PROVINCIA ORIENTALIS
The Eastern Province · Where the Forest Begins and Rome Ends · Six Centuries at the Edge
I have visited Porta Silvae seven times over my career. Each time I have stood at the forest edge and looked into the trees and tried to determine whether what I feel is imagination or perception. I have never been able to satisfy myself on this question. Something in the forest attends to being looked at. I cannot prove this. I note it. What I have also noted, on this most recent visit, is how much of the province lies behind me when I stand there — the open plains running west for the better part of a thousand kilometres, and south further than any road currently reaches, and north to the mountains, and almost none of it populated. The Senate debates dividing this province. Standing at the forest edge, I find myself wondering what the second province would be for.
Provincia Orientalis is defined by what it approaches and by what it cannot enter. At approximately 1,800 kilometres from north to south and nearly 1,000 kilometres wide at its broadest point, it is the largest province in the empire by a considerable margin — larger than the next two provinces combined, and administered with the particular challenges that come from governing a territory whose population would be unremarkable for a province one-fifth the size. The Senate has been circulating proposals to divide it for three decades. The proposals are well-reasoned. They have not yet resulted in a vote, because no senator has been able to explain clearly what the second province would do that the first cannot, given that almost nothing in either half would require separate administration.
The province is defined by Sylvanmere. Everything else — the open plains, the northern mountain approaches, the long southern reach to the Mare Profundum coast, the single city at the forest edge — exists in relation to the forest, and the forest has not acknowledged this relationship in six centuries.
Geography
The province occupies the eastern territory of Aethermarch, running approximately 1,800 kilometres from north to south and reaching nearly 1,000 kilometres from west to east at its widest southernsection. To the northwest lies Provincia Montium Ferri, where the Iron Spine's eastern foothills form a mountainous boundary zone. To the west lies Provincia Lacus Interioris, the inland shore province whose agricultural eastern boundary grades into Orientalis's more sparsely settled country. To the southwest lies Provincia Australis, where the settled coastal strip approaches the province's southern corner. The entire eastern boundary is Sylvanmere — not a provincial boundary in the administrative sense but an absolute geographic one, six centuries old and approximately as negotiable as the Iron Spine.
The terrain through most of the province is open country: rolling plains and broad river valleys in the centre and south, the land well-watered by river systems descending from the northern mountains and generally suitable for agriculture, though the low population density means that most of it has never been systematically farmed. The northern section rises toward the Montium Ferri boundary through increasingly hilly country where the soil changes character and the growing season shortens. The southern tip reaches the Mare Profundum coast in a section of headlands and small bays that no road currently serves and that the province's administration acknowledges in its records primarily as an accounting entry.
Porta Silvae sits where the Via Orientalis meets the forest edge, approximately 1800 kilometres east of Nova Romae by road. A river runs south along the Sylvanmere boundary — its sources are within the forest itself, inaccessible to Roman survey — and Porta Silvae was founded at the point where this watercourse emerges from the trees and the road from the west arrives. The river is the province's most significant watercourse but belongs, in any meaningful sense, to the forest it drains from. Roman engineers have mapped its course south of the tree line; they have not mapped its course within it, because no survey team has returned from the attempt with data the Academy considers reliable.
The Via Orientalis is the province's defining infrastructure: a road that runs east from Nova Romae through Provincia Lacus Interioris and across the province's western plains to Porta Silvae, where it ends at the carved stone boundary markers that the Romans placed in Year 85 A.P. and that the forest has been moving westward, incrementally, ever since. The road was built toward something it cannot cross. The province exists along its length.
Ecosystem
The western and central province is open grassland and managed agricultural land of the standard Aethermarch type in the settled zones near the road corridor, grading to unmanaged grassland and scattered woodland in the areas beyond regular settlement. The river systems support riparian vegetation and the freshwater species that the small riverside communities fish. None of this is ecologically unusual. The Academy's provincial naturalists document it competently and without great excitement.
The forest edge is where the documentation stops being routine. The agricultural land within approximately two kilometres of the treeline produces normally in terms of yield but differently in pattern — planting schedules that work everywhere else in the province produce different results here, drainage behaves differently in heavy rain, and the farming families who work this land have developed practices over generations that they cannot fully articulate but that their records demonstrate produce better outcomes than the standard Annona-recommended approach. The species that venture out of Sylvanmere — birds, insects, the occasional larger animal — do not always correspond to anything in the standard catalogue. The Academy's eastern studies collection holds specimens that have been catalogued but not classified for two hundred years.
Ecosystem Cycles
The agricultural cycle in the settled zones near the Via Orientalis is standard for the province's latitude. The farming communities along the road corridor are well-established and their seasonal rhythms are documented. Beyond the road corridor, the province runs on whatever cycles the unmanaged land follows, which the Academy has not systematically studied because the population required to conduct such a study is not present.
The forest edge does not participate in observable seasonal cycles in the way native woodland does. The treeline does not thin in winter or thicken in summer in the pattern of deciduous woodland at this latitude. The trees visible at the edge are green in winter when native deciduous species are bare. Academy scholars have noted this in writing since the third century. It has not been explained.
Localized Phenomena
The forest is the phenomenon. Everything about Sylvanmere's edge constitutes a localised phenomenon of the first order, and I address it fully in the Sylvanmere regional article. For the purposes of this province's record, the relevant observations are as follows.
The boundary markers placed by the Romans are periodically moved — not removed, moved — further west, by an increment that the surveyors have measured at between twelve and forty metres per event, at irregular intervals over six centuries. The total westward movement since Year 85 A.P. is approximately 400 metres. The movement is not continuous; it occurs at intervals of between five and thirty years, and the last movement was in 1167 A.P. The road authority files these reports with the Senate. The Senate acknowledges receipt.
