The Wider World¶

What lies beyond the Frostspine, as well as anyone in the north knows. The whole cold landmass has a proper name — Umbrath, the shadowland, the chained god's shadow given a coastline — but you will meet it only in a surveyor's hand or a scholar's margin; to a northerner there is the mountains, south, and the ice, and that is map enough. The north's maps are good for three days' travel and become folklore after that. The thin places on this page are thin on purpose: every region below is sized to hold future zones, and the "room to build" notes summarize what the canon already implies about each.

The Frostspine — the known world¶

The rampart itself: Kordran's mountains over the Wyrm's vault, running roughly north–south at the top of the world. The playable world today — Coldhollow, the trail-country west of it, the road south to Emberford's river-lands, the Ore Road north through the Highreach — is one inhabited seam of the range's eastern face. The World section maps it properly.

Worth restating as geography: the towns are not the region's centers. They are its exceptions — three lit rooms in a very large cold house.

The Wyrmcrown — north, beyond the Iron Gate¶

The high heart of the range, where the peaks cease behaving like ordinary terrain. No living person has crossed the Iron Gate above the Frozen Gallery — found sealed from the inside, a fact the north prefers not to contemplate after dark — and everything beyond it is testimony: air that tastes of struck flint, ridgelines that do not match their own silhouettes twice, and Ashwing's circuits, which grow visibly tighter the farther north the observer stands. The deep charts agree the Veins converge here. The Chaining's anchor is somewhere under it.

Room to build: the approaches are walked. Through the graven door behind Old Graven's tally room — shut since 612 SR, and opened at last — the Wyrmshoulder climbs to the range's high shoulder: the Flint Fells, the Silhouette Ridges, the God-Barrow Field, the Gatewatch Line that never came down, and the forecourt of the Iron Gate itself, where the offerings finally make sense. The Gate stays shut — caulked from within — and everything beyond it remains the canon's designated home for endgame-scale revelations.

The Pale Steps — west, over the passes¶

Glacier country: shelf above shelf of old blue ice, stepped like a stair built for something patient. The western passes out of the trail-country are summer-only and not always then; beyond them the Steps run to the edge of the map and, the dark-elves imply without confirming, under it — their halls are somewhere below, and invitations are not applied for. Under the range's western spurs sits Hammerdeep, the dwarven mother-hold that sealed itself through the Long Winter and has never fully reopened. Frostmaiden weather. Unkindled stories. A silence with weight.

Room to build: well begun, and now high and deep both. The Sunstead Pass crosses from the trail-country to Thornfold's hearth, Sunstead Abbey's ruin, and the first shelf of the Steps — Mother Rime's court, the frost-sworn, and Hammerdeep's West Postern. Behind the postern, the hold itself: the West Hall, and the Underways below it, where the Sundered Kin sing the grudges. Above the shelf the High Shelves now climb into the glacier's own belly — the under-ice, the dark-elf halls' outermost margin (lit, attended, and not receiving), and the Western Door, of no material the north can name, depicted and shut. And past the Deep Road Gate the word SINGING finally has a country. Still unbuilt: the halls proper, whatever the watch keeps watching for, and everything the Western Door is a door to.

The Skorl Floes — east, the frozen sea¶

Where the land gives out into Morvach's country: pack ice, black leads of open water, and the skorl fleets that live on both. The floes are a worked landscape — hunted, fished, feuded over — with laws older than any town's and enforcement considerably faster. Under them, sailors used to merely insist, lies the Drowned King's lit and perfect court — and since 1212 SR a peak of that country stands above the water again: Kingsholm, the Drowned Isle, green against all latitude, the wreckers' Shingle on its strand and the packet Kittiwake working the leads to it. The shore's one fixed point is Brinemoot, the seasonal ice-market where the Salt Peace was sworn in 790 SR; half-skorl caravans from it reach Emberford's markets in most years, smelling of salt and refusing to be hurried.

Room to build: opened, and now worked. The seafaring register has its first pages — the isle, the crossing, the court below it — and past the far pans the ice-bridge now crosses to the Reaver Skerries: the skerry chain, Gravskarr Hold (a war-hold; the moot's outcasts, at home), and the green dark of the under-floe down to the Pale Bull's ground. Still unbuilt: the mother-holds of the skorl proper, Morvach's deep beneath the under-floe, and whatever the wave-road behind the Drowned King's throne runs down to.

The Thawlands — south, down the Emberrun¶

Follow Emberford's river — the Emberrun — south out of the mountains and the world turns gradually kind: river-meadow, orchard-shire, barge-town, grain. The Thawlands are the north's larder and its gentler neighbor, the first country the Long Winter released and the reason bread reaches Coldhollow at all. Halfling kitchens, human market-towns, Tallyman fairs, and a general conviction — maintained with some effort — that the mountains' business will stay in the mountains. Oldest of the river towns is Runmede (founded 141 SR), the grain-and-orchard settlement a day south of Emberford, where the north's bread is grown and its retired surveyors garden — now on the map and walkable from Emberford's South Gate.

Room to build: begun, and now the shire is real. The barge road runs south from Runmede's docks to Southmere and the Deep Wold, and past the Mireback Sink's second arm the causeway now reaches the Sunfall Shire: hedgerow grain-country, the Tallyman's road, and Millharrow market town — halfling kitchens and all. Still unbuilt: the barge-towns deeper south, and the politics of people who fund the frontier while preferring not to visit it (Millharrow's weighbridge is where those politics bank).

The Sunward Lands — far south, mostly rumor¶

Past the Thawlands, over the world's shoulder, lie the old kingdoms: cities that never met the Long Winter at full strength, roads with names, courts, colleges, and wars conducted indoors. The ashari came from their far edge; the Lanternkeepers' mother-houses are somewhere within them; and northern opinion of the whole region is compressed into the standard carter's blessing for southbound travellers: "Mind the soft ground." It is not entirely about mud.

Room to build: everything a classic temperate fantasy south implies, held deliberately offscreen; the source of future pilgrims, exiles, expeditions, and trouble with good manners.

Below — the Delvings, the Veins, the Underchain¶

Down is a direction too, and in this canon the most loaded one. The working Delvings are its shallow margin; the Veins its living middle; the Underchain its floor and its reason. The dwarves' sealed winze is the marked door. The Deep Mother's etiquette is the passport. The Forgefellowship's one-sentence report — "It was warm, and it should not have been" — is the entire travel advisory.

Room to build: the first tier is charted. Behind the Deep Road Gate the Veins now descend — the warm dark, the Quiet Shift still working its fifteen-hundred-year shift, and the First Chord, where the survey's one word gets its meaning. The road below the Choirmaster continues down, unwalkably, toward the rest of it: the deeper Veins, the Underchain, the chains. Tier by tier, still to build.

The shape of it¶

Umbrath as the north actually holds it in mind — a vertical country, cruel at the crown and kinder at the hem:

            THE WYRMCROWN  (sealed: Iron Gate · adit · winze)
                  ▲
 PALE STEPS ◄── FROSTSPINE ──► SKORL FLOES
 (glacier west)   │  Lanternwatch        (frozen sea, skorl)
                  │  Coldhollow
                  │  Emberford
                  ▼
             THE THAWLANDS  (the Emberrun, grain, barges)
                  ▼
           THE SUNWARD LANDS  (old kingdoms, rumor)

                 BELOW: Delvings → Veins → Underchain