Highcrest, the City on the Crest
Highcrest stands where Aldric drove his sword into the turf, on a crest above the river-bend in Greenmeadow Vale, and it has been climbing up and spilling down that hill for eleven hundred years. At the top is the Crown’s keep, grey and squat and full of portraits of people with large heads. Below it, in rings, the Athenaeum with its domes, the Cathedral of the Lamps, the market square where trade chat is shouted from dawn until well after it is useful, the Stonegate where the dwarves live, the Lowgate where the goblins do business, and the harbour road winding down to the Highcrest Docks, where the ferries put out for the isles.
And everywhere, in every street, in basements and over taverns and in halls of stone, the guilds. Their banners hang from every window that will hold a nail. Their recruits mill around the boards. Their crafters hammer at all hours. The guild hall of a new company is a rented basement with a damp patch; of an old one, a hall of stone with a vault, a tavern of its own, a training yard and a statue at the door. Most guilds are somewhere in between, and are loudly sure they are nearly the second.
Greenmeadow Vale
The heartland of the Crown is rolling hills, slow rivers, farms, hedges, and an alarming number of boars. Nobody knows why there are so many boars. The farmers say that the goblins breed them in the Warrens to sell back to the guilds as quests, and the goblins say that this is an excellent idea and they wish they had thought of it.
Every guild starts here. Its first recruits learn which end of a sword to hold on the boars of Greenmeadow, and its first dungeon is Hollowbrook Cellar, under a farmhouse a short walk from the capital, where the kobolds have stolen every candle and bought off Old Gnawbelly, the biggest rat in Greenmeadow, with the cheese. After that comes the Goblin Warrens, where the goblins have unionised and will fight to the last for a fair day’s wage and a fifteen-minute break. Foreman Grizzlik is a reasonable goblin who will negotiate. Big Boss Snaggletooth is not, and will not.
Whisperwood
North of the vale stands the first forest, where Lysa went down into the roots and the elves woke under the eaves. It is an old wood, and the trees gossip, and the wolves listen. Elves still live in its southern glades, quietly, in houses grown rather than built. The Ravenhold Keep stands on its southern edge, where Lord Varric keeps his seat and the ravens keep the keep.
Deep in the wood, past the last elven village, lies the Mirrorhall, where Queen Seraphel lives among the reflections of drowned Vaelmere. Nearer, and worse for the unwary, lies Thornwood Hollow: a druid grove gone wrong in the years after the Missing Moon, when the moonshadow failed and the oldest tree in the grove went hungry. Old Mother Oak rules it now, and her great thorn-wolf Bramblefang hunts for her, and the squirrels have opinions about everything, which they will share.
Mistveil Isle
Off the coast to the south-west, a day’s sail from the Highcrest Docks, the highest towers of drowned Vaelmere stand up out of the sea, wrapped in fog that never lifts. This is Mistveil Isle, and it is all that is left above the water of the fairest city ever built.
Ghost lights walk the broken bridges at night: the elves say they are the lamps of Vaelmere’s watchmen, still on their rounds. Very old tortoises sun themselves on the white stones and will not say what they remember. The guilds come out on the ferry to quest there, for the island pays better than the mainland for the time the crossing costs, and every so often a young elf comes with them and stands for a long time at the top of a tower, looking down through the clear water at the streets below.
The Ashfen Marshes
The Ashfen was grassland once, the plains of the orc clans, until the Night of the Missing Moon soured the moonwell at its heart and the rivers backed up and spread. Now it is lizardfolk, bog gas, leeches, and the infamous mosquito quest, about which nothing more will be said here, out of respect.
The Ashfen has more evil in it per acre than any land in Aetheria. In the east the Sunken Crypt, where the Lich-Captain Morvane brought forth the Grey Tithe, and where the Drowned Warden and the Mother of Leeches still serve him. In the north, the Shadowmoon Temple, where the Priestess Nyx keeps faith with a moon nobody can see. And at its heart, in the ruins of the moonwell, Blightmire Sanctuary: Mother Mycelia’s fungus-gardens, the Gravewyrm that burrows through the dead, and the Archdruid Vellum, who stayed when the swamp came and has become, over nine hundred years, mostly swamp.
The Ashfen is also one of the four contested lands, where guilds meet in the open and settle their quarrels without the inconvenience of a referee.
The Saltwind Coast
Where Aldric’s hundred keels came ashore the coast is cliffs and coves, wrecks and crabs, and the crabs are the size of carts. The Saltwind folk are fishers and wreckers and, when the Crown’s excisemen are looking the other way, smugglers. The worst of them hold Smugglers’ Cove under Captain Blacktide, a pirate captain who never learned to share; his Quartermaster Grell keeps the books and the Bilgerat King keeps the bilges, and nobody keeps Blacktide.
Beyond the Saltwind lies a sea no ferry sails, and the guilds with ships of their own cross it to Saltmarrow, the Crown’s harbour on the edge of the Corsair Reaches. The Saltwind is contested land too, and the cliffs echo with steel more often than gulls.
Sunscar Atoll
Far out to the south, where the Forgefather’s fire breaks the sea, a volcano smokes inside a ring of black sand. This is Sunscar Atoll, the ancestral home of the trolls, and they still come back to it to die, and sometimes to visit.
The naga raid it now: serpent-folk of the deep water who came up out of the sea after the Drowning, and who serve, the Tidekin say, the dream that dreams itself. The crabs there are made of cinders, which is worse than being the size of carts, though the Saltwind folk dispute it. The guilds take the ferry from the Highcrest Docks to Port Cinder to quest there, and come home sunburned and smelling of sulphur, with a great deal of gold.
Frostspire Peaks
North of everything rise the Frostspire Peaks, white and terrible. Under them lie the halls of Hammerdeep, burned twelve hundred years ago. The upper halls are ruins now, where the yeti have moved into the throne rooms. Beneath the ice the Frostfang Caverns run, where everything is either frozen or furious; the Yeti Matriarch rules them, and the great white beast called Rimeclaw, and at their top, in the ice, the Frozen Seer of Hammerdeep still keeps her watch on the tower. Below the ruins burn the Emberforge Depths, where Ashen King Thrain works at his anvil.
And above all of it, on the highest crag, stands the Wyrmspire: a tower of black stone with a dragon on top. The road to it is the most travelled road in Aetheria, and the most mourned. When the wind is from the north, they say, you can smell Ignaroth’s breath from Highcrest.
Frostspire too is contested, and there are those who say more guild blood has been spilt on the road to the Wyrmspire than at its top.
The Stormreach Highlands
At the roof of the world, beyond Frostspire, lie the Stormreach Highlands: windswept heaths and sheer cliffs under a sky that never stops thundering. It is the veil of storms, called nine hundred years ago to hide the land from the eye in the sky, and held ever since. The minotaur clans graze their herds there between the lightning-strikes. The Stormspire Citadel stands on the cliffs, where the High Stormcaller Veyra and the Thunderlord Garrak and the callers of the storm keep their endless work, and admit nobody, and the Twin Tempests and the Lightning Warden guard the gate.
On a cliff edge further along, the gnomes built the Gearwright Foundry, where the turrets are on the gantries and the lava is in the crucibles and there are no railings anywhere. Gearmaster Pollux runs it. His great machines, the Iron Harrier and the Crucible Titan, were built to defend the realm, and have decided that the realm includes the Foundry and does not include visitors.
And highest of all, above the clouds where the storm cannot reach, stands the Starfall Observatory, where something fell out of the sky nine hundred years ago, and stayed. The Stormreach is the last of the contested lands, and the highest, and on a bad day the lightning takes more players there than the enemy does.