ORC LANDS

Last month I was either too busy or too tired, and hence I only updated the blog three times. Let's hope that in November I can get some more quality free time and go back to updating weekly.
For today you have a third (and last) post about the lands inhabited by demi-human races, in this case by orcs.

· ISLES OF THE BROKEN SPINE: These islands are located at the south end of the Inner Sea, east of Masiwn and west of Sur-Gorlend. None of them is overly large, but neither are they small (like the ones from Rintolle). They are located in a line, and there was a time when they served as "step stones" to travel from Sur-Gorlend to Masiwn. But since orc tribes colonized the isles, that kind of travel has been interrumped. This archipelago is the closest thing to a kingdom that orcs have ever had, and they are fiercely territorial about it, not allowing anyone else to enter their domains. They don't even like ships traveling near their shores, and random acts of pirate mayhem discourage such routes, forcing ships to sail deeper in the Inner Sea. Internally, orcs have no single government uniting them. Despite that and their warring temperament, they somehow manage to avoid falling in continuous civil wars; orcs work hard to always remember they must save their energies to crush their true enemies: elves, dwarves and humans. The biggest political formation is the tribe, with quite a good bunch of them populating every isle. Also, all orcs feel a weird pride for their own isle, even though their only true affiliation is to the tribe. The island nationalism is usually exposed when orcs group together for "games", such as wrestling, running, weight lifting... Said isles, being big enough, provide almost everything orcs need to live; orcs practice agriculture and farming (they are not that savage), apart from hunting. There's ore too, but orcs never build proper mines like the ones of dwarves (or men), so they deal with little quantities of metal for their very crude blacksmithing; and use quite a lot of wood, that they promptly chop from the woods, that they don't overwork. All in all, orcs live in a much more civilized manner that what most people expect.
The name needs no explanation, as it's in common language. If anything, it shows the lack of subtlety of orcish thinking.

· NHORBAR: This is the big island that lies north of Nor-Gorlend, a place of eternal snow and gelid winds. This is the only other place in Ajsalium where orcs live freely and predominantly. Yet, unlike in the Isles of the Broken Spine where orcs live alone and "pure", Nhorbar is shared with humans. And, truth to be told, after millennia of living together, all humans have some orc blood, and viceversa; effectively, everyone in Nhorbar can be considered a half-orc. The ones that call themselves orcs, are slightly smaller than their southern relatives, and their skin coloration lends more toward grey tones than olive ones. The extreme climate makes agriculture impossible, and farming a very time demanding and difficult task, so hunting is the main activity. All this has prevented nhorbarian orcs from evolving culturally, and live rather primitively (like their "human" neighbours); thus, they compensate their lack of racial purity with a more strict adherence to the orcish traditional way of living. And that means machism, use of violence as the primary way to solve problems, and constant fights against human tribes.
The word Nhorbar is wrongly assumed to be a contraction of north + barbarian. The north part is true, but not the other. "Bar" was an ancient term for coldness, and thus Nhorbar means "the cold from the north". Later, the term "barbarian" was coined from the root "bar", referring to the people that lived in that cold place.

DWARVEN LANDS

This post is similar to the previous one, but regarding the lands of dwarves. Apart from the ones living in these two places, there are approximately fifty thousand more elsewhere, most of them explorers traveling the world to find a new home for their (dying) race.

· ETERNOCK: Eternock is the name of the huge mountain country that occupies most of the Nor-Gorlend subcontinent. And it's also the name of the ancient dwarven empire that covered all of its excavated underground, continuing down to Sur-Gorlend. The Vortex caused the cave in of all the southern part of the empire; and only the solid rock of Eternock stood still. It's hard to know how many dwarves live there nowadays, but a decent estimation is about two million souls. Dwarves live mainly underground (in fact, the surface supposedly belongs to the human nation of Othar), with small farming facilities in rocky areas. Those "farmers" also serve as merchants and intermediaries with humans. Bellow the ground, vast cities lie in excavated caves that are an immortal testimony of the grandiosity of dwarven mining and architecture. Each city hosts a number of clans, which are large family groups. One clan will be charged with ruling the city (a task that can be retained for many generations), yet it will be aided by selected counselors from every other clan. That same political structure, augmented, rules the whole Eternock, with one clan taking the lead in ruling matters, but usually just for a few generations (from only one to three). Humans call the chief of the ruling clan "king of dwarves", but to be honest that's not a good definition. Dwarves living in Eternock remain the most true to ancient traditions and way of living, despite the fact that mines are dangerously depleted of ore. They put great effort in maintaining the imposing halls of their cities, and still create wonderful pieces of blacksmithing, and goldsmithing jewels that sometimes reach the human world where only the most rich aristocrats can buy them.
Unsurprisingly, Eternock stands for "eternal rock".

