Twenty-Sixth Day, Fourth Month, 870 AD.

Alekos Virgilos, Prince.

Kingdom of Polaeros.

Polaeriopolis.

The Seeker's Palace.

Dear Alek,

It was ever so nice to meet with you in person again last month! I must confess, your recounting of your journey to Brythonia has left me feeling an odd mix of wonder and bitterness; wonder at the questions and answers you found on those islands, and bitterness for I could not be by your side as you travelled there. No matter, hearing of your explorations is more than enough for me! Contained within this letter should be the information you asked me to send on those kingdoms of the Heptarchy neighbouring Teleytaios. In unofficial terms, I worry about our bordering kingdoms, especially Owkrestos. Towards the end of last year, as you are no doubt aware, the unpopular King Aered was killed in a coup leaving his only issue, a bastard of eleven, to take the throne. Whilst I am of course no stranger to bastards being given positions of power, I am worried as the regency council for the young king has just formed, and amongst its appointees there is not a single member of house Blackoak. The reason this worries me will become apparent when you read of just how influential, and vengeful, Lord Aertax Blackoak is.

Owkrestos is a land of song and story. East of Teleytaios and south of Nordicos, it is a land covered in forests and fens with little in the way of conventional agricultural terrain. As a result the people that live here are predominantly hunters and gatherers, and the only thing that grows in abundance are orchards, berry bushes and mushrooms.

To those from the other Klironomean kingdoms Owkrestos seems strange, almost foreign. In these lands the blood of the Skraelings runs deep, and in a great many places it never truly disappeared. The people call themselves Klironomean, they worship the Church and venerate the First Saint, but the fact remains that their customs are odd and their way of life different to the other six kingdoms.

The royal family of Owkrestos has fallen on truly dire times. House Wyldlarch has ruled over Owkrestos almost as long as house Sperakos has ruled Teleytaios, having integrated the local lordships and defeated their rivals sometime towards the end of the first century. The house has ruled from the city of Stagspring for some eight-hundred years. There is a legend popular in Owkrestan folklore relating to the crowning of house Wyldlarch, which I shall now relay in an admittedly abbreviated form, so as to ensure brevity:

Legend has it that the Royal House of Wyldlarch gets its origin not from some ancient nobleman, but from the son of a great hunter, who came across an injured white stag whilst out hunting. According to myth, it was said that whoever slew the white stag was to be the rightful King of Owkrestos as chosen by the Angel of the Wilds, Arnka. The great hunter did not disgrace himself by finishing off the wounded beast however, believing that there was little sport and even less honour in killing such a magnificent beast without having earned it through skill and cunning. Instead he bound its wounds and gathered for it food and water. When the great hunter left to fetch another pail of water for the stag that he may continue cleaning the beast's wounds, he returned to find the Angel lying injured before him instead. The Angel claimed that he had been hunted for four generations by the lords of Owkrestos, and that only the great hunter had shown him kindness, honour and mercy.

"In return for your mercy," the Angel said, "I decree that your firstborn, and their firstborn after them, shall be the Kings of this land for a thousand years."

"Your Holiness," the great hunter replied, "I am honoured beyond all words, but if I may ask, why reward my son over me? I seek only to know, for I do not wish to sit the throne."

"Well," the Angel smiled, "I find myself in need of a new Kennelmaster."

And, so the legend goes, a mist of stardust the Angel returned to the heavens, his new huntsman beside him.

A pretty tale, though doubtless one born of a desire to make the ruling family seem more just in their rule than any historical fact. It is far more likely this myth came about so that the defeated lords and petty kings that ruled the divided lands in the chaos of the first century could kneel without feeling humiliated.

As I said above, the royal house itself stands on dire straits. The only issue of the late King Aered is his bastard son, King Aleksandar Wyldlarch, a boy of eleven with less power than the nobles around him.

He has taken the coat of arms of his family, seeing as he is the last living member. His banners show a white stag rearing on a dancette line, forest green on a spring green field.

In homage to the legend of their founding, which seems to have occurred sometime around 76 AD, their words are "Chosen of Arnka". Simple, if a bit on the nose.

