The Stormcrown

Overview

The Stormcrown is the high country above the holds of The Ironspine and the last towns of The Headwater Marches: bare ridges, storm shelves, and high basins where the vanished Upland Colossal Civilization left its terraces, ridge roads, and weather shrines. Headwater folk named it for the storms that gather on its ridges before they come down the valleys. In the holds it is simply the heights, the top storey of the mountain belt, and Dwarves seldom call it anything else.

No hold claims it, and no lord. Its lower edge is not a line but the place where gate custody and Headwater charters give out and a taboo takes over, so it sits lower on some spurs than others and moves with whoever is willing to climb.

What Happened Here

These heights were the public world of the colossal peoples. Over The Rise of the Upland Colossal Civilization (c. 260,000-c. 195,000 BR) they made exposed height into a civic order: roads held across ridges, terraces cut against storms, shrines raised where the weather could see them, tombs set high in the stone.

Nobody conquered them. In The Withdrawal of the Upland Colossal World (c. 198,000-c. 160,000 BR) the heights simply stopped repaying a life lived at that scale. The communities drew upward and inward into hidden basins and storm shelves, fell silent, and stopped being met. Their god, Haurûm the Mountain-Father, slept as his people thinned.

The works outlived their makers. Troll lines holding crossings on the colossal road network had already sworn charges to its keepers in The Swearing of the Crossing-Charges (c. 230,000-c. 190,000 BR), and the Crossing-Oath Houses still keep those oaths. Survivor lines began walking the abandoned roads during The Walking of the Unkept Roads (c. 175,000-c. 140,000 BR) and became The Edgeway Kindreds, whose oldest circuits still cross these heights. Whose road it is now, theirs, the holds', or the lords' below, is an argument on the Roads and Crossings thread.

No one has settled the Stormcrown since. It is too high, too exposed, and too costly to hold, and the peoples below have long found it wiser to leave what stands up there alone.

What Is Known

  • Land. Bare rock, thin air, little soil, and weather that turns within the hour. Flights of colossal terraces step down the basin walls, and the lowest run on into the Headwater valleys, where some are still ploughed. Exposure kills more people here than anything else; rockfall and colossal roads that give way without warning take most of the rest.

  • The Long Tread. The greatest of the colossal ridge roads runs for days along the outer crest, too broad for any living builder, and it is the one way through the Stormcrown that ordinary travellers know. Gate holds and Edgeway kindreds each keep parts of it and dispute the whole, as described on the Ironspine page.

  • The Weatherline. On the highest ridges a chain of weather shrines of stacked and fitted stone faces the storms rather than any town. From the Headwater valleys, on a clear day, it shows as a broken row of notches against the sky, and valley folk watch it for the weather: when cloud hides the notches, the high roads will close before night. The shrines are little touched by time, which upland custom credits to the sleeping god. Whether anyone still tends them is uncertain.

  • The sleeping heights. Haurûm is said to lie beneath the highest summits. Climbers report a slow, rhythmic rumble under them, like a heartbeat, and some hear faint chanting in the wind across the peaks. Hold miners and Headwater quarrymen alike leave the deepest seams beneath the summits alone.

  • Who comes here. Kindred caravans on their circuits, carrying salvage, news, and danger-warnings along the high roads, and with them the wind-god Corrow the Gale-Runner. Hold wardens as far as their own stretches run. And, very rarely, Giants, the colossal world’s withdrawn remainder, who keep to the storm shelves and hidden basins and keep the Mountain-Father’s sleep. They are the last people who still speak his name.

What Is Not Known

Above the Long Tread and the Kindred circuits, the Stormcrown is left unmapped on purpose. Nobody below knows where its hidden basins lie, how many Giant lines still live in them, or whether any would bargain with smaller peoples, and on what terms. Nobody knows what the colossal peoples called these heights, what the weather shrines once answered, or what lies in the high tombs. Which old obligations still bind its roads and passes, and to whom, is half-remembered at best. And no one can say which summit, if any, the Mountain-Father sleeps beneath.

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