Argysis is a sub-range of the Kharvorn Mountains. The deep-delve dwarven clans worked its holds for longer than the lowland kingdoms kept records, and built it into one of the great mountain realms of the north. That kingdom is gone. Two centuries ago the black dragon Rothogomos took the mountain in a single campaign, the fall now remembered as the Dragon Betrayal. The dwarves fought it hold by hold and collapsed the deep roads behind every retreat. The survivors fled east into Hephake. No dwarven population remains. The reptilian Shyka who hold Argysis now are Rothogomos's bred servants and priesthood, and they did not lay a single stone of the place they occupy.
The dragon's domain
What Rothogomos won is a hoard inside a corpse. The cities stand stripped and sealed the way the dwarves left them, the forges are cold, and the deep roads are caved in where their own engineers brought the roofs down. There is nothing here to govern, because there is no one left to govern. The dragon broods in the ruined capital of Othyndria over a treasury he cannot spend, and keeps the Shyka as eyes and claws across a mountain otherwise emptied of the living. He tore Othyndria's great hall open to reach the gold and has occupied it since; everywhere else, his hold is a garrison's hold, not a kingdom's.
Argysis and Anarak have been at a standstill since the betrayal. Tepheranos rules the basin to the south, cheated of his half of the hoard and waiting, and Rothogomos waits in turn. Neither brother has moved on the other in two centuries. Each still wants what the other took, and so the northern Kharvorn sits frozen between two dragons who will not strike and will not let go.
The Pact of Barrik
Before the fall, Argysis and Hephake shared a monument at their border: two dwarven kings carved back to back, one holding a battleaxe, one a book, for the martial and scholarly lines of the two kingdoms. Children of both realms made the journey to it, and princes spent days in meditation at its foot. The Dragon Betrayal ended that. The statue now stands in ground no Hephake dwarf can safely reach, and the pilgrimage died with the road to it. Hephake has not forgotten where it is.