House Wyldlarch rules from the city of Stagspring, in the centre-north of their kingdom. It has fallen on hard times recently, much like the family whom it houses, and there is little to say about its constituent parts.

In the centre-north backed against a mountain is a palatial district, at the centre of which lies the Huntsfort, the royal accommodation of the ruling family. It is an austere and stark palace, with walls of rough stone and floors of hard wood. It resembles a castle more than a palace, all told.

Around the palace the city can be divided into roughly two halves. To the east of the palace lies the Silverquarter, a district of mines, smelters, refineries, jewellers and mints, all working the seam of silver that lies under and around the capital.

It is true that Owkrestos has little mineral wealth, but the seam of silver which runs under the capital is one of the largest in the known world, and as a result a great many of the silver crows that pass through the economies of the Heptarchy are made in Owkrestos.

To the west lies what can only be described as an overgrown slum. It is, charitably, an urban district for the housing of the workers in the local economy. Tens of thousands of starving lowborns are crammed into thousands of cramped, almost rudimentary, houses as unhygienic as they are unsafe.

There is little to speak of in regards to this city, save that recent events have seen much of it gutted and burned. Upon the death of King Aered his late wife attempted to seize control of the throne, but a coalition of the former king's noblemen and vassals led an army to ensure his bastard son was placed on the throne. Being a child, he would be easier to puppet than a woman well-versed in courtly politics and intrigue. When the battle was over and won the besieging army turned loose in the streets, sacking the outer districts of the city and leaving only the Huntsfort itself untouched.

Owkrestos follows the Church of the Saint, though unlike the rest of the Heptarchy the New-Church has almost no presence here. The vast majority of the kingdom follow the Old-Church with an emphasis on Arnka, the Angel of the Wilds and the Hunt, though in places other, smaller cults still maintain a following; the Church of the Ancients and the Ichorian Cult both have small groups of followers scattered around Owkrestos, and there are even some parts of the kingdom that, according to common rumour, keep to the pagan ways of the old Corvid Pantheon, from before the Skraelings were conquered. The continued presence of ritual sites and archaic temples deep within the woods of the wild lands would seem to support this theory, or if nothing else prove that the Owkrestans are far more in touch with their past than the rest of the Heptarchy.

Aside from the silver under Stagspring there is a second, smaller seam of precious metal in Owkrestos. Beneath the small mountains that dot the kingdom's border with the Tildan Principalities, there lies seam of gold. Luckily for one of the noble houses of Owkrestos, house Brakow, that seam runs almost directly beneath the castle of Sunkeep, and as a result of the presence of these veins of silver and gold whilst there may not be a great deal of potential mining sites in Owkrestos, what few there are manage to be quite lucrative.

Those two mineral deposits make up a large portion of the Owkrestan economy. Much of the arable land, and indeed around half of all the land in the kingdom, belongs to house Blackoak and its seven cadet branches, and as a result whoever sits the chair of Blacktree Hall would become, at a stroke, the single most powerful man in Owkrestos bar only the king. Even then, the king's power exists only in name.

Of the other noble houses in Owkrestos, a good portion of them lie in lands almost entirely covered in the bogs, marshes and fens of the east of the kingdom, meaning they are poor when compared to their peers of Blackoak and in other kingdoms. The houses Brookrill, Fengrove, Fenmarch and to an extent even Hawthorne reside over communities that live lives entirely revolving around hunting and fishing through these lands where little more than moss, lichen and hardy grass can grow. Some of the branches of house Blackoak reside in the fens as well, though these make up the weaker branches of the family.

Owkrestos' strength can be hard to measure. The land has little in the way of professional soldiers or 'true' knights, indeed perhaps a total of two-thousand can be counted amongst the entire kingdom, with most of those belonging to house Blackoak. However, given the prevalence of hunting amongst the people of this kingdom, the levies they raise are often of a higher quality than their neighbours, and skilled in ambush warfare and ranged combat to boot, so long as they can keep their bowstrings dry.

Entire armies have marched into Owkrestos from Triarios, the Tildan Principalities and on one occasion even Teleytaios, and not one of them have ever succeeded in conquering the kingdom. Indeed, the attempt by Teleytaios to conquer the kingdom some four-hundred years ago cost them fifteen-thousand men, a king and three princes, and for that price they gained little more than a few border keeps and perhaps twenty miles of land. Some historians and archivists say that the destruction of the Teleytaian force marked the end of the Centuries of Iron, as the nations of the Heptarchy withdrew from conflict to lick their wounds and forget their dreams of reunification.

