Gold Coast - County Anvil

Geography

The Gold Coast, formally Anvil County, is a region stretching from the Brena River to the north to the Strid in the south. It is bounded to the west by the Borderland which is traditionally considered part of the region as well. Since the age of the Interregnum destroyed much of Cyrodiil with its constant warfare, the once lush forests have been replaced by a rocky region of dry grasslands and farmland.
Its climate is dryer than much of the rest of Cyrodiil, taking after the arid landscape of Hammerfell to the north-west, and the end of the massive rainshadow of the Dragontail Mountains. It gets its name from its gold-tinted grasses and the rare gold-leaved oaks that can be found only in a few hidden sanctuaries in the region. Its coastline is rocky and dangerous for sailing, with only a few safe ports for ships to dock at or make repairs.

Settlements

Knightsgrave

Once a temple complex dedicated to the worship of Akatosh during the middle First Era. This was the founding site of the knightly Order of the Hour dedicated to enforcing the will of the God of Time. The temple fell to ruin and the site became a massive graveyard for the knights who served in the Order's ranks. Today, a small fishing village lives in the shadow of the old ruins at the mouth of the Brena River.

Sutch

Once the capital of its own kingdom. Sutch Keep now guards the southern border between Hammerfell and Cyrodiil. The keep has fallen into ruin numerous times throughout the centuries, always being rebuilt whenever political tensions rise with the Redguards. Most recently, it was revived in the wake of the Oblivion Crisis, with wooden structures built atop the foundation of the old stone ruins. A small castle town shelters within its fortified walls, a first stop for caravans from Hammerfell into the Heartland.

Drad

A small mining village built around the former Drad Estate. The land was bequeathed to a tenured dunmer knight of the Order of the Hour. When Lord Drad discovered valuable ore in the nearby hills, he hired mercenaries to round up mountain Ogres from the nearby Colovian Highlands to serve as a slave workforce. During the Oblivion Crisis, these orgres escaped their bonds and killed the Lord and Lady. When the Lord's scheme was revealed, Potentate Ocato purchased the land back from the ogres at a fair rate, and a Legion-operated mining town was built up at the site of the estate.

Crowhaven

A once-prosperous town built around the estate of one of Colovia's old ruling families. To the outside world, the settlment seemed to have vanished from all record in the early Third Era. It was during the Oblivion Crisis that the truth of this village was revealed. Its ruler, Lord Lovidicus Jarol had become a Vampire. Lovidicus enslaved the village, hiding it from prying eyes for over two-hundred years with illusion magic. He somehow sired a son with one of his mortal servants. When she died in childbirth, the vampire noble destroyed the village in his pain. A servant smuggled the Dhampir infant out of the castle with symbols of his long-forgotten noble birth and raised him as her own. The child went on to become the greatest champion ever known in the Imperial Arena, earning the moniker The Gray Prince. 
Lord Lovidicus was slain by a rival gladiator of his son. When the truth was brought back to the Gray Prince, he bequeathed the land to the orc clan that raised him, and allowed himself to be killed in combat. Despite his ignoble origins, the Prince's loyal fans rewarded his decades of service by helping Clan Malog rebuild the village and its keep, pouring money into its reconstruction and openly trading with them. Today, Crowhaven is a prosperous village whose blacksmiths are unmatched in Cyrodiil. An Ebony-plated statue of the Gray Prince stands proudly in town sqauare.

Whitmond

A small farming village in the hills above Anvil. Its matriarch is a nord woman called Maeva the Buxom who won the land in a legal challenge against her errant husband, a knight called Bjalfi the Contemptable who turned to banditry after his mismanagement led to years of poor harvests. Under Maeva's leadership, the village is thriving.

Anvil

The seat of the Gold Coast and and Cyrodiil's second-wealthiest port. This hub of trade and naval supremacy is the beating heart of the Colovian West. It is a blend of Imperial and Redguard architectural styles and culture, with a significant immigrant population from the other provinces as well. This cosmopolitan metropolis supplanted the ancient capital of the Ayleid western powers, cementing human rule in Cyrodiil after a century of war.

