The Glittering Hills
There’s a stretch of land along Aranor’s eastern coast that the Chourdavian crown calls the East-march. Locals call it the Glittering Hills. The name is hopeful—maybe even cruelly so. It evokes light, promise, and wealth. But the truth of the land is toil, silence, and the slow, grinding erosion of order.
The terrain is hilly and scrub-choked, carved with ravines that twist like old scars. The soil is poor. The wind is sharp. The roads are barely roads at all. The region produces a modest yield of gemstones—just enough to tempt miners, not enough to justify civic investment. The crown treats it like a buffer zone. A frontier. A place to tax, not to see.
And lately, something has begun to stir.
The Chaos Men
They aren’t coming from the north. They aren’t marching from some distant border. They’re emerging—from within. From the Fell Temple of Zagrath, erected over the broken remains of the Broken God. It lies roughly 500 miles south of the Glittering Hills. The temple was constructed by Zagrathi cultists who seek to unmake the world through entropy—to break it as their dark god is broken.
Now, they’re loosed.
The chaos men are former cultists, twisted by ritual and mythic entropy. Horned, hooved, and marked by mutation. Some bear extra limbs. Some speak in reversed tongues. They don’t conquer. They dissolve. They spread strife, desecrate thresholds, and unravel the quiet testimony of the land.
They call themselves the Unmakers. And they speak of a coming Sundering.
Signs in the Hills
It started small. A miner vanished. Shadowy silhouettes cast on ravine walls. A ruined shrine began to glow at dusk. A Preceptor sent to investigate returned silent, then disappeared.
Now, the sightings are growing. The ravines feel older. The wind carries whispers. The hills glitter—but they do not give.
The Stones
The gemstones of the Glittering Hills aren’t valuable in bulk. They’re small, flawed, and difficult to extract. But they carry ritual potency. Hedge-workers and itinerant scholars use them in rites of necessity. These aren’t treasures. They’re tools. Testimony. Fragments of a land trying to hold itself together.
Name |
Appearance |
Use in Magic or Rites |
|---|---|---|
Veilshard |
Pale to smoky violet quartz |
Used in concealment, dream-walking, or veiling presence. Blurs perception. |
Sunderviolet |
Deep red garnet with fractures |
Burned in severance rituals. Cuts metaphysical ties. |
Witchglass |
Opaque black tourmaline |
Ground for protective circles or entropy-binding. Brittle but potent. |
Saltfire |
Pale amber citrine |
Heated in purification rites. Emits faint light when warmed. |
Ravencleft |
Iridescent black with blue sheen |
Used in shadow-walking or masking magical signatures. |
Shardmilk |
Translucent white quartz |
Dissolved for memory rites or pain-dulling. Ineffective in sunlight. |
Graveflint |
Ash-grey quartz or spinel |
Anchors spirits, binds echoes, stills movement. Cracks render it inert. |
Extraction is mostly panning and sifting. Tunnel mining is rare and dangerous. The yield is low. The stones are not wealth—they are witness.
Final Thoughts
The Glittering Hills are a threshold. Not between nations, but between states of being. They glitter, yes—but the light is thin. The chaos men seep up from the south, and the land itself seems to hold its breath.
“They do not march. They seep.”
— Carved into the walls of an abandoned mine
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