The Stolen Coast

The Zeshem call it "the Stolen Coast"; the Pratasa call it "Halsima". You cannot even talk about this land without taking sides in their holy war.
This land was once taken by Selkies from the earliest Zeshem, and is now occupied (mostly) by a fusion of local culture and Pratasam culture-religion. This region is a critical base for launching trade expeditions across West Larazel, and each group (the selkies, the Pratasam archdruids, and the Zeshem empire) is deeply invested in influencing the local governments. The kingdoms walk a fine line between patrons and threats and are forced to navigate a dangerous game of power politics to avoid being invaded by external powers. For the most part, local kingdoms tend to align themselves along religious lines: Zeshem or Pratasa. Before 2014, some states tried to use religious toleration and careful diplomacy to avoid being subsumed into any faction, but that time has passed and few of those kingdoms remain.
The Stolen Coast is divided into four regions: Tivima, Hamano, Vikama, and Eraziki. The first three of these are considered holy in Zeshem theology - their central rivers are said to be three of the Five Mothers that the Zeshem are descended from, with the other two being in Holy Zeshema itself. The local Pratasa converts have preserved this river worship themselves, and consider the Five Mothers to be the sacred daughters of Halcyon.
Tivima is a land divided between fifteen states - one of them, the kingdom of Efanez, being significantly larger than the others. Tivima is a diverse territory and contains both the territory's greatest warmongers and most persistent voices for peace; some among the small kingdoms have grown attached to religious toleration, and are fighting to resist calls to war even now. Others have been easily hijacked by extremist factions and are now puppets for some of the most bloodthirsty voices.

•  One kingdom, Insumez, is particularly infamous as the puppet government for Zeshem militarists known as The Returning Daughters. The Daughters were originally a group of fighters descended from displaced Zeshem who were taken from the Stolen Coast by selkies and sold abroad; after the diasporan Zeshem community rallied together in the Kingdom of Iniska, the Daughters tried sailing back to retake their ancient home. They failed, but their name and mission have been adopted by more recent extremists (again, originally in Iniska, but this time with much more support in Tivima and Hamano). 
• As for Efanez, the largest kingdom: Efanez is officially Pratasam despite much of the population being Zeshem, and since 2014 has become increasingly intolerant to that sizable chunk of the population. Civil war has broken out in Efanez, and it looks to be the first great battleground of the escalating holy war for the Stolen Coast
• Along the coast, the Kingdom of Gotekez has attracted the ire of all sides by trying to form a league of neutral kingdoms and doubling down on its edicts of religious tolerance. It is struggling to prevent civilian violence among its people, but has done an admirable job so far. According to rumors, at least one power has placed a bounty on the royal family - though the rumors can never agree on who exactly has done this

Hamano is unified under a singular kingdom, which has so far maintained stability in the face of all of this. The kingdom is divided between a more-Zeshem Eastern half and a more-Pratasa Western half, so if violence spills over from Tivema the battle lines are already basically drawn. Hamano has a rich legacy of cooperation between the religious communities, and the Pratasa temple has to carefully weed out syncretic heretics who try to integrate Zeshem religious law and druidic law. As many more enthusiastic and heretical druids from Vikama were driven here as well, it Pratasa temple of Hamano has a more selkie-skeptical view and a lot of tendencies that have been called "Eerily Halikvar". The scars of historical violence have underdeveloped Hamano, leaving it with fewer farms and mines and riches for a country of its size.
Vikama is the richest, most selkie-aligned, most Pratasa country in the Stolen Coast. Vikama is rich from its dyes, its lumber, its mines, and its farms; it is a vibrant semi-feudal commercial state that likes to think of itself as Samvaran. Vikama is the original Samvaran base in Larazel, the Northern colony and outpost, and it is proud of it. It hosts the most accomplished druid schools, the scholars make a point of learning Emprisaran, and the art styles are pseudo-foreign. But even here the syncretic heresies have their presence - Vikama's clerics like to proclaim the rivers to be sacred lines of power belonging to Halcyon, and that ancient prophets prepared their people for Halcyon's gospel - giving them a divine destiny to conquer all of the Stolen Coast and Zeshema. These are extreme words spoken by few, but the belief is more common than is immediately apparent.  
Eraziki is a fringe of savannah North of Vikama, and is mostly occupied by herders and small-farmers; it lacked the lumber, arable riverlands, and obvious mineral deposits that attracted Samvarans to other places. Most of the tribes here mostly worked with the selkies and Samvarans as mercenaries and targets for conversion; little has changed on those fronts.

