Tangiern is the largest state on the Crimson Coast by territory, and the only one held by humans. The Tangier crossed the Dragon's Spine generations ago and built their kingdom in the one direction the elves never wanted: south, with their backs to the Fragenstor Mielthøn and their faces to the Void, the purple-dark southern ocean that ends the world. The rest of the continent finds them unsettling. A people who hand their dead to that ocean and sleep soundly with a haunting at their eastern fence are reckoned, in the old phrase, half into the Void already.
The coast and the forest
Tangiern holds the western two-thirds of the Crimson Coast. The Dragon's Spine walls it off to the north, the elven realms of Klevnaf and Istora press against its eastern march, and the Void runs unbroken along the whole southern shore. Most of the kingdom is the Fragenstor Mielthøn, the dark conifer forest the Tangier call the Forest of a Thousand Thoughts. Settlement clings to the river valleys and the coastal fringe; the deep interior is left to itself, and the people prefer it that way.
Two rivers carry the country down to the sea. The Rabbit River runs through the heartland past the capital at Nøsen, and the Magrask falls cold and fast out of the northern mountains. In the northwest stand the older woods, Hilda's Forest and the ruins of Hildaneir, which the Tangier avoid for reasons their grandparents could not name, alongside the Pools of Tragedy, dark lakes no one drinks from twice. The coast itself is poor ground for a seafaring people: rocky, fogbound, and treacherous, with few harbors worth the word. The Tangier have made the sea sacred anyway, because the sea is where they send their dead.
Giving the dead to the Void
The Tangier give their dead to the open ocean, and to nothing else. A body must never go into the ground, and above all it must never go into still inland water. On this the whole country agrees, jarl and forester and fisher alike, with a unanimity the Tangier manage on almost nothing else.
The reasoning sits a day's sail to the east, where the elven rivers run wrong. The Tangier point to Murder Creek, the River of Wights, and the Pools of Tragedy, water that holds the violently dead and gives them back, and they draw a straight line from it. A body left in still water leaves something of itself behind, they say, and what it leaves rises. The Void does not hold. Its tide runs outward past the edge of the world, and a body carried far enough out on the ebb is taken apart and cannot come back to trouble the living. So the dead go out on the falling tide, never the rising one.
The funeral fleet is a civic office, not a private grief. Every coastal town keeps death-boats used for no other purpose, and an inland death sets off a quiet race: the body must reach the coast and catch the next ebb before it turns. On the appointed tide it is rowed out past the last headland and given to deep water, where the current pulls it outward rather than back. A body that has turned will not be carried. The fleet will not foul the road out with rot, and the family that brings one is sent home to do the thing no Tangier wants to do, which is dig.
Out on the ebb, never the flow. A man who buries his father in the dirt has buried only half of him. — common saying along the Void coast
What the Tangier truly fear is a death far up the Rabbit or the Magrask in deep winter, when the rivers are ice and the coast is a month away. Those dead cannot be brought down in time. What their families do with them is not discussed in Nøsen.
Timber, fur, and the sea road
Tangiern lives on timber, fur, and the Void trade. The Fragenstor yields lumber faster than any single market can take it, and Tangier ships carry worked wood and trapped fur around the shores of the Void to ports the inland kingdoms have never charted. Hunting and trapping feed the same fleets; Tangier furs are good enough that buyers tolerate the long, cold crossing to get them. Farming barely figures. The season is short, the soil is sour with centuries of pine needles, and cleared ground reverts to forest inside a generation unless it is fought for. Most food is hunted or shipped in.
The capital, Nøsen, sits at the Rabbit's junction and still smells of the logging camp it grew from. Tirenthar, at the river's mouth, is the kingdom's chief port despite a coast that fights every hull that uses it. Frostrien holds the eastern road and the garrison that watches the elven march. The smaller towns are sawmills and waystations strung along the rivers, feeding timber down to the coast and the dead down with it.
The king and his jarls
Tangiern is a kingdom in name and a confederation of jarls in fact. King Halvard III rules from Nøsen, sixth of his line, but his crown is chief-among-equals. The jarls who hold the major towns keep their own men, their own purses, and their own grudges, and the king's writ runs furthest in three things: war, the sea trade, and the faith of the ebb. Holding the jarls together is the real labor of his reign.
The elven war on the eastern march is, to Tangiern, a managed nuisance and not a drama. Older accounts make much of a tribute the Tangier once paid the unified Winter Elf crown, but that was never more than a toll for passage along the forest roads; it lapsed when the elven kingdom broke, and no one in Nøsen misses it. Halvard favors neither Klevnaf nor Istora and wants no elven ground. He keeps Frostrien garrisoned, lets the rangers of both sides bleed each other through the Suftos uplands, and turns his attention south, to the trade and to his quarrelsome jarls.
Not every jarl keeps the faith of the ebb. Up the Rabbit's headwaters, where the forest closes in and the coast is a winter's journey off, the Vøllund family of Brattholt bury their dead in the Fragenstor, and have done so longer than anyone can shame them out of it. They are not lapsed believers. They hold that the Forest of a Thousand Thoughts keeps its dead awake, and they want theirs kept near, close enough to be asked. Whether the Brattholt dead lie quieter than the elven river-dead, or worse, is a question Nøsen would rather leave unanswered.