As a result, whilst Owkrestos may not seem particularly powerful, it must be remembered that whilst they may historically have been outmatched on the battlefield, they are rarely beaten on their own terrain.

In terms of sheer numbers there are perhaps two thousand professional soldiers in the kingdom and fifteen thousand levies, though Lord Aertax Blackoak seems to be in the process of increasing the number of well-trained Armsmen in his employ, and has been since the other nobles launched their coup against King Aered.

Perhaps he feared they would turn on his house next? After all, his power grabs and political machinations, whilst greatly increasing the prosperity of his house and those who live on their lands, have won him few friends amongst the other noblemen.

Or maybe he seeks to go on the offensive? The other nobles have denied him, undeniably the most powerful man in the kingdom, a seat on the child-king's regency council. Who can say?

There are almost no sellsword companies from Owkrestos, save perhaps Symon's Starlings, and even they are mostly Teleytaian in makeup. Owkrestans generally have no need to join sellsword companies, since any man skilled with a blade, spear or bow in this land will end up becoming a hunter or fisher, however a great many sellsword companies like to come here given the almost constant internal squabbling of the nobles of this land. For the sellswords that come here, employment is almost certainly guaranteed.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

Nordicos is the northernmost kingdom in the western Heptarchy. It contains a people who, for the most part, live in clusters around the southern reaches of the Archic Mountains. As a result they have a far larger urban population, proportionally speaking, than most other kingdoms, but a smaller rural population.

Nordicos, while lacking seams of particularly 'rich' metals such as silver or gold, controls most of the copper and a large portion of the iron and coal in the heptarchy, so whilst they aren't particularly rich, they're certainly not poor either.

A secondary factor of this abundance of copper is a demand for tin, which is needed to make bronze. Seeing as the only readily accessible tin mines are to be found on the Brythonic Isles, and Nordicos lacks access to the sea, they are forced to instead trade with Teleytaios, using the neighbouring kingdom as a middle-man for the acquisition of tin.

This trade route is lucrative for both parties, and neither wish to see it ended and ruin a not-insignificant sector of their economies, so aside from minor border skirmishes there has never truly been a threat of war along the shared border of Nordicos and Teleytaios.

The royal house of Nordicos is a large one. Whilst it may lack the gilded honours or storied histories of the other royal houses of the Heptarchy, house Petrinos contains dozens of members, a size beaten by only the vast houses of Licotemos in the east of Klironomea.

The coat of arms of house Petrinos displays a silver hammer with white rays emanating from its head against a grey field. The house also seems to have a curious number of multiple-birth pregnancies, leading to a disproportionate number of the house being twins or somesuch thing.

Given the size of the house I shall not list all of its members, merely those of note.

The head of house Petrinos is King Andronik Petrinos, who has taken the sigil of his house unmodified as his own.

His legacy will continue in the form of his twin sons, the Princes Ioseph and Stylianos Petrinos. Prince Ioseph has taken a pair of crossed white hammers against a grey field for his sigil, whilst the younger twin, Stylianos, has taken a pair of crossed black hammers against a grey field for his own personal sigil.

Next, in order of descending age, are the king's brothers.

Lord Lykourgos Petrinos, who is the younger twin of the king, and Ser Aered Petrinos have followed the example of their brother and king, taking the unmodified sigil of their house for their own.

Patriarch Emalios Petrinos, being a member of the clergy, has forsaken the use of his family's heraldry, and as such lives under no colours.

The last of the royal family of Nordicos worth mentioning are the triplets, Ser Stefra, Ser Stemros and Ser Stellan. These three brothers have taken up with the Grey Company, a sellsword band formed by house Petrinos as a business venture, since they take a large portion of the profit from any contract the Grey Company undertakes.

These three knights fight under heraldry depicting three light-grey men striding with longswords in hand on a dark-grey field.

