A hungry empire sprawling across southwestern Ve—its jungles stretch from the Blood Mountains to the Gulf of Chimea, its mines burrow into conquered Aureum territory, its colonies spread across distant Rimihuica. Chimea is built on expansion, exploitation, and relentless opportunism.
For full political details, see the state entry.
Blood Mountains
The northwestern mountain range, conquered from the Aureum dwarves roughly a century ago. Rich in rubies, iron, and copper—essential to Chimea's economy and a constant drain on its military.
The Aureum population resists assimilation; the Bloodlings (vampiric gnomes) control the deepest mines and emerge at night to prey on workers. Every gemstone that reaches Chimus is stained with blood.
A century of occupation has settled into a three-way deadlock that the imperial doctrine refuses to admit is one. The Second Legion holds the surface and the worked levels from Gilla. The Aureum resistance, the Last Lamp, holds the deep around a hidden Aureum sun-work called Candelum, where the only working light in the range still survives, and fights a slow insurgency to keep the way to it open. And below both of them the Bloodlings have stopped behaving like a hazard and started behaving like a third power, taking Chimean mine-officers and Aureum runners with equal disinterest and answering to nothing on the surface. The pressure has done something Chimus would call treason: the Legion's commander, Toben Ashling, has opened a quiet line to the resistance leader Orenna, not for peace but because the deep has become an enemy neither can fight alone. For the resistance and the vault, see the Last Lamp; for why the Bloodlings want Aureum light, see the gnome racial entry.
Major Blood Mountain Settlements
- Gilla — Primary administrative center for the occupation, coordinates the Second Legion
- Jenolan Caves — Mining community built into cavern systems
- Jindivick, Gorokan, Hell Creek, Bumbaldry — Extraction settlements deep in the range
- Courangra, Narara, Boggabilla — Smaller mining villages on the jungle-mountain border
The Phriorys border
Chimea's southern frontier dies at the hills of Phriorys, where the Suki Jungle gives way to open grassland held by the green dragon Pyaganos. Three times across the last century the empire has marched legions in to take those hills, and three times the dragon has thrown them back and sent the survivors home; the Three Repulsions are the standing wound in the empire's idea of itself. The court in Chimus cannot leave a beast bounding the empire and reads every defeat as a tactical error the next campaign will correct. A fourth march is being argued now, pushed hardest by the war-minister Hollin Emberling, who survived the third and wants the fourth anyway, and resisted by the treasury bloc under Wessa Wickling, who counts the cost against a Blood Mountain gem flow that is already failing. For the marches themselves, see the Three Repulsions; for the dragon, see Pyaganos and Phriorys.
Settlements
Chimus (★ Capital, ~40,000) — Imperial capital in the southern plains, built for display with broad avenues and marble government buildings. Ve's second-largest city.
Old Tyabb (■ City, ~15,000) — Gateway to New Chimea. Staging ground for colonial expeditions—soldiers, supplies, convicts, and "redemption colonists" pass through here on their way to Port Vincent and the ships. A city perpetually saying goodbye.
Port Vincent (▲ Town) — Primary western port on Traitor Bay, departure point for colonial ships.
Jungle Towns:
- Miltalie, Kargunyah, Nugent — Interior anchor settlements
- Aldaville, Frowat — River towns on the Tonyfall