The Commonwealth of Hana and Lonin
The Commonwealth of Hana and Lonin is in the northern empire and spans a vast wilderness there, with pockets of civilisation here and there.
The Commonwealth was formed in 547 AF when the Grand Duchy of Lonin, once a realm beyond the empire's northern border, sought the protection of being an imperial vassal, and so it sought an accord with the Realm of Hana. Hana had long had the distinction of being an elective monarchy - one wherein a monarch reigned for life, but was selected by a great assembly of the realm's nobility. The agreement struck afforded the nobility of Lonin the same rights as the nobility of Hana. It was by and large a peaceful integration - Hana and Lonin already had a long history of close ties.
The capital of the Commonwealth, Zolev, is in Hana. It is where its noble parliament sits and where the monarch, currently King Victor Vanzek, reign. However, the largest settlement of the Commonwealth by some margin is the mighty fortress-city Vilslev in Lonin, situated along the Whitewater, a glacial river that flows from the northern reaches of the Worldspine mountain range to the east to the Wailing Sea to the west - mariners who venture to that sea stay close indeed to the coast on their way along the western coast of Lonin and northern coast of Elthos.
The nobility of the Commonwealth enjoy the principle of political equality, at least in theory. All noble votes have the same weight in parliament. In practice, some nobles hold far more land than others. The ruler of the Commonwealth remains above other nobility. The ruler of the Grand Duchy of Lonin is a hereditary position and wields immense power. The parliament appoints individuals to various offices: most notable among these are castellans, the title used for civil governors, and voivodes, for regional military commanders. Whereas only about one person in a hundred people elsewhere in the empire is a noble, about one in seven in the Commonwealth are noble, though the overwhelming majority own no land.
The principles of land ownership are different in the Commonwealth to the Imperial Territories and Dyria. Land ownership is allodial - it is owned outright, and cannot be rescinded by a liege. It can be used or sold at the owner's discretion, but only nobles can buy land. Owning land comes with both financial and military obligations to the realm. In practice, this has lead to some large houses consolidating and operating a system of elective inheritance, in which the wishes of the previous ruler are given great weight, that maintains territorial integrity. It also means there are many landowners with only small parcels - occasionally as small as a single farm - who still in theory retain noble status equivalent to people from far larger houses.
The frozen wasteland to the north of the taiga and tundra of Lonin is called the Terror. Raiders, both human and sometimes more bestial but intelligent humanoids, emanate from it, as do strange and terrible creatures. With each passing year, the attacks become larger. Zaria Albalaski, Grand Duchess of Lonin and Boyar of Vilslev, is an implacable defender of the Commonwealth, but the city's soldiers are spread desperately thin as they try to stop raids on settlements to the north, and observers deem it only a matter of time before they are overrun. Nobody expects that the vast walls of Vilslev, nor the mighty Tower of Ice, shall ever be breached, but loss of control of the outlying land would leave the city isolated. Much of the Grand Duchess' time of late has been in Sanctuary, seeking further aid for her home.
As well as those native the Commonwealth, the land also holds appeal for enterprising migrants, due to the resources to be found in the Worldspine, the mountain range that bounds the empire on its east. The dwarf holds there have been abandoned for over a century and the mountains are crawling with beasts and with goblin tribes, but even their foothills contain some of the richest ore deposits in Elsoth. Prospectors from all over the empire come to try their luck. The Commonwealth itself provides military forces for security, supplemented by mercenary companies hired by mining concerns.