The Mountains of Reality

Look at the mountains from the plain, or, if you dare, from the Waste.
The Mountains of Reality, a slice in the suffocating sky makes a break towards the eternal grey; a sapphire blade on the horizon, glowing like a candleflame-lit gem. A knife against the throat of time.
Even before the mountains themselves are visible, their effect on the atmosphere can be sensed. The air clears. The terrible weight of paling gloom fades away. The sun, the real sun, glares down. True day, true night. And the Waste rages at a boundary of the storm.
Then, beneath the sky; hanging from it like an obsidian necklace upon the breast of day - shards of black. Fierce shark’s teeth from an enormous jaw, closing on the axis of the world.
Closer.
You trudge forward, hour upon hour. The sunsets. In the fresh black sky, pale lamps gleam.
You walk on.
Day comes.
The necklace of obsidian blades has grown. It sweeps across the sky from side to side. The tooth-points lost in the haze of an azure vault, and the mountains have birthed a high family; serrated triangular children, black glazed with shining white like tarnished diamonds. Tongues of white fire spill from their jagged lips. Glaciers. Cloud-crowned palaces of stone and ice, scarred with cracked valleys like gospel books torn open by a circus strongman.
Closer.
The wind picks up. You feel cold, not the amorphous, directionless life-sapping refrigeration of the Waste, but actual weather, cold life. Fingers of air press against you, gently teasing, pushing you back.
Closer.
The mountains grow again, spreading across the sky. The black blades almost lost behind clouds. Passing gaps, like the masks of dancing players, reveal their shapes and near-impossible size.
The glacier-tongued children are kings themselves. Each sits imperious, attended by a court of cyclopean queens, the least of which might overawe nations. And though crowned in ice, the queens are robed in green. Forests tumble from their shoulders like light silk, transforming into seas of life, for these size-sovereigns are themselves attended, thronged by a hundred crags who clamor for attention like hungry gulls.
Still, you walk.
Closer.
And the night falls again.
The falling sun sends beams of rose riding the air like Valkyries, skidding up, up over the mountains, over the robes of green, stained gloom-black by their red light, up to their burning crowns of ice set into a vermillion fire by the sun's last light. Up. Light licking the glacier tongue of the ice-glazed imperial hills, riding higher. Up. Up. Up. to the diamond-bright peaks of those attending kings. Up. Up.
The ground has been dark for hours. The sky-bowl fills with stars once more, but high above the sun is not done setting on the Mountains of Reality.
Blood-red beams crawl the black blade edges of the highest peaks. They glow, almost resentfully, like a freezing, bitter priest before a slumbering fire. The faintest infra-red emits, the merest hint of sunfire on the bitten edge.
Your neck cranes. Far, far above the light of black roses burning with a black fire fades into the boundless night. And then it is dark.
You walk, and the wind follows.
Closer. Closer.
You smell trees and hear the teased strand of a moan, a susurrus; wind in leaves. And a keening - high, high above, a black sword of stone slicing a banner of eternal air. Unlike the soft nothing of the Waste, the mountains have a sound. They glower, but they breathe.
Light, and a bird cries.
You stumble. Up through the cracked pumice, salt, dust, and sand of the Waste, rises stone. Huge boulders, shards, solid planes of water-rippled limestone and sandstone banded in ochre and blue like veins standing up on a clenched hand.
The sun arcs in a blue and storm-tossed sky. Slowly and by faint degrees, the dawn-pale light infiltrates the air. As a tear building in the eye first blurs the world and then leaves focus in its passing, the mountains stand before you like a wall of time.
The black blades of the high peaks are invisible now, lost in the vault above the clouds - the ice-rimed rulers explode with sunlight like shattered crystal prism, the golden light of dawn. The green-robed Queens pulse with distant life, trees in their billions strung with silver-bright rivers. Waterfalls roar a bass note in the imponderable visual distance. Attending crags bow, crack and scatter down their sides and beneath these smaller crags, hiding near their feet like mice, mere mountains, some not even a thousand feet high, with paths and rockfalls, forests and moorlands, streams and climb-ways spreading like spilled needles, a hundred-thousand gateways to an unbounded land.
And crawling at the skirts of these, the foothills of the Mountains of Reality, are you.
...........................................


