The Emberwaste

A desert of red sand and black glass, cut by canyons and studded with vents that breathe fire on their own schedule. Nothing here is abundant except heat. The Salamanders hold it, and hold it badly — they are perpetually at war with one another over the few springs, shaded canyons, and workable glass-fields, and the Kingdom quietly encourages this, since a united Salamander host would be the most dangerous army in the world.

Geography

Sand, glass, and canyon, with the vent-fields shifting on a scale of decades. Water exists in a countable number of places, all of which have changed hands violently within living memory.

The Conquest

The Emberwaste was not made for Salamanders. It was made for the ones they took it from: the sand-swimmers, a people of armored, burrowing beetle-folk who need no springs at all, having been shaped to drink from the sand itself. They are still there, in far greater numbers than the Salamanders realize, having simply gone deeper.

Faerie histories record the conquest as a heroic founding. The sand-swimmers record it as an ordinary afternoon, in a song, in a language no Faerie has bothered to learn.

Society

There is no capital, only the Kiln — a fortress of fused glass that changes hands every few generations and belongs, by convention, to whichever war-chief last took it. The Kingdom recognizes whoever sits in it, sends them a title, and does not otherwise involve itself.