A tiny gnomish magocracy on a mountainous peninsula at the tip of the Watar peninsula, jutting into the Middle Sea. Echea is essentially two enormous mountains—the Iri Mountains—covered in universities, research facilities, and the workshops that produce some of the finest magitech in Alaria.
Vetoed from the Aldriktch Trade Alliance by Camaran. The Echi don't seem to care much—they're too busy with scholarship to worry about trade politics.
The Camaran veto
Echea petitioned the Alliance for membership a generation ago and was refused before the question reached a vote. Camaran cast the veto, and Camaran's reason had nothing to do with commerce. The republic had buried the Volari wards after the Camaran Blight and written magic out of its law, and a state founded on outlawing the practice was never going to seat a magocracy whose universities graduate elemental war-casters by the class. That the Echi work elemental magic, which spends no life, rather than the life-costing Deoric that emptied the Volari foundries, made no difference: Camaran's statutes draw no such line, and First Consul Doravin Selmari least of all. The Echi treat the snub as Camaran's forfeited access to Echean magitech, not as any loss of their own. The two states have not exchanged an embassy since.
The Universities
Echea's universities are its heart. They function as schools, research institutions, artifact factories, and military academies all at once. Every student learns elemental magic, combat tactics, and practical crafting. The result is a population of highly educated elemental war casters who rarely fight—but when they do, they're terrifying.
The universities compete fiercely for prestige, funding, and the best students. Academic politics in Echea can be as vicious as any court intrigue.
Coastal Settlements
Small fishing villages cling to the rocky coastline below the mountains. These communities exist mostly to feed the cities above and provide port access for visiting scholars and trade ships.
The strait below
The Iri Mountains fall straight to the water on Echea's northern side, which sets the magocracy directly above the Telphineas Strait, the only deepwater channel between the halves of the Middle Sea. Watar patrols the narrows for an anchorage fee and Bestacia litigates against it, and Echea, the one of the three with both the high ground and the war-magic to simply close the passage, declines to be drawn in. The Echi keep nothing on that shore but fishing villages, and the toll quarrel strikes them as the natural consequence of a trade league that did not want them. Camaran's veto ended Echea's interest in the Alliance's business, and the strait is the Alliance's business. The high ground sits there garrisoned by no one while two states that cannot reach it fight over the water at its foot.