The words of the royal house of Nordicos reflect the city they hold as their seat of power more than anything else; "Forever Hold the Dragon's Rest". Given that Corthraxiopolis, their capital, is seated at the mouth of a mountain pass overlooked by the colossal fossilised remains of a great dragon, it should not be too hard to work out the meaning behind these words.

The capital of Nordicos, as previously mentioned, is Corthraxiopolis. It is a city built into the mouth of a mountain pass in the southern Archic mountains, an excellent position in terms of defence, if somewhat restricted in its ability to grow.

The palace of the Nordican kings is built on a raised position overlooking the centre of the city. It lies just beneath the skeleton of the dragon that resides upon the mountain. From most accounts it is a... middling palace, not as austere as the Huntsfort but far less grand than the royal palace of Anaria.

Outside its walls there are two major sections of the city to note; Lower Fair and Upperhold.

Lower Fair lies in the lowlands spilling out from the mouth of the mountain pass. It is a district very much centred around trade and commerce, having a large Orgilaan minority tending to their ranks of market stalls and cloth caravans, coming and going with their wares from all across Klironomea and beyond. It has no true defences, for the plan in event of invasion is for the people below to retreat behind the stout walls and towers of Upperhold, where the soldiers will hold back the foe whilst the population retreats past the Upperhold and into the sprawling networks of caves that have been internally reinforced and turned into shelters and storehouses. Should the foe manage to break through the walls of Upperhold and fight their way through to the mountain passes, they would still need to fight through some twenty miles of cavel and tunnels of which they know nothing and the inhabitants know everything. This makes Corthraxiopolis one of the best defended cities in all of Klironomea.

As for the religious makeup of the land, its people predominantly worship the Old-Church branch of the Church of the Saint. There is a sizable group who worship the New-Church in the capital and other urban centres, but even in these places the more decentralised and open Old-Church tends to hold more sway over the common folk. There is also a sizable minority in the rural areas of the kingdom and the groups who permanently live in the mountains that instead follow the Cult of Ampithere-Worship, though as the years go by more and more of these people turn from the Dragon-Church and towards the mainstream branches of the faith.

There are rumours that large portions of the nobility and even the royal family have sworn themselves to the Silverian Church, though this is vehemently denied by Patriarch Emalios.

Nordicos has a relatively small military to call upon, limited not by the size of its population but rather its distribution; with such a disproportionate level of its population living in cramped urban centres such as Corthraxiopolis, Megalothiriopolis and Rochaven there are fewer people living in the countryside, and as such if too many men are pulled away from their farms in the rural parts of the kingdom it would surely mean famine. As a result, there are only some eight to ten-thousand levies that can be mustered by the Nordicans at any given time. It also maintains one of the smallest forces of Armsmen in the Heptarchy as well, numbering at only four-hundred Men-at-Arms and a hundred Longbowmen-at-Arms. These men are normally found garrisoning the royal palace and Upper Hold, acting as the honour guard of the royals and nobles, though they have been called away to war more than once.

Aside from levies and Armsmen there are the knights of Nordicos. The majority of the Nordican knights, some thousand or so, are hedge-knights simply hired on to act as a part of the kingdom's military, with another five-hundred belonging to various knightly orders. The most prominent of these Orders are the Axeknights of Morna, who fight with huge greataxes with hafts made of stone, acting as implacable walls of steel on the battlefield, working alongside their peers to ensure that, no matter what, the foe will not live to see the end of whatever conflict they may be fighting.

When talking of the Nordican military, it would be remiss to ignore the number of sellswords that can be found in such a place. Whenever trouble is on the horizon and the urban poor lack for jobs or food, they often form sellsword bands and travel to conflicts abroad in the other kingdoms of the Heptarchy, the Tildan Principalities or even the myriad states of the Dathan peninsula. Some of the smaller groups of sellswords are hired by the Orgilaan merchants to act as caravan guards or outriders, fending off the bandits and raiders that line the roads of the sparsely populated rural lands of Nordicos.

Most prominent amongst these sellsword companies however is the Grey Company. A company formed of loyal Nordicans and founded by the grandfather of the current king of Nordicos, the first king of house Petrinos, it is led by Ser Stellan, the youngest of the three triplets, whilst his brothers Stefra and Stemros act as loyal advisors, bodyguards, and lieutenants for their younger brother.

