Letters from Ma Xin

During the many expeditions of Ma Xin into the wider world, he often makes notes and records of his travels to be delivered to the Emperor himself. After review, these letters are then collected into the Imperial archives, keeping a living record of what goes on beyond the oceanic borders of Jieyuan.

Soleils Levant

“The Empire of the Dawn, Land of the Eternal Light, or as they insist on being called: “Soleils Levant.” These are a weird sort of people. None of them can seem to properly agree with one another about who is in charge, where the capital is, or even what currency they use. The only things that seem to be universal are what someone’s place in society is, what is “proper” language, and how much they really hate the people next door. Anyways, from what we’ve been able to piece together is that they had some divine empress that unified the land, and everything was great. Infrastructure, culture, all sorts spread all across far and wide. Then their empress was killed by some azur blade, and everything fell apart without that leadership. Sounds familiar, huh? Well, their lady never got back up, so this council of representatives started fighting one another for who should take over. No one agreed, and every representative returned to their home provinces to make their claim using their armies. The result is what we have here now, a bunch of smaller kingdoms fighting one another and making alliances to see who gets to become the true inheritor.
Great stuff.
From what I can tell, it seems they have some caste thing going on. The ones with long, pointy ears are in charge, something about divine blessing or whatever. They call themselves the “Éternelle” and they’re real quick. I recognized a few faces on return trips to the area, so I get the impression they’ve got some agelessness like myself. In general, even if they’re not in charge, people of this group are the elites. Below them are the “Chasseur.” A bunch of beast people, they’ve got some traits of monsters and animals, but they all seem to have something that they can use to fight with like claws or powerful teeth, sometimes both. They’re real loyal it seems, so they get the luxury of being treated particularly well. Bit misplaced if you ask me, but they’re the ones trusted to work as bodyguards, assassins, and all those real sensitive positions. Lastly we’ve got the regular folks that make up a lot of the more menial types: farmers, footsoldiers, things like that. They call them the “Chanteuse.” From what I can tell, there’s a bunch of divisions in this group based on how “harmonized” they are. Those that do really well are promoted to “Harmoniser” and given artifacts that allow their wielder to transform, becoming better in a variety ways. A few human families apparently have become sort of nobility through passing down these artifacts through their lineage. I wonder if that empress killer was one of these Harmonisers, Chasseurs, or an Éternelle.
Diplomacy is hard with how many factions there are, but invading is even harder it seems cause boy if you mess with one of them everyone else comes out the woodwork to strike back. Guess the only ones allowed to pick on them are each other.”
-”Land of the Rising Suns” by Ma Xin

Teleoseom

“Don’t. What lies to the north? Don’t look. If you manage to come back alive, you’re not going to be the same with the knowledge of what’s in those woods. Trust me. Don’t touch it. If we ever expand up there, bring the biggest, strongest army you can.”
-”A Northern Chill” by Ma Xin

Gabyeoun

“Yeah I’m not sure what to make of this. A bunch of floating islands, just sitting there up in the sky? We’ve tried to send people up that way, but anytime they get close a bunch of beams of light strike us and boy do those things hurt. I’ve sometimes caught glimpses of these figures flying around the place. They look to be shaped kind of like people? Really angular, though. They seem to leave these trails of lights behind them when they fly. I managed to catch a glimpse of them fighting some massive dragon looking thing one time. Seems they have weapons that let them fire those beams, and even create swords and the like when they need to get in close. If only we could get a closer look at them without getting shot to bits…”
-”Cloud Guardians” by Ma Xin