Istora is the eastern half of the Winter Elf kingdom that broke in two when Istor XXVI was murdered. Queen Lamenrae rules it, daughter of the dead king and the first woman ever to hold the elven throne. Her realm follows the Sova Chyda from springs in the Suftos Hills down to the Void, with the dark forest of Winterwood at its center and the voices of the ancestors at the center of that. The Istori were once known for a kind of regal patience. The war has worn it off them.
Geography
Istora holds the eastern Crimson Coast. The contested Suftos Hills wall it off from Klevnaf to the west, Thraken Lake marks where its highlands give out toward the Dragon's Spine Coast in the east, and the Void closes it to the south. Almost everything that matters here sits on water. Settlements line the Sova Chyda, the sacred Winterwood straddles its middle reaches, and the southern uplands climb into the Hag Hills along the Dragon's Spine border. There is little flat ground and less of it is safe, so the river does the work of a road and a wall both.
Economy
Istora is better placed than Klevnaf, though wartime makes "better" a thin word. The Sova Chyda waters what farmland the valley allows, and the eastern trade roads toward the Dragon's Spine Coast have stayed open while the western ones closed. Fishing feeds the coast, and Istori preserving methods keep a summer catch edible through the long winters.
The export that keeps the treasury solvent, and divides the realm, is Winterwood timber. Istori carvers have always worked the dark evergreen wood, but Lamenrae has turned a craft into a trade, selling worked and raw timber down the coast and buying back food, steel, and the weapons her own smiths cannot supply fast enough. The imports are what let Istora field a slightly larger army than its rival. The timber is what some of her own people cannot forgive her for selling.
Politics
Lamenrae is young for an elf, perhaps two centuries, sharp and angry in roughly equal measure. Her father was killed, her father's uncle Taoinor seized the western half of the kingdom in the aftermath, and tradition expects her to be grateful for the half she kept. She is not.
Her court divides over what the war is for. One side treats the succession crisis as a chance to remake an elven society they had long found stifling, and backs the queen's reforms as proof that the old rules can be broken without the sky coming down. The hawks want one thing only, Taoinor beaten and the kingdom made whole, and tolerate the reforms as a way to pay for it. A quieter set believe the war cannot be won at all, and are uneasy about saying so. Lamenrae speaks the language of the reformers and spends her nights on the work of the hawks. Her advisors worry that a queen this fixed on her uncle is not governing so much as waiting.
She believes, and says, that Taoinor murdered her father. The case against him was assembled by her senior counselor Amrela: servants who put him near the king's chambers that night, a cupbearer who swears the wine smelled wrong. None of it would convict him, and his people call the witnesses bought. Lamenrae has stopped trying to prove anything. She wants Taoinor dead, and proof has become beside the point.
Culture
Istora is the reformist half of Winter Elf society, more by necessity than by conviction. A queen needs a theology that allows a queen, and a besieged realm needs customs it can afford. So the Istori have begun to question things Klevnaf still holds fixed.
The Winterwood is still the center of their faith, but the Istori have changed what they think the dead are telling them. Where Klevnaf hears the ancestral voices in the Whitewood as commands, Istora has come to treat them as counsel. The dead advise; the living decide. To Klevnaf's traditionalists this is close to blasphemy. To most Istori it is simply what two centuries of outliving their ancestors' certainties taught them.
The harder split runs through the forge-temples of Ystaeria, the cold-glass patron the Istori keep on both sides of the war. Ystaeria's doctrine holds that cold exists to preserve, and her priests argue, civilly and without end, over what that means for the things cold makes. The Industrialists say a thing is best preserved in as many careful hands as can be found, which is as good a theology of export as Lamenrae could ask for. The Traditionalists say sacred work belongs with those who know how to keep it, and should never pass to outsiders who do not.
Most of Istora's forge-priests have made their peace with the queen. Aelrein has not. She keeps the forge-temple of Ystaeria at Tuur, which makes her the senior Traditionalist voice in the eastern kingdom, and she has carried the old argument past ice-glass into the Winterwood itself. The ancestors wait in that wood between their lives, she holds, and its timber is their flesh while they wait. To sell it down the coast to lowlanders who will burn it for a season's heat is to scatter the dead among people who cannot keep them. She does not call Lamenrae faithless, and she grants that the Industrialists read the same scripture in good conscience. That restraint is what gives her weight. A zealot the court could dismiss. Aelrein it has to answer.
Count the carts going west and you are counting the dead going with them. The queen prays over every one. I do not doubt her prayers. I doubt her arithmetic. — Aelrein, forge-priest of Ystaeria at Tuur
The old companion traditions cross the war untouched. Foxes and snowy owls still carry messages between elves who would kill each other on sight, and now and then between factions, when no one is watching them closely enough. Hawks and wolves are newer, trained since the split for harder work than the old companions were ever asked to do.
Outsiders say the Istori have turned nasty since the kingdom broke. They are not wrong. Centuries of composure have set into something warier and meaner: strangers are taken for spies until they prove otherwise, and an open question can read as a threat. A people who once prided themselves on patience now pride themselves on outlasting.
Military
Istora fields something near a thousand trained soldiers, a little larger than Klevnaf's force, which its greater population and steadier supply can just about sustain. Its strength is equipment and drill. The open eastern roads keep weapons and armor coming, and the muster grounds outside Tuur turn out disciplined ranks.
The weakness is the ground. To reach Klevnaf, Istora's soldiers have to climb west into the Suftos Hills and into defenses prepared to meet them. Neither kingdom can push hard into the other's country, so the war has set into a stalemate that bleeds both slowly rather than ending either.
The Palace of Seasons
Lamenrae's seat at Tuur, raised over centuries to house the monarchy through the summer months while the court wintered in what is now Klevnaf-held country. Four wings answer to the four quarters of the year, each with its own stone and its own gardens. The Winter Wing was never finished. Work stopped the year the kingdom split, and the scaffolding still stands against it, weathering, a half-built monument to the season the realm lost.
The Coronation Grove
A clearing in the Winterwood where Lamenrae had herself crowned, breaking the custom that demanded the rite take place in the ancestral capital that Klevnaf now holds. Her loyalists keep it as a pilgrimage site, a place to stand where their queen took power without anyone's leave. What the grove is, and why her choosing it galled the traditionalists, the Winterwood keeps.
The Shrine of Reflections
A temple on the bank of the Sova Chyda where elves come to sit with the river's clear water and let it still them. It predates the split, and its tradition of meditation and prophecy is old enough that Velorin the mythographer is said to have studied here before the Lost Ages closed over her. Since the war began, its priests report darker water. They describe death and fire, and a figure standing in the mist who might be Ghy, or might be Istor XXVI, or might be someone not yet dead.