There is my brief overview of the kingdoms of the Heptarchy neighbouring my own. I apologise if it lacks the prose of my previous entries about Klironomea or my own homeland, but then I have always had to look to Owkrestos and Nordicos through a more calculating lens. Where do you think you will visit next? You let slip whilst visiting that you intended to go south and visit the all but silent continent of Sothena, though whether you intended to visit Sothettar, the Nekhtoudum ruins, the last remaining nomads, or even the few remaining villages in what were once the client-kingdoms in the central band of the continent I know not. In any case, please make sure you write to me of your travels, it is almost as good as if I were there myself! How far afield have you travelled now? The Ouroborisian Tor in the west, the furthest points of Dathan in the east, the Sky-Barrows of the Skonisnomas in the north and now somewhere in Sothena further south? Soon enough you will have travelled the furthest of any man in the world, surely, and at a remarkably young age! I am certain that your book on the cultures and realms of the known world will be a success, after all, not only will you be the single most well-travelled person in the world, but also one with a repository of knowledge within his grasp at home.

Perhaps one day you will be able to make your way east of the Drakespine mountains and see what has become of the eastern continent since all contact was lost in the Age of Silence? Now that would be a true achievement! The Amber Road in the north may have frozen over and there may be nowhere to resupply by sea on the southern route for thousands of miles, so getting there would be a challenge, but if anyone could work their way around these issues it would surely be you.

I look forwards to reading your response, and even more so to seeing you once more, whenever that may be. Things are beginning to look dicey at home for me; my sister continues to exercise her control over my father and Rhema has written in that strange, almost rambling style of his to say there are almost constant raids from the Al-Alema to the south trying to cross the twenty-mile wall of Castelos, so I fear there will be little in the way of good news from me for some time. Given the unrest in Owkrestos across the border, the threat to the south and the ever-increasing gripes and grumbling of the dispossessed nobility, the affairs of state and the court are only growing more complicated and dangerous. I know things became far simpler when my father cut through the knot of feudal politics by revoking the lands and titles of all his vassals, but as ever I am the one remembered for dismantling the nobility in the Twilight Rebellion. Given the state of court in Anaria and my sister's own enduring, irrational hatred of me, I do not think it will be safe for me to return to the capital anytime soon. I have begun increasing the size of my own professional forces in Aenirhen, as well as the pace of repairs on the Einarbrycge. I have also begun repairs and improvements on the stretch of the Coastroad leading to the bridge and the waystations along its route.

It is cynical of me to say this, but there is another war coming. Romanos and Elikoidi agree, even if neither can work out why they think so. It may not be for quite some time yet, but I don't intend to be caught off my guard. Elikoidi has found a man who can create a substance that burns like hell and can be safely launched by artillery, a man named Marren. I am to meet with him and determine whether he deserves a place in my forces within the next few days.

I have started looking into common mythological themes and religious threads as I did when we were younger. I know not what the presence of these archaic symbols on ancient unmortared stone castles means, but I will work it out, this I swear.

They're fascinating, Alek! These ruins, I mean. I went to one near the southern Archic mountains, a small ruin known as the Tledaal, and the architecture pre-dates any known style from any known culture in the known world! You know what the most fascinating thing is though Alek?

They match the strange markings and symbols found at the Aauta Pass in Tilda, well over a thousand miles away! We're potentially looking at an ancient culture predating even the Sotenari and Nekhtoudum that no-one knows anything about! I will continue to look into these ruins and have the symbols copied to the best of the ability of the men under me, but I will likely need some more men and resources before I am able to safely continue.

Unfortunately the needs of the kingdom must come before my own fancies, and as such I will likely not be able to go on my next expedition for some time, but there are three more such sites in my own lands I intend to look into for symbols and clues. There's something going on here, Alek, something ancient and forgotten by man. There's a place by the coast that I have heard may have something I'm looking for, another in the forests of the Farwald, and further afield there is another fort built on the foothills of a mountain in the southern Archic range, known as the Horndaal.

No matter what I find or where you go, I hope to see you again soon, Alek.

I miss you dearly.

Your friend, now and always,

Prince Lykourgos Sperakos.