Lothlain is the long edge of things. It curves away to the north and south like the inside of a crescent moon, thin and far-flung, a region that has always resisted easy account of itself.
Much of Lothlain is forest, gripping the rugged landscape in tendrils; deep, unyielding, not appearing to be habitable or indeed knowable.
Go north and the land rises into granite, into crag and tor and the kind of sky that feels older than weather. The mountains here shear off at their northern edge, sudden and final, and below them the earth opens into fen, flat and wide. Folks call this ‘the drowned edge’. Inland, the fen is cold and freshwater, full of dragonflies and the smell of willow and dark earth. Further out the salt rises, and with it sea lavender and the cry of gulls, the tide feeling its way up channels that are neither river nor sea.
The folk of Lothlain live in scattered settlements, always a valley or a ridgeline apart from one another, and they have their own ways of doing things. Old customs still kept here have long since faded elsewhere.
Its people are rooted here the way the granite is rooted, without question or explanation. Outsiders who feel the pull of it rarely come for comfortable reasons.
"Shadow cuts and forest crawls, all beyond the silver sea"