Taziondale

Taziondale is a country of mountains in the north, past the ranges of Vala, and it is reckoned among the human nations: predominantly human many generations ago, and blended since, as everywhere on Erôth is blended. It speaks Tazion, which belongs to no language family and is written as well as spoken, and which is heard on both sides of the peren border because Vala speaks it too. Southward its high ground runs out into open downs, and where those downs end, the Saltmarch begins and no crown reaches any further.

In Idir it is chiefly a word attached to other things: Taziondale artifacts, Taziondale steel, a Taziondale accent. Its own people call Peredhel the Dell, and say the name the way a person says a thing they have stopped arguing about.

Structure

They are a reclusive people, and were reclusive long before the war gave them a reason. What the south has is mountains and small isolated towns that meet each other for trade and disperse again. It has no great hubs and no centers, not any more, not since the southern towns were taken; whatever it had of that sort is under peren administration now. The north is a different country in temper. Northerners run to the aristocratic, which is how a southerner puts it when she is being polite about them, and the north keeps the old libraries, well maintained and closed to anyone without the connections to get inside. A scholar out of a southern peasant family will sooner dig an ancient building out of a hillside than get an hour in one of them.

The country’s faith is the Order of the Radiant Spear, a militant sect of Alnair dedicated to protecting life and purging evil, whose members carry spears said to be blessed by his light. It is common across Erôth and particularly common here, in the one country whose fighting style is spear and shield as a matter of course.

The Spearheads

When a member of a family has served it with great honor in war, that family has a spearhead made for them, personally crafted and genuinely carried: an ornate thing that has also been used. When the bearer dies it passes on, and an old house may hold a good many of them from a good many people.

The design is the family’s record. Each new spearhead takes every design the earlier ones carried and adds one more of its own, and it goes to the most prominent child of the generation. That makes the arithmetic run backwards from what a stranger expects. A crowded spearhead is a recent one. A spearhead that is very old and carries almost no marking is one of the first, and its being in anyone’s hand at all means it went to the favored child, and to that child’s favored child, and onward down the whole length of an ancient line without once stepping sideways. A plain piece of iron the size of a spear’s head, worn on a chain at the collarbone, is a claim about seven hundred years of a family’s choices. Anyone raised in the country can read it. Nobody outside it can.

Iron

Taziondale is a blacksmithing country before it is anything else, and the reason is in the ground. Peredhel prizes its own Vala ore above every other and sends its best smiths up to work it, and it is Peredhel’s own accounting that says the greatest ranges of all, with the best iron in them, lie past that border and out of its grasp. Tazion steel travels further than Tazion people do. It goes into the Stalingrad crossbow, which is built of Galderian yew, elk sinew and Tazion steel by a method held in one family for generations, and where any of the three cannot be had the makers build fewer rather than substitute. What else the country sends out goes south by sea: goods out of Taziondale pass through Ravenhold on their way down into Idir.

The ground holds older things too. There are ruins in Taziondale that are not Tazion at all, so different in their architecture, their pottery and their writing that the archaeologists who found them assumed a lost empire the Tazion had once overrun. They were Mól. Whatever the two peoples were to each other in that age, no record of it has been found on the Tazion side, and the search for one is what brought a Tazion archaeologist south to Idir in the first place.

Foreign Relations

Peredhel

Not conquered, and not whole. Taziondale lost close to a sixth of its territory to Peredhel, and the annexed ground was the worst possible ground to lose: mineral rich, holding high quality and rare ores, and it has fed peren forges ever since. The war has never properly ended. Efforts to take the land back have sharpened in recent years, and they are not the state’s doing. The fighting is done by resistance cells, militias raised locally rather than armies raised nationally, and they have grown markedly bolder since the emergence of a figure known only as Rena “the Destroyer”, whose appearance is credited with galvanizing the insurgency and reigniting the whole conflict. Peredhel files her elsewhere: across the border in Vala she is a wanted rebel and saboteur of caravans with fifty sovereigns on her head.

Peredhel’s own appetite for it has cooled. No Tarumbar presently favors a war to the north west, and the soldiers stationed in Vala are there to keep the monsters down and turn back Tazion raids rather than to take anything. The border sits where it sits, and both sides raid across it.

The Arcane Congress

Officially Taziondale complies. It has signed the Arcane Congress’s agreements and observes its regulations in public, and the Congress records it as an adherent. Underneath that it runs its own research into forbidden and unconventional magics, in hidden laboratories, under containment strict enough that nothing has yet spilled into public view. The Congress knows the shape of the arrangement well enough to write it down.

Campaign Updates

Nobody in the company has set foot in Taziondale. It has reached them anyway. Koa Attila’s family came out of Taziondale, though he himself was born on the Saltmarch and raised by the Free Folk who range it; what he has of the place is a dragon fruit eaten in a forest as a small child, which he recognized years later when a ghost older than the country wished aloud for one. Among the captives freed from the slavers’ auction outside Haudh-Gwenn was at least one taken from Taziondale, which is a very long way to be carried. Malik introduced himself as an archaeologist hunting Taziondale artifacts, and nobody has ever decided whether that was his trade or his cover. Ten antique gold coins of Taziondale significance passed through the company’s hands and were sold on at fifteen gold apiece.

Professor Ashanti al-Hassan is southern-born, spearhead at her throat, an ancient sun tattooed across her neck in Tazion iconography. She is where most of what Idir knows about the country comes from, and she is aware that she has been away long enough for her news to be stale: when Aldo greeted her in flawless Tazion she embraced him on the spot as a brother out of Taziondale, and it was he who ended up telling her about home. She has not forgiven the Dell and does not intend to. Told on the road who Leon Yaegar had been, she went silent for the rest of the journey.