The Faerie Kingdom
Eleven provinces and twelve races, centred on the meadows of the Heartland and the capital that sits in them. About 225 km² all told, six million official subjects, and one absolute monarch.
The arithmetic does not balance, and that is not an error. The High Sidhe have no province of their own: they hold the Eternal City, which sits inside the Sylph province like a stone in fruit. And the Deephearth is not beside the others at all — it lies beneath three of them, which is why no map of the surface has ever shown it and why the Gnomes find surface cartography faintly comic.
Each region has a centre of power, though what that means varies. The Gnomes have no centralised government and meet instead at a geologically significant hole in the ground; the Nymphs answer petitions on a scale of centuries; and the Sylphs have no seat of their own, because theirs coincides with the capital.
| Region | Area | Population | Dominant Race | Capital | Ruler |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Heartland | 37 km² | 1,680,000 | Sylph | the Eternal City | Duke Aureling |
| The Hedges | 12 km² | 450,000 | Cait Sith | Mousehold | Old Tibbault |
| The Greenmantle | 20 km² | 300,000 | Nymph | the Heartwood | Eldest Thanewood |
| The Rimeward | 26 km² | 350,000 | Dwarf | the Winterworks | Foreman-Ascendant Coilbrass |
| The Emberwaste | 31 km² | 400,000 | Salamander | the Kiln | War-Chief Vashruk |
| The Manywaters | 22 km² † | 700,000 | Undine | Tidewell | Lady Nerissa |
| The Twilight Veil | 18 km² | 500,000 | Spriggan | the Duskmarket | Grismer |
| The Land of Night | 15 km² | 250,000 | Wisp | Lumenhal | Astronomer-Primary Vesperine |
| The Elderlands | 8 km² | 120,000 | Tenko | the Ninefold Shrine | Hakumei |
| The Veldt | 6 km² | 220,000 | Pooka | the Round | First Voice Cadenza |
| The Deephearth ‡ | 30 km² | 900,000 | Gnome | the Motherstone | Matriarch Dunnowar |
† The Manywaters' figure counts only its three charted subregions. The Singing Sea itself is larger than any land province in the Kingdom, and the Undine have never seen the point of measuring it.
‡ Subterranean. The Deephearth lies beneath the High Forest, the Heartland and the Twilight Forest — three lobes joined by a few long tunnels, which the Gnomes consider one country and everyone else considers three.
Reading the Numbers
The outliers are the interesting ones. The Rimeward is 13% urban because the cold permits nothing else, and its capital is effectively a company town. The Emberwaste is barely 3% urban, since a Salamander hold that grows large enough to matter attracts an army. The Greenmantle has essentially no urban population and the Kingdom cites this as proof of Nymph backwardness. And Mousehold, at 60,000, is the second-largest city in the world despite governing nothing — everything simply passes through it.