Silver Bastions
Stone Sentinels of the North
Rising like a serrated crown along the spine of the Ironhold Marches, the Silver Bastions form the natural fortress of the Lyran Commonwealth—a mountain range of such grandeur and scale that even time itself seems to move slower in its shadow. These towering peaks are the bones of House Steiner’s strength, the unshakable roots from which their code of duty, discipline, and resilience has grown.
The Silver Bastions earned their name from how the early morning sun glints off their snowy flanks and the rich veins of mithral and silver lacing their cores. The range shines like an unbroken wall of polished steel in the clear winter light, blinding to behold and impossible to ignore. The mountains stretch for hundreds of leagues, forming a nearly impassable natural barrier that has served as both shield and crucible for the people of the north. Within these heights lie the great fortress-cities of the Commonwealth: Tharkad, the political and spiritual capital, and Kaltenburg, the martial bastion of the knightly orders. Between them, a web of highland keeps, watchtowers, and fortified passes anchors the defensive grid that has held off countless invasions across the centuries. Each pass has a name, a history, and a record of blood spilled to hold it. No march through the Bastions goes unchallenged.
The land is harsh and demanding. Blizzards can descend without warning, and rockslides shift the bones of the mountains like a living thing. Yet the people who dwell here are as enduring as the peaks themselves. Small villages cling to cliffside terraces, their houses carved into the rock or built from the stone itself. Herding goats, mining ore, or training in the disciplined arts of sword and spell, the inhabitants live lives of simple rigor, measured not in luxury but in the pride of purpose fulfilled. The mountains also hold mysteries. Ancient ruins from the age of the League of Stars lie buried in high passes, their wards long broken, their secrets still half-whispered in the wind. In the deeper hollows of the range, strange magical phenomena persist: lights that flicker without flame, songs that echo without source, and stone that seems to hum beneath the feet of those attuned to it. Some say the mountains themselves remember.
The Knight-Orders of the Silver Bastions train in secluded monasteries carved into the stone—disciplined enclaves where martial prowess is honed alongside philosophical and magical study. Here, House Steiner's traditions find their purest form: stoic, unbending, and bound by oath.
To the Lyran people, the Silver Bastions are not merely geography. They are inheritance. They are teacher and trial, monument and memory. To fight in their shadow is to fight with the weight of a thousand years behind your blade.
“Here, even the mountains kneel to duty.” — Valkyr Siglinde of Kaltenburg
Type
Mountain Range
Owning Organization
