based on the old Western Huronese trade-coins.

The Tower is also famous for the thaumineering that has gone into its structure and, most of all, for the Black Knights, the Urazeli templars whose arms and armour are works of incredible arcanomechanical artifice.  The Tower has stood watch over the largest breach in the Great Cliff for centuries, and is actually named after the Dragon-Saint Zhatan, First of the Disciples of Urazel, who commanded its creation in the Dawn War to protect against the servitors of the Elder Gods.  The Black Knight Commander is the absolute authority in this city; a predecessor in her role, several generations ago, took advantage of weak Lord Commanders who could not enforce their own control of the area to break Zhatan away into an independent state.  The secession was fuelled by the old rift between Easterners and Westerners; the templars of the Tower see it as the holy duty of the Huronese to retake the Wasteland and finally tear down Baalshegarath, and see the ongoing obsession of the Lord Commanders with becoming new Emperors as a diversion from their true duty.


==The Fractured Coast==

The easternmost edge of Huron is the Fractured Coast, pulverised during the Dawn War into a mess of coves, peninsulas and islets.  Several major Huronese ports are nestled amidst the wracked coastline, and it is a major region of shipping and trade; but the rugged cliffs and hidden bays also serve to hide many sins, from sea-raiders to ancient, shattered relics of the War.  Lighthouses, often called 'Urazel's Fires', are common and much needed for vessels to avoid the treacherous reefs and shoals that are a feature of the entire coastline.

The Fractured Coast saw a great deal of bloodshed and destruction during the Dawn War; the original coastline was probably ten leagues or so further out to sea, coming to its current reach after being pounded by mountaincracker munitions, earthquake spells and the raging fury of deities made manifest.  Even now, detritus from the raging battles can still be found rusting and mouldering in great piles amidst the ravines that stretch for miles inland, and it's no secret that eerie servitors and still-active sorceries make the region dangerous.  Zones of safe control have been scoured around the Huronese ports, and there are a few fishing villages dotted here and there, but much of the Fractured Coast remains untamed.

Kura Tun is the greatest of the Huronese port-cities, and also the site of an Elder-era shipyard; much of the vast, arcing skeleton of metallic struts and bones is no longer operational, and only a few of the remaining mechanisms are understood by the thaumineers who attempt to use them, but nonetheless the Kura Tun vessel-birther is a major boon to Huronese efforts to maintain a significant navy.  The past century has seen increasing amounts of ship design experimentation by Huronese naval architects, and two years ago the first experimental 'metal-clad' was floated, a regular ship with metal plating over its hull; unfortunately it sank in stormy weather a month later.  The recent arrival of Ironjack refugees from Ara will likely fuel a new push in naval technology.

The relics of the past are plain to see along the Fractured Coast.  Most of the Ward-Towers, immense old bastions from the Dawn that lined the coast, are no more than shattered piles of rubble now, but in a few places the alien architecture of that era still stands; and, in certain remote areas, some structures that are believed by scholars to be Umbral in design.  The dead hulks of innumerable weird Dawn War vessels litter the beaches or lurk just below the waves out to sea.  The greatest of these, the Chariot of Light, is an immense city-ship that lies broken and ruined along the Alabaster Shore; the Chariot, once the personal transport for an Elder God, remains undisturbed even after all these centuries due to the truly terrifying defensive weaponry that is still active aboard it.  When triggered, the Chariot emits some sort of accursed energy that turns all living matter within a mile into alabaster limestone; tormented shapes litter the surrounding beaches, and each wave fills the air with a great clattering as all the petrified fish and other sea creatures rattle against one another on the sandy floor of the shallow sea.


==Myrmec==

Myrmec is the name of the increasingly arid landscape north of the Great Eastern Plain; the southern, hilly reaches are now provinces under the control of Huron, but the Lord Commander's authority only reaches as far as the slow-moving expanse of the Usma river and the green belt of arable soil around it.  Beyond that, the habitability of Myrmec rapidly reduces further; barren hills, rocky badlands and, ultimately, the unforgiving Myrmec desert itself.

Signs of the beings that once ruled the Myrmec are clear - eerie, crumbling old structures obviously not made for human habitation, worryingly insectoid images carved into rocky cliffs, clay tablets covered in alien glyphs that literally set a human's eyes itching just to look upon them.  Here and there, old Elder relics slowly turn to rust amidst the arid badlands; immense black-metal girders just up, long since stripped of whatever structure they held aloft.  Whoever once dwelt here, they are long gone; the Myrmecians of today are humans, albeit with an unusually high number of earth and fire genasi amongst them.  These Myrmecians traditionally live in small groups of several families, bound together by a particular piece of their culture's philosophies or poetry - that is to say, the word-clan is genuinely the guardian of a given scrap of thought or text.  Now, the southern Myrmecians are vassals to the Huronese, but they are grudging and often rebellious.  As well as human inhabitants, so too are there a handful of wiry, lean desert gnoll marauder-clans; they have no love for the Myrmecians and helped the Huronese conquerers significantly as scouts and pathfinders, but now that Huronese conquest has slowed to a standstill, they are seen in a more ambivalent light by the new rulers of the region.

