Clinging to sacred sites now further elevated, and on the 'far side', there lie collections of ritualistic guardian homesteads, presiding over their presumably ancient charges and ancestors. Though they may dot occasional maps these scattered settlements are seldom visited by outsiders, largely blocked by harsh mountainous conditions, and as years pass without any known 'year-round trails', finding any trail at all in the snowscapes is increasingly unlikely.
Those peoples are said to be descended from hardy folk, honorable and capable farmers, explorers and conquerors who settled regions now little known or explored, beyond the shadow of Tha'Kara'hahd, to form something to call their own, an empire some say, but by all accounts, something expansive and powerful. They carved great lanes and canals beneath the mountain ranges, and exotics flowed through.
It was not fated to last.
Within a short span, a blink in the eye of the elves, great changes began shaking the known world.
History remembers mere snatches, warforged and all manner of military might pressing in from northern lands, seizing land and throwing wide scenic cities, that legions might more easily pass. It was a campaign of desperation. And a few short years into the one-sided wars, changes began to rend the world in earnest.
Beasts of the night at first, then beasts of broad daylight, of wood, of the deeps, of the skies and more besides.
Cities and settlements beset on all sides, battling through day and night, as roads and trade faltered and faded. Disease snuck in. Wretched plague and pestilence wracked one and all, crops not trodden failed, and stores spoiled in a blackened riddled mess. The very land itself heaved and roiled, as mountains fell and rose, those grand avenues below the peaks were crushed and swallowed.
Sages who could be bought to tell; may recount from texts a tale of a battalion of those reclusive Nyorifolk who bored a one-way trip beneath collapsing mountain, with aid from Goliath and hill giant, then led a campaign that was said to turn the tide.
Reopening routes, and pulling half-starved people from the smoldering remains of their homes, the fraction of a fraction of the people galvanized, snowballed, and pressed north, crushing the invaders and their cruel warmachines between the people's fist and waves of abominations and foul monstrosities which had followed sometime after the invaders.
The last major battle took place over years, fought above and below ground, invaders firmly pegged between the people's red line, the wide plain between mountains and the gnashing of teeth behind.
As a brief victory was declared and the scale of the devastation that lay beyond the invaders became clear, the last surviving generals directed the first foundations of a wall which could span the wide valley, and seal off the land from beyond.
When the stone from one mountainside touched the other, the remainder of the fatigued generals rallied their shattered battalion and set off on a final campaign, to reclaim Nyori-Kama, the idyllic valleys and the heart of their domain, lost to the first onslaught of the invaders.
They were never seen nor heard from again.
Map Concepts
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