Big and black and higher than the sky, the mountains defy the Waste through sheer mass and the ferocity of a slow heart of stone.
The Waste pushes at their foothills to North, South, and East, like boiling milk trying to escape the pan. It cannot rise over the mountains, it cannot corrode the stone. The black beats back like the burning rays of a cold sun. Even on the smallest scale - the pale tendrils reach in like grasping claws and flinch.
Is it the indomitable mass? Pure scale? The mountains do seem impossibly big, larger than the world could easily support. And they seem... angry? somehow.

HISTORY

"New folk eh?"
As they say in the Mountains, 'new' here referring to the Grey Cities, a culture itself at least five thousand years old
Such is a novelty in the Mountains of Reality.
How old are they, what is their real history? Many Sophonts of the Cities would dearly like to know - and have found it hard to find out. Culture in the Mountains persists almost entirely by oral history. Their tales could be ten thousand years old or ten years old. Years, events, and dates blur into each other, a favored or disfavored queen might be spoken of as recent, despite having died millennia ago, or cast in legendary terms when they are still alive
Almost everywhere in the mountains is hard to get to, physically, and if you do get there, the locals are rarely eager to speak. As for records - maybe forget it.
History in the Mountains, always rather intangible and interpretive, gets really weird about 5000 years ago. Multiple conflicting schemas have been proposed - evidence is hard to come by and made more complex by the continued existence of cultures from the deep past in isolated or hidden valleys.
It seems almost as if multiple histories have been folded over each other like dough, compressing and adjoining impossibly, just as the mountains have been pushed to impossible almost unreal heights, so their history seems impossibly deep.

GEOGRAPHY

The Mountains of Reality are themselves a sub-continent or part of the paired continent of Blackwater.
Their total area is roughly the same as the Grey Cities, about 3000 miles from side to side in most directions, though they have more of a spoked radial pattern than the cities.
The Mountains climb higher than any equivalent range on Earth, higher even than physics and tectonics on Earth would allow. The tallest mountains simply disappear into the unending cloud, inaccessible to mortal life. Those slightly smaller, with visible peaks are capped with eternal snows and host to truly ancient glaciers. The effects of all this on microclimates and local conditions can be varied and intense, creating a kind of vertical archipelago.
Though the mountains to the far south have a base temperature roughly equivalent to sweltering Yga and those to the far north are truly freezing, it is the power of local geography that shapes their climate more than anything else. They can have startlingly different micro-climates depending on nature and orientation.
If a valley is oriented roughly east-west and catches the sun early so that its rays lance directly into it all day till it sets, it can be warm, even incredibly hot.
Conversely, if a valley is oriented north-south, with deep walls, it can catch direct sunlight for only a few hours a day, locking it in eternal shadow and making it a place of cold, black screes, regardless of its latitude.
Tall mountains can scrape the sky of clouds, producing a rain-shadow, on one side a permanent drizzle, and on the other, a parched, dry land, separated by a knifes edge.
And that doesn't take into account the truly bizarre effects of winds meeting the sky-piercing mountains and either being sliced in twain or blasting down their sides at high velocity, or the effect of glaciers, waterfalls, rivers, etc.
The end result is that valleys of remarkable different ecology and environment can sometimes exist very close to each other.
Nevertheless, there is a broad schema applied to the understanding of the Mountains by those who live there, as the old song tells it.

"AETH LINE, SNOW LINE, BREATH LINE, SKY"