The desert proper is a strange, eerie place with a mournful air to it; ash and bone are plentiful amidst the sands and rocks, and it is scattered with the hollow, discarded, eroding remnants of past eras.  Vast strange devices, immense twisted bones and incomprehensible towers break the desolation, relics of a past age that now lie forgotten.  The beasts of the desert are also strange indeed, including immense, lumbering behemoths that look, from a distance, like great hills themselves.  It is here that the terrible Longfang herself is said to hunt from time to time; so too are there stories of the karkadaan, the lords of the desert, mighty creatures with a myriad of pearlescent horns that are said to be the children of behemoths and elementals and which consider themselves wardens of the old, rusting Elder artefacts of their domain.

The northern Myrmecians still live free from the Huronese yoke, and their society has transformed to resist any further aggression from the south.  New word-clans have formed, piecing together bits of philosophy and poetry into new, militant interpretations that are carried through by the clansmen and -women in the way they live their lives.  A number of priest-leaders have risen up over the world-clans, each the guardian of a number of different pieces of text that they have combined into radical new concepts and from which they in turn take their own names and titles.  It's no secret to the Huronese commanders of Usma that the Myrmecians have now fortified several ancient Dawn-era bastions and pre-human ruins in the desert, turning such ancient discarded husks into defensive positions; some claim they've seen desert behemoths turned into walking buildings, their backs holding great howdahs aloft.

Even stranger tales sometimes come from the depths of the desert - rumours of the Shining One, a sinuous, curling serpentine beast of glorious mien but sinister nature that is caught in some sort of eternal battle against demonic beings that stalk the far reaches, in a region where a Dawn War weapon turned sand to glass.  So too are there stories of pre-human ruins filled with rows of sealed ceramic pots that mutter and shake, and of a great tower guarded by beings of liquid metal.


==The Maritime States of the Longfang Coast==

East of the Myrmec lie the Longfang mountains, lair of ancient Sharaz, and beyond that there is a strip of coastal land running north that plays host to several small maritime states.  The southernmost of these, Haraj, is now a Huronese satrap; but further north the states remain independent, largely due to the Demarchy of Cosuna which presents Huron with a difficult obstacle indeed.

The Longfang mountains are utterly untamed; a few passes wind through it, offering access to Myrmec, but the foothills and peaks are only home to a few human enclaves and monasteries.  As such, the maritime states here are wedged into whatever land they have available between mountains and shore - which is to say, not much at all.  The Demarchy's southern border is a very wide river and delta; the state has actually fortified the entire length of it against Huronese invasion, and the bridges across the river are designed to be easily collapsed and destroyed.  More than that, Demarchist mages continue to maintain an ancient pact with several watery elemental beings that was granted to them by the Storm Lady, Ishrak, and these elemental guardians render an assault by sea or across the river a very unwise idea indeed.

The half-dozen states here are largely ruled by hereditary nobility, but the Demarchy is rather different - every three years, anyone in the population of adult age can be selected at random from a lottery to gain a position in government.  Rumour has it that this is, itself, another pact - not with Ishrak this time but another, unknown Younger God, possibly Pethio or Ansari, the latter being a female aspect God from further north who is probably the same deity as Naskha.  What the purpose of such a pact, shaping a rather random form of government, would be is unknown.

The other notable state is the hallucinogen-fuelled government of Blue Aestus, wherein decisions are supposedly guided by oracular visions induced by seer-ministers during the consumption of copious amounts of drugs.  Blue Aestus is rich from its cultivation of the great, aquamarine-blue fields of stormweep, a potent drug-flower only found to grow in the regions of unnaturally grey-white soil that are found in the state.  According to religious tradition here, Immar and Ishrak are tempestuous lovers (but not married, as the Huronese believe) and they first courted during the Dawn War itself when Immar tried to persuade Ishrak to join battle; she challenged him to match her passions if he wanted her to fight alongside him, and so the (at that time mortal) Immar and Ishrak lay together for thirty days and thirty nights, the storm goddess's ecstasy wracking the land with storms and floods.  The Aesti claim that this rather excessive bout of lovemaking occurred in Blue Aestus itself, and that stormweep grows where the two gods indulged their passions.