Northern Velkaris

Northern Velkaris is the northernmost inhabited region of the continent, a vast expanse of frozen tundra, ice-choked coastline, and wind-scoured highlands. Before the Celestial Fracture, it was a harsh but livable land — its mountains rich with ore, its coastal waters abundant with fish, its hardy people adapted to long winters and short growing seasons. The Fracture changed everything. The moon's shattering, whose epicenter lies somewhere in the region's interior, blanketed Northern Velkaris in perpetual ashfall and plunged it into an unnatural winter that has not lifted in decades. The fallout of magical energy saturated the land, the water, and the very air. Plants mutated. Animals became something else. And the people — the people began to forget. Three kingdoms now struggle for survival within these borders. Valdenmoor, the Ashen Crown, clings to the mountains — its ancient halls dust-choked, its king desperate, its people forbidden to touch the very magic that leaks from the ground beneath them. Greyvast, the Sunken Throne, was drowned when a moon fragment impacted its capital; its survivors scavenge among the mist-shrouded ruins. The Pale Dominion, younger and far more ambitious, has turned the Fracture's fallout into a theology, practicing a controlled form of soul-magic that erodes their emotions even as it grants them power. The region's geography is dominated by the Greyfang Mountains (separating Valdenmoor from the eastern coast), the Sunken Coast (Greyvast's drowned shoreline), and the Pale Plateau (the high-altitude valleys of the Dominion). Strange creatures roam the wastes: the Hollowed (soulless remnants of failed Soulmancy practitioners), the Grief Echo (a spectral manifestation of the region's collective despair), and the Shard-Stalker (a silent predator that hunts only the Pale-Touched).