Glivornax holds the wet middle of the Wildwood, where the Grand Tolkarsus slows and spreads into the Plenjorn Swamp before the river gathers itself again downstream. Among the orc states it is neither the largest nor the strongest, and it is the only one fighting on two fronts at the same time. Hedroscobb presses up from the south, across the algae-marsh of Yugurbas Dyos, because its forges cannot run without what grows in that water. Tarn presses in from the east, along the Contested Shore, for the healing waters of the swamp itself. And when the Shazuihni boar-riders come out of the east, as they do most dry seasons, Glivornax fights a third thing besides. The Glivornaxi answer all of it, and have answered it for longer than their own spear-songs can reckon.
The Glivornaxi are the swamp's guardians first and a state second. The people themselves, their muddy green skin and their reading of Plenjorn's moods, are the matter of their own account; what concerns Glivornax as a polity is that guarding the swamp and fighting for it have become one task. Like every orc warband they swear the spear-oath to K'rovaxi, and the wild water they keep is held to be Thrygar's as much as their own. Glivornax keeps no grand capital. Its seat is Vrukmorn, a knot of longhouses and raised causeways on a reed-island where the Tolkarsus enters Plenjorn, chosen less as a throne than as the ground a guardian would stand on anyway.
The swamp it keeps
Plenjorn is a regenerative swamp. Lay a wound in its black water and the wound closes faster and cleaner than it has any right to. The Glivornaxi have known this longer than their neighbors have coveted it, and most of their settlements sit within a day's poling of a healing shallow. The Grand Tolkarsus runs through the whole of it, slow and braided, which is why the swamp is fought over at both ends at once. Tarn holds the eastern river-mouth and the lakes beyond it. Glivornax holds the swamp's body and its southern marshes. The line between them has never been drawn anywhere but in water and blood.
South of the swamp proper lies Yugurbas Dyos, a shallow algae-marsh where the water turns thick and green through the summer. The algae there is corrosive, useless to the Glivornaxi and indispensable to Hedroscobb. That single fact is the whole of the War of the Marshes.
Plenjorn at first light: black water under a low ceiling of mist, the Tolkarsus barely moving between stands of drowned trees. A wounded Glivornaxi has been laid in the shallows, and the water around the gash runs faintly clear, as though something in it were at work. The guardian who carried him there stands waist-deep with a spear, watching the eastern reeds, because the shore that heals is also the shore Tarn claims.
The War of the Marshes
Hedroscobb forges a metal the rest of the Wildwood cannot, and the forging depends on the algae of Yugurbas Dyos. The craft itself belongs to Hedroscobb's account; the consequence for Glivornax is a southern border that bleeds every harvest season. Hedroscobbi marsh-wardens cross into the algae-beds to cut and haul. Glivornaxi spears meet them in water too shallow to swim and too deep to wade easily. Neither side can finish it. Glivornax cannot hold the whole marsh against the heavier Hedroscobbi warbands, and Hedroscobb cannot occupy ground its forges need to keep harvesting year after year. So the war is a tide. It comes in at every algae-bloom and goes out again, and the dead it leaves are counted in dozens rather than hundreds, season upon season upon season.
The marsh feeds Hedroscobb's fires and the river feeds Tarn's dead. We are the ones who live in the water itself, so we are the ones everyone comes to take it from. — a Glivornaxi spear-song of the Contested Shore
The Water War
To the east the quarrel turns on the healing water rather than the algae. Tarn's spirit-warriors hold the river-mouth and call Plenjorn's shallows sacred. The Glivornaxi guard those same shallows and call the Tarni trespassers on water that was theirs to keep before Tarn was a name. The fighting gathers on the Contested Shore, the stretch of swamp both states claim outright; Tarn's side of it, and the spirit-warriors who hold it, are set down in Tarn's own entry. It is a slower war than the one to the south. The Tarni are hard to kill one at a time, the Glivornaxi know the water better, and so the Contested Shore changes hands by the reed-bed and never by the mile.
Why neither war ends
A guardian people might expect, over centuries, to win one of its wars or lose it. Glivornax has done neither. Both wars hold at exactly the pitch that bleeds the Glivornaxi without ever freeing them, and they have held there long enough that some of the older spear-elders have stopped trusting the shape of it.
What they have noticed is this: the wars almost end, and then they do not. A harvest truce on Yugurbas Dyos will be all but agreed when a raid no one ordered breaks it. A parley on the Contested Shore will fall apart over a killing neither side will own. The breaking is always small, always deniable, and it always lands the same way, with both warbands back in the reeds by morning and nobody the better for the blood. The Glivornaxi who keep the old counts have a word for a run of bad luck, and a few of them have begun to wonder whether luck is the honest name for something this regular.
They are not wrong to wonder. The breaking is too regular to be luck and too clean to be the work of any enemy who would boast of it afterward. Whatever keeps Glivornax's wars lit is neither Hedroscobbi nor Tarni, and it does not come at the swamp from any direction the Glivornaxi think to watch — that much the oldest spear-elders have reasoned, and no further. The Glivornaxi blame Tarn. Tarn blames Glivornax. Neither has yet thought to look past the marshes and the reeds to the high country south of the Wildwood, and to ask whether a hand that has never once touched the swamp might still be the one stirring it.
In a dry season some years back, a Hedroscobbi marsh-warden and the Glivornaxi spear-elder Khravuni met on the mud of Yugurbas Dyos to set a line each side could harvest behind. They had the terms agreed by midday. At dusk a single arrow took the marsh-warden's standard-bearer through the throat. It was fletched with heron-quill, which the Glivornaxi do not use and the Hedroscobbi swear they do not either. By the next morning both warbands were back in the reeds, and the talk has never resumed. No one has ever produced the archer.