Ve is the isolated continent of the far east, a great landmass set apart from the rest of Alaria by open water on every side. The Alrock Ocean walls it off to the west, a crossing so wide that no fleet from the central continents has ever made it a trade route. The Norswell Sea closes the north. To the east lie the bright, poisoned shallows of the Sea of Fools, and beyond them the wrecking dark of Shadowreap. The continent divides cleanly into halves: a dry north of savannah, plains, and desert, and a southern jungle so deep and old that the maps simply run out in it.
Geography
The ocean is the first fact of Ve. The Alrock Ocean runs the whole western flank, the widest water in the charted world, and it is the reason the continent has spent its history alone. To the east, where Meadow Sound opens out, the Sea of Fools spreads in coral shallows as lovely as any water on Alaria. The beauty is the trap. Every creature in it, from the reef eels to the snails to the smallest things in the rock, carries a slow poison in its flesh. The poison rarely kills outright, but it sickens, and the sea took its name from the sailors who trusted what they saw. Farther east still, north of the Sea of Fools, is Shadowreap, where a force leyline and a dark leyline cross beneath the water. Clouds of pure darkness drift across the surface there. A ship that sails into one comes apart, its hull torn to splinters, and few vessels return from Shadowreap whole.
On land the split is north against south. The drier north holds savannah, open plains, and a band of true desert through the middle of the continent; the south is jungle from coast to coast. Going clockwise from the northwest, Edari's golden savannah fills the northwestern corner, walled off from Sestros to its south by the Shepherds' Stones, a run of steep golden plains. Turquish Bay cuts into the northern coast and divides Edari from Shyona. Shyona holds the northeast, the largest state on Ve, a country of broad plains and high cliffs that reaches south to Meadow Sound, where the farmland gives out and the jungle begins. South of the sound the eastern coast turns wild. The Krell Lands take the southeast; then the Dygon Beastlands run the entire southern end of the continent. Phriorys sits in the southwest as a belt of hills between the Beastlands and the Suki Jungle, and west of it the Gulf of Chimea indents the coast below the empire of Chimea. Inland and north of Chimea, past the Widebarrow Mountains, the land opens into the temperate grasslands of Avalon and then the long gradient of Sestros, plains in the south giving way to savannah and the Red Desert in the north. Between Sestros and Shyona the middle of the continent dries into arid country, the Hills of Dolor and the Dunes of Evioli, where a handful of independent city-states hold out.
Major regions
Edari is the golden savannah of the northwest, some three hundred miles of grass and scattered trees claimed by no settled nation. It is the homeland of the Korel, the wildborn hunters who roam it without roads or permanent walls. In its northeastern corner the Howlwood makes its strange noises after dark.
Shyona is the largest state on the continent and the wealthiest by land and harvest, holding the northeastern plains around the Gilded Plains, with the Yokani Cliffs along its eastern face. It governs as a confederation of provincial houses with no capital and no single throne. Its reach runs from the desert margins in the north to the jungle edge at Meadow Sound in the south.
Chimea is a halfling empire in the southwest, hungry for ground, its jungles running from the Blood Mountains down to the Gulf of Chimea. About a century ago it took the Blood Mountains and their mines from the Aureum dwarves, and it has held them since at a heavy cost. Its capital, Chimus, is the second-largest city on Ve. Alone among the continent's states, Chimea keeps colonies across the ocean, in distant Rimihuica.
Sestros is the heartland of the west, a kingdom of shepherds and silk-weavers ruled by a monarch who speaks for the daemon Talressses. The Glory River waters its center, the Red Desert burns along its northern edge, and its capital, Mu, sits on Nuin Bay. It is orderly and prosperous to a degree outsiders find faintly unsettling.
Avalon is the theocracy of the central west, ruled by the Grand Imperial Ecclesiarch, who has sat the throne for generations and governs by foresight, reading the futures that shape Temptari life. Its country is rolling grassland and sacred forest, drained by the Honor River.
The Krell Lands are the southeastern jungle, an expanse the insectoid Krell have eaten through over the last three centuries. They overran and emptied the kingdoms that stood there before them, leaving the buildings standing and the people gone.
