Land and water
Geography
Lithaea occupies a broad basin within the Taurignis mountain systems. The dry, rugged Ouratsimpó Plateau rises to the north; farther within its highlands, the striking formations and subterranean settlements of the Kaminádes mark the source country of the Lithanar. Snowmelt and perennial springs feed the river as it descends into the Lithaean Plain.
Lithaea is not the whole of the Thanalaea peninsula. The name properly refers to the Taurignis-enclosed valley and the Sultanate centered upon it; Thanalaea extends beyond the Sultanate into lands of additional settlements, peoples, and jurisdictions not yet fully recorded in this public archive.
Other rivers make the valley a single connected system. The Tāwail descends from the eastern Oritaurignis and receives the Chanar from the south. The Cydnus enters the central basin near Lithaeabhat, while the Hūanzi drains the wooded western valley. Their waters gather around Lake Zafeíros, an inland route and catchment at the heart of the country.
South of the lake, the Lithanar passes through the wooded and marshy Zivelomin country, then cuts between the Dokáros Mountains at the Pýli Gorge. Beyond the gorge lies a coastal plain and a broad delta, where the river reaches the Bakalatu Sea around Zyrigsmé. This course concentrates farms, roads, river traffic, markets, and military movement along the same strategic corridor.
People and public life
People & society
Humans, elves, half-elves, dwarves, gnomes, and other peoples live across Lithaea. Elven political, artistic, engineering, and scholarly traditions remain visible in its cities and institutions; Khanish military and bureaucratic practices dominate the modern state. Dwarven communities and craft traditions are especially important to the northern industrial country around Kavronis.
The conquest displaced many elves from Lithaeabhat, transferred property, and bound resistance to systems of execution and enslavement. Later reforms expanded legal standing and access to office, but they did not erase segregated neighborhoods, unequal wealth, or the memory of dispossession. Urban life is shaped by courts, guilds, garrisons, temples, and trade; rural communities depend more directly on field, river, road, and seasonal labor.
Slavery and penal servitude remain embedded in the legal and labor order. State institutions describe sentences as matters of law and public security, while citizens and political movements argue over the coercion, inequality, and inherited violence that sustain them. Formal equality is therefore a real legal principle and an unfinished social condition.
A layered civilization
Culture
Lithaean culture is marked by the meeting of older local traditions and Khanish rule. In Lithaeabhat, walled heights, marble and granite public buildings, souks, docks, colleges, temple complexes, and council chambers declare the authority of the capital. In Zyrigsmé, sandstone, brick, mud, and timber spread across a commercial delta of workshops, fisheries, warehouses, and river landings.
Markets and religious observance organize much of daily life, but they do not look the same in every district or settlement. The court, merchant quarters, mining towns, lakeside communities, mountain approaches, and coastal ports each carry their own patterns of work and local standing. Scholarship, craft, military service, and trade remain important routes to prestige, though class and ancestry continue to influence who can use them most easily.
The Sultanate
Government & administration
The Sultan
The Sultan is Lithaea’s sovereign and final authority. Sultan Jamerishon’s reign has tied the crown to a public program of legal equality and dynastic reconciliation, while preserving Lithaea’s subordinate relationship to the Great Khanate.
Grand Council
Thirteen councilors, led by the Vizier, direct national administration. Their work encompasses law, infrastructure, trade, the Grand Army, and the state systems that administer taxation, labor, and public authority.
Petit Council
Lithaeabhat is governed day to day through a seven-member Petit Council associated with the Muhtasib. It oversees municipal concerns, including infrastructure, policing, markets, and the distinctive needs of the capital.
Guard, army, and civic order
Military, security & law
Scholai
The Scholai are the Sultan’s elite royal guard. They protect the palace and royal household, guard the treasury and monetary system, investigate forgery and serious threats, and conduct intelligence and investigative work for the crown.
Grand Army
The Grand Army is Lithaea’s national military force, commanded through its Strategos and generals. It guards roads and frontiers, administers territorial defense, and supplies the military obligations Lithaea owes to the Khanate. A small naval force based at Zyrigsmé supports coastal defense and transport escorts.
Exkoubitos
The Exkoubitos enforce municipal law in Lithaeabhat under Petit Council oversight. The Grand Army’s Central Garrison is an administrative headquarters within the capital, but ordinary city enforcement belongs to the Exkoubitos rather than the national army.
Writs of Penitence and state servitude
Writs of Penitence record criminal sentences that may place a person in state servitude for a fixed term or for life. Those sentenced can be assigned to domestic labor, mines, public works, or military service. The system is a central feature of Lithaean law and one of the country’s deepest public controversies.
Plain, river, and sea
Economy & trade
The Lithaean Plain and the southern delta support extensive agriculture. River water, fertile soil, fisheries, and wildlife make the watershed the basis of food production and exchange. Towns gather where roads cross rivers, where the cultivated country meets forest or foothill, and where vessels can move goods between local markets and the capital.
Lithaeabhat is the country’s chief commercial and administrative market. To the north, Kavronis links mines, smelters, metalwork, river transport, and the roads into the highlands. Its wider district has long supplied copper, tin, lead, iron, zinc, and other materials to the basin.