Valleys are divided conceptually into vertical bands based on relief. Though not all valleys follow this plan directly, and in fact, almost none are exactly like it, it is reasonably true, most of the time.
Most Somon activity takes place on the Valley floor, below the 'Aeth Line'. This is where agriculture happens, where population and political powers are concentrated and where the Gloom Queens rule.
Though every Gloom Queen claims at least one valley, what they really functionally mean is that they rule the valley up to the Aeth line. After that, they can project power, demand tribute and expect, or hope for alliances and gestures of respect, but they do not truly functionally rule in anything but name.
Down in the valley floor are the roads, the rivers, and the farms. The climate is a hard one and swings of temperature and unpredictable weather can be savage. Good land is much prized, carefully demarcated, and developed over centuries.
In many of the older and more populous Queendoms, terraces have been built into the valley sides over centuries, turning the valleys into great terraces full of crops. Morningspain, the largest city in the Mountains, though often snowbound and with only one growing season, look out onto a terraced landscape nearly as far as the eye can see.
Urban centers, though sparse, do exist. The largest of them is nowhere near the size of even the smallest of the Grey Cities of course, but beneath the ruling seats of the greatest Queens townships and micro-cities pile up. Some of these have been continuously inhabited from a distant age of Neolithic empires. The central streets of Morningspain are still composed of huge angular slabs of sheer-sided stone held together by nothing more than gravity.
Beyond this settled country is the Forest. The 'Aeth line'.
The forest itself can be a band above or tumbling below the farmland; rising and piling over hidden and inhospitable valleys, waving and sweeping over the land like a green flame. It is all one forest, as any druid will tell you and if you go deep enough you can get lost and arrive anywhere, or anywhen in the timeless mountains, where years tick by without a trace.
The people of the valleys still enter and exploit the forests. There are heavy laws governing who is allowed to do what, when, and where. Who can let pigs roam, and in what season, who can collect truffles or firewood, or tend bees, who can fell or plant trees, who can find and who can be found.
But the forest is also the realm of the Aeth, and of outlaws, adventurers, fey sorcerers, charcoal burners, druid circles, terrifying fires in dry seasons, and of course, monsters.
For the peasants who live in any particular valley, to go into the forest, or beyond the forest, is to pass beyond the boundary of the known and predictable world. A temple or druid circle, if a valley has one, is often just beyond the tree line, far enough away to be isolated, to contain its numinous power.
Above, or beyond the forests lies the snow line, where snow still remains even at the height of the warmest seasons and where ice never melts. Between the forest and the ice, only sparse herders of Yaks and the Vantar wander.
And far above that, is the breath line, the line where mortal flesh can no longer sustain itself, the air lacks nourishment and normal people simply die.
Whatever lies above that, only the Vantar, the Eagles, and a few wild Thaumaturges know.

THE GLOOM QUEENS

"A Queen is a Queen for all that" - popular saying.
No man may rule in the Mountains of Reality.
They can certainly try. It just won't end well.
Male rulership is cursed. All such policies, kingdoms, and even tribes have sad or catastrophic ends. Slowly or quickly, the male line dies out. The Mountains hate them.
The faithful of Ark claim the mountains are Ark, or his corpse anyway, and that it is His will which causes male lines to fail as, being both patriarchal and jealous, he will permit no man to rule him.
It might true. Who knows?
Instead, the Mountains have the Gloom Queens. The greatest of these rule whole networks of terraced river-valleys and the smallest Queens might occupy a mammoth-bone hut in a village of Yak herders and have as her regalia nothing but a string of amber beads and a carved bone circlet. But, like the saying goes "A Queen is a Queen".
Every Gloom Queen is in a feudal relationship with an over-Queen, who may herself have an over-queen, all the way up to the Beodomor, the Queen-of-Queens on her bed of silk in Morningspain.
In theory, the entirety of the Mountains is one single polity. Though in actuality, time, distance, and difficulty make any such practical rule impossible.
Why Gloom?
Each Gloom Queen has a 'Crown of Dreams', a pleasing euphemism for what is in effect a diadem of Nightmares. Their curse, or blessing, comes in the form of future-visions. In most cases, these do come during sleep, though very severe visions can happen in the day as a kind of ghastly waking day-mare.
Each Queen sees visions of their own Queendoms fall. These are all potential futures, dark ones, visions of things that will or could go wrong in their particular Queendom.
A small Queen might see a pack of wolves entering her area and attacking the herds. The Queen of a large valley might see a horde of monsters, mad Aeth, or the Children of Yggsrathaal coming over the ridgeline and burning everything.
These dreams seem quite real and are real. They are alternate or possible futures and by seeing them, the Gloom Queens can direct their people to avoid, defeat, or at least minimize the harm of them. This is the great power of the Gloom Queens and the reason they are so revered.
But for every Gloom Queen, the older they get, the more sad and terrible ends of Queendoms they have lived through in their dreams. And the more powerful the Queen, the greater and more terrible the visions, for each Queen sees the futures of every land under her rule. For the smallest Queens, this might be the threat to a single village, but their over-Queen will see all the visions for all of the subject Queendoms beneath her rule, all combined into one great tapestry.
And the Beodomor sees them all, all the threats to all of humanity in the Mountains of Reality.
These sweeping visions of piling alternate futures can give the Queen's great wisdom. They have a sweep of information and understanding many rulers would envy, and it can drive them mad. The sorrow and the pain of so many terrible ends are more than most minds can take. Terrors of such range and intensity require intelligence and wisdom simply to understand, let alone act on, to tease the potential futures from each other like the strands of the web and order what precise, minimal actions will avoid the worst, knowing that everything is done and not-done can have unpredictable effects of its own.
It is a terrible weight to bear and it is for this reason the Gloom Queens are so named.