Geography

The coast here is 550 miles long and the valleys run 240 miles inland before reaching the Stonespine mountains. The three great rivers running through the realm are the Vikaja, Hamaja, and Tivija rivers (North to South). Most of the land is subtropical forest, though the forests of Vikama are arguably just jungle. Bits of open warm plain dot these forests, transitioning to savannah in the North.

History

The Selkie Era (600 - 921)

In the early Modern Era, it was Northern Zeshem that was the richest and most populous. Not long before the selkies arrived from the Northern seas, Vikama's largest trade center, Tifava, crossed the line into becoming a permanent city. The monarch of Tifava hungrily conquered as much of Vikama as possible, and these strange foreigners offered helpful weapons to make that even easier. In 690 ME, a large selkie fleet arrived in Tifava's harbor offering a lucrative alliance. The selkie leader, Nualoa, was happy to support Tifava's conquests in exchange for a foothold in the region - and so, the selkie plundering of Zeshema began. Mass exploitation of the Zeshem riverlands and its peoples began wearing Tifava's face - but when rivals sacked the city in 701, the selkies were established enough to continue without them. 
Thanks to this early initial support, the selkies devoured Vikama before the other rivers and their domination over that region was always stronger than in the South. Many refugees fled South to escape the selkies and their allies, and the South - modern Zeshema - rallied in a great rebellion. It became a war of attrition and a war of occupation. The selkies built many colonies, but only the eight in Vikama were secure enough from rebel raids that they were able to grow and put down roots. But from the South, the rebellion continued to fester and spread with a new religion- Zesheko. 
When new warriors from further South joined the side of the rebels in the late 700s and early 800s, the selkie successors to Nualoa began to realize that this war was not going their way. They began to take drastic measures to insulate their Vikaman colonies from rebel attacks. In Southern Tivima (the Southmost of the stolen coast), the selkies built a wall of tributaries across the grasslands to prevent rebels from moving from the Southern forests to the Northern forests. This wasn't entirely successful, as the rebels still could move through the hills further East, but it did insulate the North from major warbands. In the Northern forests, the selkies began a far more extreme measure: mass enslavement and sale in Garadel, phrased as "deportation and resettlement". Entire villages that were seen as religious or political sympathizers were rounded up, forced on selkie ships, and sold in the Mejika Isles to raise money for selkie bases further South. This enslavement policy raged through the 800s, before slumping after the Zeshem navy started blocking selkie fleets from sailing further South in 900 ME. The local selkie administrators did their best to continue the practice using rogue fleets and by selling their slaves up North in Northern Larazel and Samvara. The practice only truly ended in the early 1000s, when an onslaught of paladins purged the land of most of its slavers. 

The First Holy War Period (921 - 1310)

