Adron is the easternmost state on the Middle Sea, a proud Naga kingdom set between mountain ranges. For most of the early Seventh Dawn its Nagashi rode bonded war-dragons and warded the eastern sea from the air, the long age the rest of the coast named the Wyrmward. The riders won their mounts across the sea at Nagayeshi, the hatch-ground at the eye of Oblivion, where Nagatayora's eldest living child Eyatora chose who would bond a dragon and who would sail home empty. That age ended at the Severing, when the dragon-bonds were cut in a single night, and Adron now trades on banking, shipbuilding, and the red gold mined from its peaks. The climate is Mediterranean: warm coastlines, temperate forests in the valleys, snow-capped mountains along the horizon.
Three major ley lines cross Adron: water through the capital, time running southwest to northeast across the north, and dark through the center. Their intersections produce an unusually high number of elementally attuned Naga. The dark line carries the worst name of the three. The order that severed the dragon-bonds kept to it, and Nagashi who work darkness magic are watched in Adron, because of where that magic reaches on its far side: Malstaris, the gray plane that gathers the shadows of the dead.
Every Naga traces its blood to Nagatayora, the dragon-father, eldest son of Gaea and the first to fall in the war against the titan Hykravones. Adron does not worship him. He is long dead, gone since the deep cosmogonic age the world remembers as the Reign of Dragons, and the kingdom holds his blood as a trust rather than a god. That trust is the reason no Naga in Adron will kill a dragon. The bonded war-dragons of the Wyrmward were the trust made flesh; the wild dragons that have wandered back across the sea since the Return of Dragons are neither bonded nor wanted, and they are untouchable all the same. Chavux can raid the strait off the Blades and Adron will not lift a hand against him.
The Nagashi are Adron's people: the ruling houses and banks, the thinned-out heirs of the rider caste. The houses govern as a body from Adrak, and the foremost of them just now answers to Mariseni. The Megélren are here too, far fewer and far quieter. Adron tells itself they are traitor's blood cast out long ago, the story it hangs on the old Megélren Exile. The obsidian form answers to no such tidy history; it surfaces unbidden in any Naga line, in houses that never went near the Exile. What keeps the Megélren in Adron is the shadow economy, which has always found work for operatives who ask nothing and are owed nothing.
Adron's place in the Middle Sea is the bank and the shipyard. The red gold of its mountains and the depth of its counting-houses make Adrak the coast's lender of choice, and a fair share of the hulls that carry Camaran's manufactures and the eastern harvests around the rim are Adron-built and Adron-financed. The kingdom sits at the far eastern end of the arc, distant from the Tarkhon narrows, and pays the strait toll on its own exports with the same resentment as everyone else. But the distance from the chokepoint is what lets it play financier to the states that sit nearer the throat of it. When a Middle Sea war needs funding, the loan is usually written in Adrak.
The bank's reach is the coin itself. The Royal Adrak Bank mints and underwrites the Aldriktch standard, the iron-reckoned coinage the whole Middle Sea and the Tarkhon Empire keep their books in, and it publishes the cross-rate that ties that northern reckoning to the weighed silver of the southern trade. No other house is heavy enough to make a rate hold, so a Free Isles mark and a Kyagos scar of silver are both priced, in the end, against a number set in Adrak. The red gold of the eastern peaks is the kingdom's luxury metal, too valuable and too Kethic-turning to spend, but the ranges give up something rarer still. Red platinum surfaces in trace amounts beside the gold, a hundred times scarcer and a different metal entirely, and the Adron houses hold nearly all of it. They strike it into the Crimson Crown, the standard's highest face, a coin that exists more as a sealed bullion-trophy than as money and changes hands at the scale of kingdoms.
Mountain Ranges
Gozwin Mountains: Eastern coast along the Denrik Sea. Source of red gold and home to Waterdark.
Majesty Mountains: Northeastern range. Rich in red gold. The self-styled Dwarf King lurks here, claiming ancestral rights and robbing travelers.
Shrieking Peaks: Southern range, named for the wind that howls through the passes.
Drakespine Mountains: Central range running north-south, dividing eastern and western Adron. Named for the dragon riders who once patrolled its peaks.
Gemecas
A point of interest in eastern Adron, near the Gozwin Mountains.