The Anderegnons are a miserable, cold, windy range of mountains north and west of the Senaveer, sitting directly on the border between the Material Plane and Celestia. The planar membrane here is so thin that the mountains themselves seem to exist in both worlds at once, their peaks occasionally visible from Celestia as faint gray shadows, and the aurora of the spirit world bleeding down to paint the snow in colors that have no names in mortal tongues.
The Ash
The Anderegnons are rich with malstaric ash, a substance that by all rights should not exist here. Malstaris is the shadow plane, the mirror of Celestia across the cosmic divide. Yet the ash is abundant, found in seams throughout the mountains, coating exposed surfaces after storms, accumulating in drifts in sheltered valleys.
The Atowatowa have an explanation. They believe that when a spirit crosses from the Material Plane into Celestia at Top of the World, the crossing strips away its shadow. Shadows cannot exist in Celestia. They have no place there. So the shadow falls, tumbling down the slopes of the sacred peak and the surrounding mountains, dissolving into ash as it separates from the spirit it once belonged to.
If this is true, then the malstaric ash of the Anderegnons is quite literally the residue of the dead, the abandoned shadows of every Atowatowa leader who ever crossed over. This makes the Bollinger Mining Company's operation something closer to grave-robbery than mere sacrilege, harvesting the discarded darkness of ancestors.
The Bollinger Mining Company
The Bollinger Mining Company discovered the ash deposits two decades ago and has since established a precarious extraction operation. Malstaric ash is extraordinarily valuable: essential for certain shadow-magic rituals, useful in alchemical processes, and prized by artificers working with darkness-infused materials.
The operation is expensive and dangerous. Food must be shipped in; ash must be shipped out. The supply route skirts the eastern edge of the Senaveer Mountains, threading a needle between territories: stray too far west and the northern rocs will descend; stray too far east and the Atowatowa will capture and kill any trespassers.
The miners themselves are a desperate lot: criminals working off debts, adventurers seeking fortune, and a handful of true believers who think the ash holds secrets worth dying for. Turnover is high. The company pays well, but the wind, the cold, the isolation, and the ever-present threat of Atowatowa raids take their toll.
The Atowatowa have so far limited themselves to raids on supply caravans rather than direct assaults on the mining camps. Some observers believe this restraint won't last, that the herders are waiting for something, perhaps a sign from their ancestors or a tactical advantage. Others think the Atowatowa are simply patient, knowing that the mountains themselves will eventually kill or drive out the intruders without need for open war.