The Ninefold

Mist-drowned foothills and stepped valleys on the Kingdom's eastern edge, where shrines outnumber houses and the fog does not lift. The Kitsune live here, in numbers far smaller than their influence would suggest.

Geography

Steep, wet, and permanently clouded. The fog is not weather but a fixture, and the Kitsune decline to explain it — which most visitors take as mysticism and which may simply be that they do not know either.

The Ninefold Shrine

A complex of nine gates ascending a mountainside, each gate marking a step toward whatever sits at the top. The Kitsune are the Kingdom's theologians, and their theology is a problem: they hold that the world was made whole, abundant, and unranked, and that the doctrine of advancement through service is a thing the Faeries invented and then mistook for revelation.

Relations

The Eternal City cannot suppress them, because the nobility desperately wants Kitsune blessings for legitimacy. Kitsune priests have accordingly become extremely skilled at giving blessings that sound like endorsements and parse, on close reading, as warnings.