Brynvale
A highland principality guarding the passes and the engines that keep them open.
Above the thaw
Despite its pastoral name, Brynvale is a country of ridges, tundra and permanent ice. The name survives from a warmer century. Its one true city, Pinewood, occupies the southern foothills where pack animals can winter. Beyond it, every sheltered ledge has a number and every missing caravan has witnesses.
The The Frost Skyline divides meltwater traveling toward rival basins. Warden Oren Halvek controls the passes rather than the mountains themselves. His family tends the old transfer chambers beneath The Cinder Fortress, charging a toll for roads warmed by the same machinery that starves neighboring slopes of snowmelt.
An unstable inheritance
Oren's son has found a road under the glacier that predates the engines. If it can reopen, Brynvale loses its tolls but may finally stop burning imported cedar merely to remain habitable.
Brynvale’s foothill city, where roads, pack trains and seasons are repaired.
The Halveks maintain the three highland passes and charge for the warmth that keeps them open.
Oren understands the pass machinery well enough to know it is failing and poorly enough to fear changing it.
Southern farmers who won a republic and inherited a failing source of warmth.
An eastern river confederacy held together by pilots, signal towers and a disputed promise of rescue.
A southern strait kingdom where safe passage matters more than the size of the fleet.