A Xi'ivrach orc city-state on the southern shore of Kro Nymos, the still crescent lake cradled in the Sunset Mountains at the far northern end of the Farlands. It is the only permanent settlement for hundreds of miles, and the elven kingdoms to the south have never worked out how it feeds itself or why it sits where it does. They have mostly stopped wondering. Jeh Bli is too far away to matter to the confederation, and it returns that indifference exactly.
Stone and devotion
The Xi'ivrach are orcs by origin and a faith by identity. They load their bodies with worked stone as worship, mark their skin with scarification that records what they have done and what they believe, and their high priests hold fragments of Deoric, the titans' command-tongue, which they work through scarred flesh rather than through any titan-bone instrument. Without titan material such fragments hold little durable charge, so what the priests do with Deoric is mostly rite and not war — a prayer written in stone and skin rather than a weapon. The detail of the people belongs to the Xi'ivrach entry; what concerns the city is that its whole order is arranged around devotion, and the object of that devotion is close at hand.
The lake they bargain with
Jeh Bli stands where it does because of the lake, and the lake is not ordinary. Kro Nymos has no visible outlet and never changes level; its deep water turns black, and the few who have dived far report sounds down there that resemble speech. The Xi'ivrach do not dive. They feed the island at the lake's center — Ghural-Kro, which the shamans say is where the lake thinks — with offerings of carved bone and worked metal that sink and never wash back up, and once a year their shamans cross alone to the smooth, curved northern shore the orcs hold sacred and return marked and quiet. Whatever the founders agreed to in order to live here, the city has kept it for centuries, and the keeping is most of what the city is.
Why it is left alone
The polished stone of that northern shore was not shaped by water, and it is not the only worked stone in these mountains. The Sunset range is dotted with pre-elven ruins no expedition has entered and returned from, and the Xi'ivrach call the high peaks keth-vorai, stone that remembers, and keep clear of them. The orcs understand more about the makers of that stone than the elves do, because they live among the work and have built a faith out of not provoking it. They share none of it, and there is no road by which anyone could come to ask. That is Jeh Bli's entire strategic position: it holds knowledge the south would want, behind hundreds of miles of empty country that keeps the south from reaching it.