Duchy of Drestr

📍 Basic Info

• Type: Echo-Ward Duchy

• Region: North-central Eladris, bordering Kingdom of Quintoria, Viagosian Empire, and edgeward Echo-faults

• Notable Cities: Durnrothe, Ascalend, Hollowfast

🏞️ Description

The Duchy of Drestr is a haunted land of grim pageantry and oaths heavier than steel. Cloaked in ashen forests and cold highlands, Drestr is known for its order of fate-bound knights — warriors who seal their souls to Echo-vows in defense of sacred keeps and slumbering shards. The stars over Drestr appear to hang lower, and constellations are often used to track Echo surges or divine shifts in fate.

Drestric settlements are fortified and cold, their spires carved with anti-resonance glyphs and ancestral names that must never be spoken aloud. Mourning is a public act here; each loss recorded in ritual silence and burned into the bone-wood of memory altars.

The people of Drestr believe that Echoes do not haunt the land — they are the land. Every oath, sin, and vow persists in soil and stone. As such, words carry the weight of permanence, and silence is the highest form of reverence.

🕰️ History

• Founding Legend: Formed from the exile of oath-breakers who chose to die with their word intact rather than betray their kin during the Sundering.

• Key Historical Events:

  • Fought beside the Viagosian Empire during the Storm-Harmony Skirmishes, binding oath-light into shared arms

  • Lost the fortress of Valegrim when its Echo-warding failed and the garrison relived their final moments for thirty years

  • Rescued a fragment of the Veil from a dying Echo-tide, now buried beneath the stones of Hollowfast

🌟 Key Locations

• Durnrothe: The duchy’s cold-blooded capital, carved from dark stone and lit by memory-fires

• Ascalend: Home of the Oath-Keepers' Hall and the Mirror of Final Names

• Hollowfast: Fortress-city atop a buried resonance fracture; its bell is rung only when a vow is broken

• The Weeping Skyfield: An open plain where Echoes of ancient battles drift in looping sorrow

🔗 Related Nations

• Kingdom of Quintoria (bonded by similar military legacy; share wary respect)

• Viagosian Empire (historic comrades-in-arms; occasional sky-rider exchange rites)

• Republic of Begoestia (neutral observer; Begoestia monitors Hollowfast for instability)