North, South, East, West

Turner, A Scarlet Sunset, c. 1830. 

North of the Barony, beyond the forests, and razor walls of impassable mountains, is the Empire of the White City. The City itself sits on a bay that is drenched year round in friendly sunlight. The air there is pleasant and warm, and the nights are mild. The seas there shine with phosphorescence, and City expatriates weep when they return and smell the salt in the air; when they feel the cool breeze on their cheeks when the sun sinks into the horizon and paints the coastline in blood and gold.

Trade with the Barony is by boat, and there is very little that cannot be traded in the Empire proper. 

Further north, the Imperial territories stretch onwards across vast plains and unnumbered conquered territories, until they reach a land of water meadows and flooded jungles, impossible to conquer or colonise. The City fights an endless war against the savage beings that live in that place, and frightening stories are told about them. They are warrior aristocrats, terrible, beautiful, and they are giants, perhaps the stunted children of the first giants. All of these stories are myth and conjecture, but I have heard that they live in nomad bands and have a single city, ancient and immense, hidden away in the densest, blackest undergrowth, far from the border conflicts; a city which in their tongue they call Fortification or Last Bastion. What they man it against, what things press down on them from the endless boiling lakes of the Final True North, are unknown.

To the south of the Barony there runs a rugged country of grasslands and plains and little else, cut through with fast-flowing streams, and inhabited by the great nations of horse, cattle, and dog nomads. Their metallurgy, sword smithing, and infamous repeating rifles are the finest in the world, and they jealously guard the secrets of their manufacture in guarded mental fortresses secreted deep in the dreamlands. They are said to live side by side, in peace, with ancient and degenerate colonies of Bird Kings, but I have never spoken to anyone who can swear by the truth of this. 

Still further south the land turns icebound and unsuitable for life. The polar regions break off into a black volcanic archipelago battered incessantly by storms, and by the terrible frozen sea. People are said to live there. The Old Capital built fortresses there. None know why, and the few who travel to that blasted land report nothing more than seals, whales, frostbite, and sunblind madness in the ruins.

To the east stretches the Forest of the Cannibals, forever and ever. 

To the west there is only the Sea of Fire and Blood and Burnished Metal and the Dying of the Sun. You could sail it, and many have tried, but what lies across it none know or can claim to have seen.

 

Turner, Sun Setting over a Lake, 1840.