Zyrigsmé connects the inland waterways to the Bakalatu Sea. Its river and sea routes sustain trade with Murisium, especially through the port of Nekhenar, and with the wider coastal world. The delta’s farms, fisheries, workshops, and warehouses give the port an economic weight different from the capital’s monumental center.
Temples and observance
Religion
Public religious life in Lithaea is shaped by the widespread Khanish pantheon as well as local and regional traditions. Beykríuh is honored as the ordering power of the pantheon; Dirilüma is associated with life, death, healing, and transition. Günanára and Diriay govern the day and night, while Yildirym, Twüleýa, and Adaghan are honored in relation to sky, water, mountains, forests, and wild country.
Šerkerdé is associated with war and horsemanship, Mergzanda with scholarship, art, craft, hunting, and archery, and Ugenmarı with love, beauty, fertility, birth, and healing. Temples act as places of worship, education, charity, archives, and public ceremony. Devotion is often practical and overlapping: a household, sailor, scholar, soldier, or craftsperson may make offerings within more than one tradition.
Cities and towns
Settlements
Capital
Lithaeabhat
The capital stands above Lake Zafeíros at the meeting of the Lithanar and Cydnus. Palace, councils, temples, markets, docks, the Scholai, and the Grand Army’s central administration converge inside and around its walls.
Delta port
Zyrigsmé
An ancient southern port where the Lithanar reaches the Bakalatu Sea. Its commercial neighborhoods, fisheries, river traffic, and maritime routes give the delta a distinct place in Lithaean life.
Industrial city
Kavronis
A northern center of mining, metalwork, river transport, and workshops at the Lithanar and Sidraga. Its local institutions and surrounding wards retain an identity unlike that of the capital.
Conquest, succession, and reform
History
Much of the best-known written history of Lithaea was preserved by Khanish institutions and must be read with care. It records real rulers, wars, and reforms, but repeatedly casts conquest as improvement and treats those dispossessed by it as a problem to be solved. The broad course of the country’s history is more certain than every motive recorded in official accounts.
Before the Khanate
Before the conquest, Lithaea was an elven-led country governed through a Senate. Its cities, river communities, agricultural land, roads, and old noble houses were already established. The old order was unequal and contested, but later descriptions of it as a simple failure belong to the political language of the conquering state.
Khanish conquest
Khanish armies under General Oösmaron overcame or bypassed Lithaea’s defenses and created the Sultanate. Kavronis negotiated a submission that preserved its city and industry; elsewhere the conquest brought direct violence. The new regime confiscated property, expelled many elves from Lithaeabhat, and used execution and enslavement to suppress resistance.
Assassination and civil war
Oösmaron was assassinated six years into his reign. His death opened a year of civil war in which military commanders, court figures, merchants, and competing local groups fought for authority. The surviving official record attributes responsibility selectively, so the full balance of violence remains uncertain.
The reign of Malasdier
Malasdier emerged with the support of the remaining human military. A general pardon offered to people who publicly declared loyalty helped end much of the open fighting, though some communities resisted or withdrew into remote country. His long reign established roads, courts, administration, military command, and many of the durable institutions of the Sultanate.
Malasdier II and Jarazied
Malasdier II answered renewed attacks on government institutions with severe repression. His ten-year reign normalized anti-elven discrimination and segregation before his death amid unconfirmed rumors of poisoning. His brother Jarazied then secured the throne, extended recognition to half-elves, opened public service more broadly, and used the Scholai to investigate official abuse and hear complaints against local authorities.
The Twins’ Betrayal
A later rebellion centered on rival hereditary claims and opposition to Jarazied’s reforms marched on Lithaeabhat. The attack failed at the capital; Jarazied was wounded, and the surviving rebels fled.
The rise of Jamerishon
Prince Jamerishon helped organize the city’s defense and then pursued the retreating forces. Fighting later reached Zyrigsmé, where a destructive siege was broken along the coast. Jarazied later abdicated because of the wound suffered in the assault. Jamerishon was crowned that winter, married Lady Juvilia the following spring, and decreed legal equality for humans, elves, and half-elves. The reforms changed the law and widened access to office without resolving every inequality created by conquest.
Public movements
Factions & political movements
Kharuuluud
A human-supremacist movement associated with the defense of inherited human privilege and opposition to equal standing for elves and half-elves.
ELF
Originally known as the Elven Liberation Front, the movement’s public identity has shifted toward an elven fellowship seeking advancement through civic and political life.
Potamokrátores
River networks whose older roots lie in resistance to occupation and whose modern reputation is tied to smuggling and unofficial commerce.
Chotikaíma
An elven political faction with a public reputation for militancy and the pursuit of stronger elven power.
Beyond the valley
Foreign relations
The Great Khanate. Lithaea retains its Sultan, councils, local law, and Grand Army, but acknowledges the Great Khan’s supremacy and answers imperial military obligations. This arrangement gives the realm room for local institutions while keeping its politics bound to a wider imperial order.
Murisium. River and sea routes from Zyrigsmé connect Lithaea to Murisium, especially the port of Nekhenar. These maritime ties support commerce and make the southern delta an outward-facing counterpart to the capital’s inland authority.
The regional frontier. The plateau, mountain roads, coast, and river corridors all make neighboring communities strategically important. Lithaea’s influence is strongest where administration, roads, and waterways converge; it is more contingent at the upland and frontier margins.