While some selkies did move into Vikama, the threat of Zeshem attacks discouraged large scale permanent settlement. Instead, the selkies sold cheap land to Samvaran and Northern Larazek settlers and distributed land among their local allies. These small settlements would go on to be the bases from which Pratasa missionaries moved into the countryside, and the Stolen Coast would see one of the first dedicated non-Samvaran Pratasa evangelism campaigns. While this did give the selkies what they wanted - a religious buffer against the Zeshem - it also gave local converts with a new system to try and hold selkies accountable with. Vikaman missions joined with local communities to bring a lawsuit in the Khilaia suing the local administration for slaving and treaty violation - and did actually manage to win a major case in 921 ME. Thanks to this pivotal case, the selkie emperor Milen personally demanded that local selkie landowners and administrators hand power back to local elites and divest from Zeshem landowning. The selkies remained a powerful influence, but governing power was returning to a more independent, now Pratasam, elite. 
The missionary zeal of the now-autonomous kingdom of Vikama did have its drawbacks: namely, it drew a firm line between the true believers and the vile Zeshem to the South. Religious war was constant, and the two groups regularly raided each other across the 900s, 1000s, and 1100s. Whenever selkies and Zeshem fought, raids escalated into war. In 1213, a prominent dye merchant and landowner by the name of Amanja Patwal ventured to the Zeshem lands and created the first treaty of religious peace with the new Zeshem empire. Amanja's caravans and subjects were granted protected from raids, and in exchange she allowed limited religious tolerance and swore against attacking the Zeshem. Amanja's treaty opened the door for other merchants and nobles to do the same, and by 1300 most of the Stolen Coast had entered into religious tolerance and non-aggression pacts. These treaties set the stage for the selkies to make their own non-aggression and trade agreement with the Zeshem in 1310, beginning the "Open Period" of peace and commerce. 

The First Peace, the Second War (1310 - 1811)

After the peace with the Zeshem in 1300, the four duchies of the selkie administration began to drift apart and Vikama fell out of unity. While there was peace between the duchies and between them and Zeshema, this was not a quiet time. The Druidic Revolution of Pratasam was in full swing, and news of it lit a fire in Vikama. While their neighbors and rivals to the North split into a new conservative sect - Rueka - the druids of Vikama embraced what they believed the Revolution was about: theocratic rule, fierce evangelism, and temple reform. Local Zeshem were driven further into the hills in the North, while in Southern Vikama the druids syncretized with the Zeshem in strange new ways. In the 1500s, an expedition of foreign Zeshem known as the Returning Daughters invaded Southern Vikama and carved out a militaristic holy state for several decades, but this was eventually crushed. 
In the 1600s and 1700s, a new Zeshem empire began funding rebels again - and the fledgling syncretic temple was tragically torn apart by a new wave of holy wars. Rebels surged across the kingdoms, which banded together and turned to the selkies for help. It was another dark time wedged between exploitative selkies and hostile Zeshem, and the kingdoms of the coast were greatly relieved when a new Open Period Zeshem Empire promised to stop supporting rebels in 1811. 

Modern History

In 1811 the Zeshem government signed a peace provision with the Selkie Khilaia and united Coast kingdoms that said that the Zeshem government would help stop raids and rebellions if the Zeshem were allowed to hunt rogue selkies. This was an imperfect peace, but it stabilized over time. In 1895, a mutual peace summit ended most of the religious rebellions in exchange for more local religious freedoms. The Southernmost Kingdom of Tivima was shattered by this peace as well - the government had been de-facto irrelevant for almost a century - and carved into the 15 kingdoms we see today. The only aggressively Pratasam regime that remained was the Kingdom of Vikama in the North; a band of tolerant secular regimes Vikama that and Zeshema seemed like the perfect solution. 
At first, the selkies benefitted the most from the new order: the kingdoms had to turn away from the Pratasa temple for support, and the selkies offered a secular commercial option. Syncretic or cross-religious merchants in these kingdoms also allowed the selkies to reach new markets. But Sacred Zeshema slowly learned to project power and influence into religiously mixed societies, and began making gains. One particularly progressive Empress, Pineka II, proved immensely skilled at building influence and connections along the Stolen Coast. Pineka had alliances built with most of the neutral kingdoms and had even courted Hamano; some say she was close to diplomatically "conquering" Vikama when she was deposed in 2014. Her alliances have since dissolved, and her peace has turned quickly into war.

Alternative Name(s)

Halsima

Type

Region

Location under

Larazel

Contested By

• Holy Zeshema
• Pratasam
• The Khilaia