The Dygon Beastlands cover the whole southern end of Ve, roughly four hundred miles north to south and six hundred east to west, primordial jungle ruled by dinosaurs. The lizardfolk Ix'Meglyakuk, raptor-riders, are the only people who have ever navigated the interior, and two green dragons hold territories deep inside it. Every attempt to settle the Beastlands has failed.
Phriorys is the belt of hills where the Beastlands break into open grassland, the most accessible edge of that wilderness and so the most fought over. The green dragon Pyaganos holds it. The Ix'Meglyakuk who live there call the hills Thyrak-Kesh, the bones of the land.
The Hills of Dolor are rocky ridges and scorched valleys in the north-central dry belt, their name an old Shyonan word for grief. Shyona sent its exiles here to die. Those who refused built Keshwindi, a city-state of the condemned that now trades back with the homeland that cast them out.
The Dunes of Evioli are a sea of sand east of the Hills of Dolor. At their heart sits Gnotobi, a city-state on a lake that yields Orange Flake, the one commodity worth crossing the desert for; the Golden River carries it north to the coast.
Locquine is a pixie city-state deep in the southern jungle, on the watershed of the Misery River. Its people drink the grief-water and have been changed by it, and what they make from that changed perception, weavings of possible futures and elixirs of truth-sight, is worth a fortune to anyone who can survive the trade.
Belanora is rugged hill country west of Meadow Sound, the gateway to Locquine. The Misery's grief reaches it only faintly, filtered by elevation and rock, leaving a melancholy the hill-folk live with rather than a despair that breaks them. Its people sell the only practical access to the pixies, and the bayside town of Tearfall is where expeditions gather before going in.
Peoples and powers
The defining political fact of Ve is that no one from outside can touch it. The Alrock Ocean is too wide to cross in force, and the Sea of Fools and Shadowreap seal the eastern approach, so no empire, no coalition, and no church based on the other continents has any reach here. Every quarrel on Ve is settled by the parties to it or not settled at all. There is no higher court to appeal to, and no outside army ever arrives.
Shyona is the largest state but not the surest hand, because it moves as a loose confederation of provincial lords with no capital and no way to act as one body. Its wealth and reach still make it the pole the others position around. Chimea is the opposite kind of power: smaller, aggressive, and stretched thin. Its century of occupation in the Blood Mountains has never settled into peace. The Aureum dwarves it dispossessed still fight from the high tunnels, the vampiric Bloodlings take mine workers in the night, and the empire pays for all of it by expanding faster, including the colonies it keeps across the ocean in Rimihuica. That foreign foothold gives Chimea information no neighbor has, along with a set of enemies no neighbor shares.
Sestros is the stable power of the west, prosperous and quietly theocratic, its monarch ruling as the voice of the daemon Talressses. The strength hides a fault. A daemon lives on the prayers of the desperate, and Sestros has made its people too content to pray hard. If Talressses ever sinks below the floor of remembrance that keeps it alive, the monarch who speaks for a god becomes a monarch with nothing behind the title, and the kingdom has no law for choosing who comes next. Avalon, set between Sestros and Chimea, governs by prophecy instead. Its Ecclesiarch acts on futures no neighbor can see, which makes Avalon impossible to read by ordinary diplomacy, and Chimea has never once moved against it.
The smaller players hold chokepoints rather than armies. Keshwindi controls the only overland road through the Hills of Dolor and stands as a permanent provocation to the Shyona that condemned its founders. Gnotobi controls the Orange Flake and the single river that carries it out of the dunes. Two pressures sit in the south that none of the Ve states has answered. The Krell have advanced without a pause for three hundred years, and their frontier now grinds against Shyona's southern jungle, with no alliance among the states to meet it. In the southwest the dragon Pyaganos has thrown Chimea out of Phriorys three separate times, and Chimea's expansion does not allow for permanent defeat, so a fourth attempt is only a question of when. Deeper still, Locquine sits on the Misery River producing weavings of futures that any ruler would kill to read, which makes steady access to a city of genuinely alien minds the most valuable and least reliable prize on the continent.
You want to trade with the pixies, you bring sad music and you bring it honest. They hear a lie the way you hear a bell. And whatever they offer you, remember they saw you coming long before you saw the jungle. — a Tearfall guide, to a buyer bound for Locquine