The Windscar Expanse

Overview

The Windscar Expanse is a broad far-side macro-region of dry uplands and interior basins on Caeldon, lying outside the cradle-web of Elderweald, Ironspine, Confluence, and Roothollow history. It is one of the first named signs that Caeldon is a whole planet rather than one crowded contact zone.

Its primary people are the Orcs, and its civilization is The Windscar Pacts, first treated in The Founding of the Windscar Pacts. Its scouring wind is the god Rakhal the Storm-Caller, who breaks whatever has gone stale, and its clans keep their lineages, honour, and dead under Ushkar the Ancestor-Warden.

Lay of the Land

The Expanse fills the west of the far side, from the edge of the Glassbelt east to the Lee Wall and north to the sea cliffs above the Soundchain Roads. The Shearline divides it: the Rimward Basins lie below the escarpment in the south-west, the High Scars above it to the north and east. The Leeward Folds lie east, beyond the Lee Wall, and what lies south of the Expanse is not mapped.

The prevailing wind is dry, off the desert. Distances are long: about three months from the Lastwater Wells to the Lee Wall, about four months from the basin rims to the sea. The Lay of the Land sets out the rest.

Subregions

The Expanse is not one flat stretch of hard country. It is told in full in its two subregions:

• The Rimward Basins: basin-rim country of walled wells and strongholds, where the clans gather in the dry season and hold the water against raiders and the long drought.
• The High Scars: escarpment country of crossings, cairn chains, and escort bands, where the dead who were not warned stand across the road at the fading cairns.

Between them the Windscar keeps both its walls and its roads, and they do not always love each other. When a stronghold barred its gate against the escort bands, the quarrel became The Rimward Passage War, and its oath still hangs over The Oath Cistern.

Beyond the Expanse's edges:

• Inland lies The Glassbelt Interior, a true desert of salt flats, heat basins, glassed ruin, and rarer water, where Windscar escorts go only when they must and come back with fewer than they took.
• Beside it lie the sheltered terraces of The Leeward Folds, whose Halfling reserve custom the Pacts first meet in The Leeward-Windscar Terms.
• Coastward lie The Tidelace Coasts, reached through The Tidelace-Windscar Approaches and, later, the Windscar-facing exchange corridor of The Soundchain Roads.

Shared Character

Whatever the subregion, Windscar country answers dangerous distance the same way: by oath and by escort. Passage across it is held by pact, not by walls. Escort is a duty as much as a trade, water and pasture are shared by agreement sworn at the treaty-grounds, and a broken passage is answered by a war-band riding out to make it right. The toast at every season's-end fire is to the escorts who brought a party through when the wells were dry and the dun dogs were on the line, and every kindred has its blood-feud that began with a passage betrayed.

What lures the bold across the Expanse is mostly what lies beyond it: the glassed ruin and salt-buried treasure of the Glassbelt, and, nearer, the crystal of the Hanging Vale, which glitters from the rim and which no kindred will camp within sight of. Every camp-ring has a tale of someone who went down to bring back one piece of it. The full shape of that order belongs to The Windscar Pacts.

Settlements

The Expanse has no capital and no single centre. Its fixed settlements are the rim strongholds of the Rimward Basins; its moving ones are the camp-rings, treaty-grounds, and passward shelters of the High Scars.

The People

About 180,000 people live in the Expanse, nearly all of them Orcs: some 80,000 in the Rimward Basins, some 48,000 in the High Scars, and about as many again in the Open-Steppe kindreds of the dry country north of the Scars to the sea cliffs, with a thousand or two Ogres and Trolls on the routes. Open-Steppe Orcs herd, dress, and are named as the rest of the Windscar does; they are as lean and long-limbed as High-Scar Orcs, and they are the kindreds most often away on the coast run.

Tensions

• Away on the coast run. The Open-Steppe kindreds are the ones most often away on the coast run to the Soundchain Roads, sometimes for whole seasons.
• Ledger or recitation. Kindreds back from the coast bring sounding-house ledger entries of what a harbour gave them or refused them.
• South of the Expanse. Nobody has mapped what lies south of the Expanse.