Alceria
An immense cold interior whose rulers sell the idea of a green kingdom that no longer exists.
The green name
Alceria's surviving lowland woods cluster around The Tangleholt and the sheltered approaches to Oakdell. Much of the wider realm is tundra or ice. Official maps still paint it green, invoking the orchards that stood before the first great transfer. Regent Tavia Morn no longer permits those maps in schools.
River Cedarflow connects the central valleys to the contested warmth machinery. The court cannot simply stop the flow: doing so would flood settlements downstream and freeze its own nurseries. The Thorn Fortress protects the oldest chamber, wrapped in roots that have grown around its doors.
The root's testimony
Alcerian Rootspeech practitioners can recover impressions held in living timber. A cedar at the fortress remembers soldiers carrying a child into the chamber on the night the official histories call voluntary sacrifice. Tavia wants the memory heard. Her treasury survives on the treaty that memory could destroy.
A sheltered capital keeping seedlings alive for forests that exist only in memory.
A wooded western port of Alceria whose shrines remember the displaced.
House Morn derives authority from keeping nursery trees for settlements the cold has erased.
Tavia opened the Thorn Fortress to witnesses after hearing the child’s memory herself.
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.