The sound in the forest — audible from the treeline in the early morning hours of the third and ninth months — has been described in two hundred separate records over six centuries. The descriptions are consistent. The sound is not identifiable as any known species. The College has a formal theological classification for it. The classification satisfies no one who has heard it.
The nearest elven settlement within Sylvanmere is approximately 900 kilometres from Porta Silvae. The forest between Porta Silvae and that settlement has not been traversed by any Roman expedition that returned. The elves have not commented on this.
Fauna & Flora
Agricultural interior: standard managed woodland, farmland species assemblage, river corridor flora in the tributary valleys. Competently documented. Unremarkable.
Forest-adjacent zone: a category of documentation problem that the Academy has been managing for centuries. The species that venture out of Sylvanmere — birds, insects, the occasional larger animal — do not correspond, in several cases, to any species in the standard catalogue. The specimens collected at the treeline are held in the Academy's eastern studies collection. They are catalogued. They are not classified. The classification problem has been open for two hundred years. The Academy's position is that classification requires sufficient specimens; the forest does not produce sufficient specimens on any schedule the Academy can predict or influence.
Natural Resources
Agricultural production in the settled zones near the Via Orientalis is solid and above average in the sections with the best river access — the broad plains are fertile and the river systems provide reliable irrigation. The province exports grain and livestock south to Nova Romae and is not dependent on any single crop or sector. The potential agricultural output of the unsettled territory is, in the Annona's assessments, very large. The population required to realise that output is not present, and the proposals to incentivise settlement in the province's interior have not attracted the response the administration hoped for, because the people the administration is trying to attract have looked at a map and noticed how much of the province is adjacent to Sylvanmere.
The eastern zone's farming families have, over generations, developed agricultural practices adapted to the conditions adjacent to the forest that produce better outcomes than the standard recommended approach. The Academy's agricultural specialists have been attempting to formalise this knowledge for fifty years. The farming families are not uncooperative; they are simply describing something that does not translate into the Academy's taxonomic framework without losing the properties that make it useful.
KEY SETTLEMENTS
Porta Silvae — the provincial capital, at the forest edge where the Via Orientalis meets Sylvanmere; population approximately 50,000; the empire's most unusual city in the sense that it has lived adjacent to an unexplained phenomenon for six centuries and has organised its civic culture entirely around the presence of that phenomenon. The city faces east. Everything faces east. The sunset over the forest is the province's most noted tourist attraction and its most psychologically significant daily event.
Terminus Viae Orientalis — the road ends at the carved stone boundary markers, maintained by the provincial road authority and resurveyed annually. The surveyors' reports note each year whether the markers' positions differ from the previous year's survey. The road authority files these reports with the Senate. The Senate acknowledges receipt.
Beyond these two sites, the province has a scatter of agricultural towns along the Via Orientalis corridor — communities of a few hundred to a few thousand, serving the farming estates on either side of the road — and almost nothing elsewhere. The southern coast is uninhabited in any permanent sense. The northern approaches to Montium Ferri have a handful of way-station communities. The interior plains between the road and the forest have the farms and the forest-edge communities described above, and then, for hundreds of kilometres in every direction, the open land that the Senate keeps proposing to fill with a second province.
History
The province was settled eastward in the second and third centuries as Roman expansion reached what was then simply dense woodland, and the first frontier patrols reached what Centurion Marcus Arbor called, in 85 A.P., 'the true edge — where the forest becomes something other than forest.' The subsequent sixty years, during which the elves made no communication beyond periodically repositioning the boundary markers, established the eastern frontier's defining characteristic: a boundary maintained by something unidentified, enforced by means undocumented, and respected by Rome for reasons entirely rational once you have read Centurion Arbor's reports.
Porta Silvae was founded in the third century. It has not expanded significantly since — there is nowhere to expand toward except the forest, and the forest does not admit expansion. The province itself was formally designated in the second century; its boundaries have been stable since, with the exception of the eastern boundary, which moves at the forest's discretion.
The Senate division proposals began circulating seriously in the 1160s, following the administrative review that noted the province's tax yield per square kilometre was the lowest in the empire by a factor that the review committee described as 'suggesting a structural rather than a management problem.' Three proposals have been formally tabled: a north-south division along the river systems; a division carved around Porta Silvae as a separate administrative district with the remainder forming a new frontier province; and a proposal to cede the southern coastal section to Provincia Australis. None has been voted on. The current governor has opinions about all three and has shared them with the Senate in a document whose diplomatic language the Senate found admirable and whose content it found inconvenient.
For full chronological detail, see: Annales Mundi.
Tourism
Porta Silvae draws a steady stream of visitors who want to stand at the treeline and look into a forest that has been closed for six centuries. The city has developed a modest tourism economy around this: the viewpoints, the Arbor memorial at the point where the centurion first documented the true edge, the College shrine at the nearest boundary marker, the long tradition of scholars who have come to stand here and think about what they are looking at.
The forest does not reciprocate. It does not provide any experience that the visitor can describe afterward as communication. What it provides is presence — the specific and persistent quality of being adjacent to something that is aware of you — which some visitors find affecting and others find unsettling and a few find so disturbing that they do not finish their planned visit.
The rest of the province draws no tourists of note. The open plains are open plains. The road is a road. The southern coast is beautiful, by the accounts of the few people who have reached it, and completely inaccessible by any maintained route.
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