The Black Isles
An archipelago centred around its largest island, such that it would appear on maps as a giant sea turtle with the creatures members being smaller islands, and the many other lesser islands being like baby sea turtles surrounding the safety of their mother. This is how the Black Islanders, trolls of the h' BchBrche people, conceptualize their realm. Although the largest, central island houses the largest troll settlement, is often thought of as its capital or at least the centre of its kingdom by humans and dwarves, this is not how trolls reckon things. Despite this, the Queen of the Black Isles does reside in the city on the largest of the islands: but this is conceived merely as merely a historical quirk.
Geography
Consisting of thirteen islands, the Black Isles are the remains of an ancient volcanic core. It is rich in obsidian, basalt, baukire, and other precious metals. As a result of the dark coloured ores, it has black sand beaches, dark jagged stone spires and mountains. Although fertile and covered in old growth forests, the preponderance of jet-coloured exposed rock in its mountains, gives the islands their name. Landings on the islands are very difficult for those who are not familiar with the few safe harbours or the way to enter them due to jagged rocks in the water, loose and sharp scree in the surging surf, and the heights of the cliffs like black slabs of an ancient, natural, castle wall.
Ecosystem
Wherever there is enough top soil and coverage—in between the massive sharp and dark outcroppings of stone—the Black Isles are dense with old growth temperate rainforests. Massive oak trees atop high cliffs above the Chaalai waters; natural copses of fruit trees heavy with apples, peaches, seem inviting, taunting from the valleys and gorges visible from the sea. Mountain goats, seabirds, terror birds, felid predators, endemic eagles, traej dogs, musk foxes are all found throughout the isles. In the undergrowth mountainous mushrooms and fungal blooms abound in the darker, danker regions. Bright coloured fruiting bodies threaten vicious poison.
Natural Resources
The archipelago is bountiful for hunters and gatherers. It seems, on cursory inspection, to be full of unspoilt, untouched wilderness, verdant, fecund, and bountiful. Whilst this is mostly correct, it is the result of centuries of cultivation and the naturalists among the h' BchBrche who have made gardens and orchards among the wilds. At night, workers and drone slaves, toil harvesting foodstuffs, returning at dawn to the hive-like underground cities. Precious metals and gems are mined from deep within the dank and fetid caverns well beyond the settled areas. Entirely unique underground environments as wild as the surface can be found. Again, troll naturists have cultivated these too. Streams, ponds, rivers, and lakes, all below ground, are seeded with blind cave fish that have been bred for size and taste. Workers and drone slave fishers tend these constantly in the dayless eternal night. Most valuable of the minerals and ores of the region, baukire, various metals, and gemstones can be found in the deep mines. Trollish historians—and the rarest of the rare: troll Schqhènnites!—record how the ancient and extinct Eun Chi and Eunu goblins' war machine was fed on Black Isle metal ore. They were allies ages before the human domination of Gruthe began in the Three Kingdoms Era. It is possible that the ambitious and foolhardy Sthekkas ab'Zennept was aware of his history and knew of the Black Isles' wealth in resources but, like most of the human powers on Gruthe, believed that the trolls had perished along with the goblins during the plague years centuries before. Thus, the resource rich islands would be a mighty prize for him to present to his belovèd field marshall to finance the contemporary war with the Qh'énns.
History
Schqhènnite geomancers and geo-historians believe that most of the Chaalai was a series of supervolcanoes and that its larger islands—Jèrynn, Rheddait, the Mỳdri, the DaoHari, and the Black Isles—are the remnants of ancient volcanic cores. Though their is doubt about some of the islands, there is little doubt about the Black Isles. And over aeons, weathering has eaten away the outer walls of the stone and earth leaving the much denser cores. Since then the weathering on the core is constantly breaking off in shards, revealing more the sharp stone edges that define the triangular mountains that give the islands their name. Even the Schqhènnites are ignorant of their origins, but both the Black Islanders and mainland scholars tend to accept the Black Isles as the ancestral home of the trolls. This of course becomes suspect in later centuries when trolls from other regions of the world are encountered (most notably the h' Bsrĕni of the Rellian sector in the south). However, the resident trolls have lived for untold centuries on the isles and in the lava tubes and cavernous mountains.
The fall of Sthekkas
The Fall of Sthekkas ab'Zennept
by
包德強
The failed sortie of General Sthekkas ab'Zennept and his legionnaires on the coast of the Black Isles. Hundreds died. None were ever seen again.
Alternative Name(s)
BchBrchtier
Type
Archipelago
Owner/Ruler
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