· DRAKPAC: In the times before the Vortex Drakpac was a peninsula of Sur-Gorlend, the most southern place dwarves had colonized. But the earthquakes provoked by the Vortex profoundly affected the peninsula, up to the point that it came loose of the continent, and even started to drift away to the East. Fortunately, the dwarves that populated it lived on the surface hills, instead of underground, so not many of them died. The following years were much worse, as the isolated community had to struggle for survival in a relatively small island with no external help whatsoever. Due to dwarven tenacity they overcame those obstacles, and somehow reinvented their own society. In fact, they managed to break a legendary dwarven fear: fear of waters. From nothing but their own intelligence, drakpacians created slow but very resilient ships with which to navigate and reach the continent once more, searching for the rest of the dwarven race. They found a very changed world, in the final stages of the Long War, in which they too entered. In the present, Drakpac supports a community of three or four hundred thousand dwarves, living according to the old traditions, but keen on engineering innovation and exploration of the world still in search of possible lost dwarven colonies.
Drakpac seems not to have a translation into common language, although the word has been linked to the dwarven semantic family of "audacity".

ELVEN LANDS

Basically, all elves live in any of their three territories. There are just ten thousand elves living outside, either adventurers, high diplomats or the occasional merchant. All the rest, you'll find them here:

· VIDOLGREEN: A vast forest located at the western side of Conterria. In the distant past, before the Vortex, Vidolgreen was the only elven country; but then it was much bigger, more than twice its current size. Now a mere shadow of its former glory, it's still the largest forest in the continent; but it gets slowly smaller due to men salvaging the woods closest to their lands, something that fills elves with affliction. There's a shadow in the woods, though, a dark place in the southeast, where the forest was tainted with Hell's corruption, an expanse that is rumoured to be filled with the lost souls of elves that died fighting the infernal hordes. Apart from that, everything is a celebration of greenness and life. Elves (somewhere between half million and one million) live in the inner part of the forest, in places that none from other race has ever seen; enormous arboreal cities can hold thousands of them. Buildings are done in titanic trees as old as the world, and everything is so integrated in the natural landscape that for the untrained eye they would be all but invisible. In these cities elves live under the wise advices of a king and a queen, chosen from the elder for their intelligence and knowledge. All kings and queens are in periodical contact thanks to magical ways, and every decade or so a meeting is held in which all of them visit every city. Vidolgreen is the elven country that keeps most faithfully to the old ways of the race, and they are very happy just to live in perfect union with flora and fauna. Even so, every now and then a rogue elf would want to know more of the outer world, and the very rare elven adventurers will likely come from Vidolgreen.
The name stands approximately for "always flourishing".

· RINTOLLE: The archipelago located between Conterria and Alterria, west of Vidolgreen. It appeared when the Vortex shook the world so hard that terrorizing earthquakes made Conterria split up in two parts, and a good part of Vidolgreen quickly sank under the waters; the islands are what managed to stand above sea level. The population is low, as most of them are direct descendants of the survivors (migration is negligible): something in the vicinity of one hundred thousand inhabitants. The morphology is pretty different from Vidolgreen, as there can't be so dense woods in relatively small islands; because of that, here elven cities are constructed near the shores, with tall stone buildings of rounded shapes. In a way, they resemble the trees that had always been their homes. There they spend their long lives cultivating the arts, that they've honed to a masterful level never seen before, compiling all history in epic odes and wondrous tunes, a swansong worth of gods that will make the legacy of elves live forever. Apart from that, they've also built a small but imposing fleet of ships, that add the luxury expected from elven manufactures to a top performance. But they are just for maintaining the relations between the three elven countries.
Rintolle means "islands of remembrance", and it's a homage to the thousands of elves that died drowned when the earth cracked open.

· YANATHANIL: A small country located in the east of Alterria, southwest of Rintolle. It is the smallest of the elven lands, little more than the area surrounding a gulf and a small peninsula that houses a wood that survived from the pre-Vortex days of Vidolgreen. Population is higher than you would expect for such a small territory, but even so accounts for just under a hundred thousand souls. For the last centuries, almost since the end of the Long War, Yanathanil has been marked by a tense cold war held against the neighbouring human kingdom of Kamenstein, who yearns for the very tactical Yanathanil gulf for his own fleet of warships. This situation has affected greatly to the social and political forms of this land, up to the point that the typical elven pseudo-monarchy has been replaced by a military oligarchy based on the predominant siege mentality. They have little time for Nature or Art, always honing their military skills getting ready for what they think is the inevitable war. This state of mind, and clear xenophobia, has separated them from the rest of their race; but every elf from Yanathanil will readily give his life for their Vidolgreen and Rintolle brothers (a readiness for sacrifice that is reciprocal, too).
The word Yanathanil is usually translated as "steel-strong will", and for that reason the elves from this land are sometimes referred to as "steel elves".