The Heartland

The rolling meadowlands at the center of everything: waist-high grass, which is to say forests of it, clover the size of parasols, and wildflower country that changes color three times a season. The Heartland is the most temperate and forgiving land in the world, and it is no accident that the race which holds it became the most numerous and the most favored. Every road in the Kingdom is measured in distance from here.

Geography

Open meadow with slow water and gentle relief, ringed almost entirely by the Hedges. The Nine Roads run inward to the capital from every province, and are the only formal infrastructure the Kingdom maintains at its own expense.

Society

The Heartland is the Kingdom's breadbasket and its parade ground. Nectar, seed, and pollen flow inward along the Nine Roads, carried in caravans of harnessed beetles and worked by non-Faerie labor that the Kingdom's ledgers list as equipment.

It has no Sylph capital, because the capital is the Eternal City and the Sylphs surrendered any separate identity to it long ago. This is the source of their "first among equals" standing and of a quiet melancholy running through Sylph culture: every other race can point at a place and say that is ours, while the Sylphs can only point at the Queen's city and say we live nearest.

Relations

Politically inseparable from the capital, which is exactly the problem. The Heartland's harvest feeds the Ring's estates, its people staff them, and its province has no voice at court distinct from the crown's own.