Argysis was a dwarven kingdom. The deep-delve clans had worked its holds for longer than anyone in the lowlands kept count, and the Shyka who occupy its ruins today did not build a stone of it. Around 3176 SD, two centuries before the present, that kingdom ended in a single campaign, when two black dragons came against the mountain together.
Rothogomos and Tepheranos were brothers, two of the dragons whose kind had been clawing their way back to prominence across Alaria since the Return of Dragons. They came to Argysis to crack it open and split its treasury between them. The dwarves did not treat. King Grønmar ordered the holds held one at a time and the deep roads collapsed behind every retreat, so the prize would be worth as little as dwarven hands could leave it. The northern gatehouse of Encaspius fell first. The forge-city of Morphi held for the better part of a year before it was buried. The fighting went hold by hold and tunnel by tunnel, the way the dwarves meant it to.
The betrayal came at the moment of victory. With the last seat at Othyndria breaking open and the treasury finally in reach, Rothogomos turned on his brother and took the whole hoard for himself. Tepheranos, cheated of half of what they had bled for, was driven south to the lesser kingdom of Anarak, where he has sat ever since. Grønmar did not leave Othyndria; his bones are still beneath the stone Rothogomos tore down to reach the gold.
The survivors fled east. Under Strømgar they crossed the Two Brothers and went down through the South Passage into Hephake before the dragon's reach closed the routes behind them, and Hephake has been a kingdom shaped by refugees ever since. One thing did not survive the crossing. The Pact of Barrik, the shared monument where children of both realms had once kept a pilgrimage, now stood in contested ground no Hephake dwarf could reach, and the tradition died with the road to it.
The deep road out of Morphi, where the dwarves brought the roof down on themselves rather than leave it open behind them. A quarter-mile of collapsed gallery, the cut stone of the ceiling lying on the cut stone of the floor, and somewhere under it the machinery of a forge-city that worked iron for a thousand years. Rothogomos has never dug it out. There is nothing under there he can spend.
What Rothogomos won was a hoard inside a corpse. The cities stand stripped and sealed as the dwarves last left them, the holds are silent, and the only population in Argysis is the Shyka priesthood and warbands he keeps as eyes and claws. The feud did not end with the betrayal. It froze. Two centuries on, neither brother has moved against the other, and both still want what the other took.