Vala

Vala is a province of Peredhel and not a country, whatever is said of it in the towns south of the border. It stands in the nation’s west with Bardh and Yovincia, one of nine provinces under three Tarumbar, and it is the part of Peredhel that lies directly north of Idir. It is hilly where it is not mountainous, and the water runs downhill off it the whole way to the sea. Men who have been up there come back calling it another country.

The Mountains

What the mountains are made of depends on who is asked. The rivers say salt: the River of Thea runs brackish all the way east to the ocean because it is fed from Vala’s salt mountains, and where the range comes down at Saltmarch the ground takes its name from the same thing. Peredhel’s own surveys of the province talk about iron instead, some of the finest on Erôth by their account, with the best smiths in the nation sent up to work it, and the greatest ranges of all still out of reach beyond the Taziondale border. Idir has heard a plainer version, which is that Vala mines ore and mines a great deal of it. It was enough to spoil a trade scheme once: worked goods out of Draazstone had to be priced against what the north could already make for itself, and the sums came out thin. What travels down the road into Loshev comes from Vala and from further up still.

The other thing everyone agrees on is the monsters. Vala is the unruly quarter of Peredhel, where beasts still range the open country and a town keeps itself closely guarded in the evenings as a matter of ordinary practice. Travelers call it heavily guarded, and it needs to be. Two callings are held to come out of the province above all others: the monster-slayer, raised to it in the mountains, and the smith.

The Province and Its Towns

Peredhel’s nine provinces each elect a Prince, and Vala’s takes the title Valhîr. Below him the province divides into three regions, each anchored by a majlath holding the Prince’s estate; which of Vala’s towns are the three was never written down. The Prince’s leave is a real instrument and is asked for: Leon Yaegar traded in Loshev on Vala’s behalf, with the Prince of Vala’s permission, for Yovincia’s benefit. The Prince’s own name has never traveled as far south as Idir.

Lvov sits on the western river fork and Zatichsk north of it. The port of Ravenhold is in the north, and keeps an accent and a culture distinct from the rest of the province. Momly lies far to the northeast on the caravan road, and it is through a town of Vala that Phillipa buys Darkwood off the Eldamar shipments.

Vala has noble courts, and their high collars are recognizable on a man long after he has left them. Yullen Gemsmith was a Metta-Hina of a noble family of Vala before Loshev, and it was his old contacts at home that opened the trade road between Zatichsk and Loshev. Tazion is spoken here as well as across the border in Taziondale. Peredhel’s couriers run a routine circuit that comes up through the Idiran river towns and on into the province.

The Clan in the Mountains

Somewhere above the treeline are the Muharib. They were removed from the Mól Empire, or seceded from it, depending on who tells it, before the Empire fell, and that is how they lasted; they settled a mountain top and built keeps of Alqadim Al-Qasr on it. They keep the old tenets still, which is more than the Mól cultures left in Idir can claim, and it is the reason Draazstone looks down on the Mól-descended of Idir. It is said in Loshev that Peredhel exists at all because of their labor. Torgun Kurvroc claims descent from their Vala-mountain line, and has built his house into real Mól ruins.

Travelers coming and going say that the people of Vala know them perfectly well, and that they come out occasionally.

Campaign Updates

They came out. Hobgoblin raiders went through Loshev and through Kurvroc’s estate first, took what they said belonged to them, fought the town guard to a standstill with wounds placed so precisely that almost nobody died, and turned south. Rumor put their home in the mountains of Vala. The company declined the council’s request to hunt them, on the reasoning that they were foreign, skilled, and not worth a war.

The province has a war of its own that Idir hears only in fragments. Rena “the Destroyer” is wanted across Vala as a rebel and a saboteur of caravans, called the queen of regime changes, and there are fifty sovereigns on her head. She burned a conscript-training camp and freed the prisoners in it, and she has besieged a city. Field-commander Barbara Barnes is hunting her, and it was one of Barnes’s lieutenants, down in Haudh-Gwenn to buy Idiran horses, who said so at a party. A horse-buyer asked, out of nowhere and in the middle of another conversation, whether anyone had heard of Rena’s siege of Momly. Nobody had.

Nobody in the company has ever set foot in Vala.