A Sivakr (Silver Elf) kingdom in the Grey Mountains, a sub-range of the southern Kharvorn. The surface peoples drove the Sivakr underground in 1700 SD, and for more than sixteen centuries the silver elves stayed below. They came back up fifty years ago to trade. It is going poorly, and for the same reason it went poorly the first time: the Sivakr negotiate by editing what the other party remembers agreeing to.
Borders Camaran (southeast), Erasnus (southwest), and barely touches Hephake (northwest). Member of the Aldriktch Trade Alliance, admitted late and over objection, and the neighbors who admitted Myorna are turning hostile as they rediscover for themselves what their ancestors once drove the Sivakr below the mountains to stop.
Silver and the warrant
What Myorna sells is silver. The Grey Mountains are heavy with it, and the silver is why the neighbors swallowed their misgivings and admitted the kingdom to the Aldriktch Trade Alliance around 3326 SD, fifty years after the gates reopened in the Sivakr Emergence. What they bought along with the silver is the way the Sivakr do business. A Myornic bargain is a memory duel with the edges filed off: the silver elves negotiate by reaching into the other party and adjusting what it remembers having agreed, a practice that runs through the whole of Sivakr culture and not merely its commerce. Inside Myorna this is not fraud but governance. The kingdom's legal record is whatever the goddess Tiira's apparatus attests, and a Tiira-warrant is the nearest thing the Sivakr keep to a binding signature. Her ministries hold the official memory clean; the older underground cult of Xalvaakr holds it whole and unaltered, and calls the cleaning a desecration. That faith split runs through every household and through the capital, Vad Ilghak, whose memory-libraries keep the written half of the craft. The cost of the work is paid below, in the Forbidden Valley north of the capital, where one chained life is bled so the silver elves need not spend their own. King Samaryn, called the Grand Weaver, opened the gates on a memory-worker's reckoning that sixteen centuries had buried the old grievance past surface recall. The first half of that bet held. The second half is the kingdom's present problem.
On trial in the Alliance
The merchants who deal with Myorna keep coming home certain of bargains they cannot afterward account for, exactly as the surface did before it drove the Sivakr underground in 1700 SD. That distrust now has a test case. A Tiira-attested bond, given by a Myornic factor as surety on grain owed to the Erasnus city of Adnar, failed when the grain never arrived, and Erasnus is calling the bond memory-modified and void. To Myorna the claim is nearer a death sentence than a lawsuit. A state whose entire legal memory is the goddess's attestation cannot concede that the attestation is worth nothing without conceding it has no enforceable word at all, so King Samaryn's court argues the bond binds precisely as Tiira recorded it. Whether a Sivakr-notarized contract holds under the charter now sits before the Alliance court at Aldriktch, and its answer decides more than one grain shipment. It decides whether Myorna's silver can be traded on Myorna's word, and so whether the kingdom keeps any place in the Alliance at all.
The Underground
Most Sivakr still live partially underground, in warrens and complexes connected to the surface cities. The old ways persist. Some want to seal the surface entrances and return to isolation; others see the underground as backwards and want full integration with the surface world.