The Human Corridor Orders

Overview

Out of the broad growth of the Confluence, Caeldon's first great Human world breaks into tighter realms strung along its rivers and roads.

It begins with the older Confluence Marches, whose first gathering is told in The Gathering of the Confluence and whose founding in The Founding of the Confluence Marches. It ends with river and road realms that follow the lead of the Serathic League on The Lower Serath.

The Confluence Marches

The first great Human realm forms across the Confluence Basins and the Headwater Marches.

It is a realm of many parts: fat basin towns, marcher strongholds in the foothills, trade roads, and alliances that last as long as they pay. It is also a realm of feuds, raids between valleys, and war-bands for hire. Its strength is that it takes whatever works, deep farmland, frontier daring, and any way of ruling it can borrow, and joins them. Flood drowns the careless in the basins, wolves and pass bears take travellers in the foothills, and the marcher lords fight each other and anyone else for the valleys between.

Roads and Rivers Worth Holding

As the Confluence grows, some routes carry far more than others: more people, more goods, more grain, more silver. Where they meet, the crossings, markets, and walled towns are worth holding, and whoever holds the ford or the market takes a toll.

These busy roads and rivers are where the next Human realms grow. They are easier to rule than the open country, and far richer to raid. Outlaw bands live off the roads between towns, river-thieves off the barges, and lords hire sellswords against both and against each other. A town that keeps its road safe grows strong; one that cannot is plundered or swallowed by a neighbour. The roads breed their own legends: an outlaw lord who held a ford for twenty years and taxed it like a king until a town paid his own men to drown him, a bridge-keeper who held her span alone against a raiding band until the town bell brought help, and the hanged at the crossroads, whose remnants still drag at night travellers where the old gibbets stood.

The Serath Leads

The corridor realms follow an earlier lead: the Serathic League, sworn on the Lower Serath before the wider spread.

There, walled towns, river traffic, and repeated bargains made one of the first great named Human realms within the Confluence world, held together by sworn guarantees, armed boats, and held crossings. Once a river can be made into lasting power, Human realms no longer need to be only basin towns or frontier marches. They can be strings of crossings and walls along a road.

The roads and works behind this are told in The Headwater and Serath Corridors. The guarantees beneath the Serath are told in The Lower Serath Guarantees, and the league that grows from them in The Founding of the Serathic League. The roads were built partly on Ogre backs, as told in The Chain-Camps.

Historical Significance

The corridor realms show how early Human history splits without leaving the Confluence behind. Later Human power works at two sizes at once: the wide, restless Confluence Marches, and the narrower, richer realms of the rivers and roads.

They are also where the roads, bridges, and walled crossings of the medieval cradle-web begin, and with them the oldest feuds over who holds them. Many medieval ruins along the rivers are the towns of these ages that lost. Treasure-seekers dig their cellars for hidden toll-chests and the strongrooms of sacked guild halls, and in the oldest pits find the dead of the plagues and sieges instead, sometimes waiting.