Editing Acrozatarim/Gazetteer (section)

==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.