Kyorda occupies the narrow coastal shelf where the Frostmarch Peninsula tapers toward the Denrik Sea, facing Wavecrash Sound to the southeast. It is the most settled of the peninsula's states—home to Tikhaya humans and a community of Wytrolape, giant apes who have claimed the sea-cliffs as their own. The two peoples share this rocky shore in an arrangement that has proved durable if not always easy, with the Tikhaya centered on the town of Xandur while the Wytrolape range the headlands above.
What sets Kyorda apart from the peninsula's other states is the Bank of Infindior, whose single door opens on this shore where the land meets the Denrik Sea. The Bank is no counting-house, and it lends nobody anything. It is a vault in which time does not pass: a deposit left inside neither ages nor can be reached by anyone but the one who placed it, and that stillness is the whole of its value. The great houses of the Adron coast and the southern markets use it to hold titan-bone reserves, the few Crimson Crowns that exist, and fortunes a court or a rival creditor would dearly like to freeze first — because a thing set beyond time is a thing beyond seizure. The mechanics of the stalled room belong to the plane. What the door leaves on Kyorda's rocky shelf is reach far above its latitude: the heaviest money on the Middle Sea sends its factors north to Xandur to reach the vault, and guarding and provisioning that traffic, more than any catch or cargo hauled off the headlands, is what makes this cold shore worth holding.