A transitional zone between the southern Caffas Mountains and the White Wastes, where the elevation drops from mountain heights to the flat expanse of the wastes below. The Firefrost Hills take their name from the bizarre weather patterns that occur here—hot air rising from the fire leyline collides with cold air sweeping north from Wycendeula, creating sudden temperature swings, unexpected frosts in summer, and heat waves in winter.
Climate
The Firefrost Hills are climatically unstable. A warm morning can turn to freezing by noon; snow can fall one day and melt under scorching sun the next. This unpredictability makes agriculture impossible and long-term habitation difficult. The few who live here are nomads who've learned to read the signs of incoming weather shifts.
The seam beneath
The weather is not only cold air meeting mountain warmth. The fire leyline that runs under these hills, the Yolus seam, does not run true. Somewhere in the deep past the seam was wrenched out of true, and it never re-set afterward. Where other seams hold steady, this one answers in fits. Hot for a season, then cold, then hot again, with no pattern a person can hold in mind. That erratic pulse is the deeper engine of the summer frosts and the winter heat waves; the collision of airs is only the surface of it. The broken, scorched ground of the hills is what that old breaking left behind.
The nomads know this better than they can say. When they read the signs of a coming shift, they are reading the seam's pulse as much as the sky, the faint warmth that wells up from the ground before a thaw, the way a cold snap can arrive from below rather than down off the peaks. It is the reason they alone can live here. Who tore the seam, and whether the breaking was meant, is lost. The nomads have a name for every mood the ground takes and no story at all for its making, and the Flame Kindred's fire-lore runs back generations without once reaching the answer. Under the rubble of one collapsed structure, a core that struck here long ago has never gone cold.
The Border Zone
The hills mark the effective boundary between the Sandreach Mountains region and Wycendeula. The Flame Kindred of the Caffas consider the Firefrost Hills the southern edge of their territory, but they don't patrol it—the unstable weather and proximity to the orc and goblin tribes of the White Wastes make it more trouble than it's worth.
The Flame Kindred keep away for a reason that runs past weather and raiders. Their whole craft is fire drawn from a steady seam, and this seam is not steady. A working that would light cleanly in the eastern Caffas can gutter here, or catch and run past its caster's hold, because the ground feeds it unevenly. For a people whose power and identity are leyline fire, the Firefrost Hills are ground where their own element cannot be trusted. They claim the hills in name and leave them to the nomads.
Travelers heading south into Wycendeula typically pass through the Firefrost Hills quickly, camping only when necessary and keeping watch for both weather changes and raiding parties from the wastes.