Fort Strand

A long-forgotten fort south of Anvil. During the Obvlivion Crisis, a gang of bandits squatting in the ruins were wiped out. The land was awarded to Adric Umbranox, then son of the Countess of Anvil with a large commission to develop the ruin into a line of defense for Anvil's southern border as Sutch is to the north. The young noble has largely squandered the commission, hosting lavish parties in the ruins instead. The project is years behind schedule a full decade later. Now ascended to Counthood, Umbranox is searching for a more reliable steward to take over the project.

Gweden

A once-forgotten estate high in the southern cliffs of the region. Gweden is currently the seat of power for the Sirens, an all-female crime syndicate infamous throughout the Abecean coast. This gang arose during the Interregnum out of the ashes of the Fate-Bearers, a guild of dunmeri assassins who purchased the land from nearby Anvil. This guild used the gift of profecy to select victims who posed a danger to the people of Tamriel. However, the gift was taken away from its members by the Tribunal goddess Almalexia. The matriarch of the Fate-Bearers reformed the faction rather than return home and submit to the authority of the Tribunal.
Though the criminal syndicate is scarcely a secret to the citizens of the Gold Coast, the land of the estate is maintained as farmland. Its members maintain the land faithfully, enjoying the hard work and indipendence it brings. So long as the flow of food and gold is maintained, the criminal activities of the Sirens are largely tolerated by the Empire.

History

Malatar - The High Wood

In the last years of the Alessian Slave Rebellion during the early First Era, the Ayleid port kingdom of Garlas Malatar became defacto capitol of the Heartland High Elves' last bastion against the alliance. In those days, the Gold Coast region was known as Malatar, the High Wood, where the unforgiving jungles of Cyrodiil gave way to a gentle temperate forest of golden-leaved oak. Supplimented by arms and provisions from the elven homeland of Summerset, and protected at sea by their navy, this coastal federation of city-states became an unbreakable barrier to the expansion of the fledgling Alessian Empire.

King Narilmor presided over the fledgling state, naming it the Emperyean Bastion of Malatar. Always known as a severe and devout ruler, Narilmor allied himself with the Daedric Prince Meridia, forcing his people to live under the strict moral precepts of Meridian Law. He refused to accept refugees of Ayleid states that fell under the Alessians who would not submit themselves to the blessings of the Prince of Light.
Surviving propaganda of the Bastion suggests that the ephemeral races of men were unfit to rule an empire. That the Alessians would inevitably turn on eachother, and when the moment was right, the Beacon of Meridia would blaze across the jungles of Cyrod, and a new Empire of Light would take its place, restoring elven rule. This divine crusade would never manifest, however, as the Bastion would crumble in short order.
Little is known about the internal politics of this kingdom. It survived alongside the Empire for nearly a century as a closed and secretive state. In the final decades of its existence, it began losing ground when the human kingdoms of Kvatch and Sutch were founded by invading Alessian generals. Rumors spread throughout the Empire that King Narilmor had grown increasingly paranoid and despotic in the wake of those defeats. A surviving Kvatchi folk-song speaks of Ol' King Narls burning his subjects from the inside with Demon-Fire, his subjects fleeing to Kash Vikatch to beg to be their slaves instead. The good people of Kash laughed and named their grandfathers and grandmothers who were enslaved to those same long-lived elves. The elves prostrated themselves and vowed to repent, but the people of Kash sent them back to burn instead.
When Emperor Ami-El invaded the Bastion in force in 1E 351, he quickly discovered the state had already collapsed. The member-states had broken off from their capitol and were quick to surrender to Alessian rule. When they marched on the capitol, they found it ablaze in golden fire. Ami-El left a contingenet in charge of rebuilding the port, his attention needed up in Skyrim to pay off an old debt to the Nords. When the blaze finally subsided after several days, the men built Fort Mistwatch within the ruins, and began looting its catacombs. However, Mistwatch soon disappeared from record, its soldiers reported all missing. Subsequent expeditions all met the same fate. In time, the once-mighty city of Garlas Malatar was lost to history.
The Empire's newly-acquired western coast was left without a major port. The new Gold Coast territory was given over to the kingdom of Sutch by the Elder Council with the express mandate of developing a naval base and port. This mandate was fulfilled with the construction of Anvil Fortress, becoming the critical line of defence for the Empire from possible elven retalliation. Particularly after the Empire came to be ruled by the xenophobic cult of the Alessian Order.

The All Flags Navy

The rule of the Alessian Order was as infamously dogmatic and cruel as that of Ol' Narls himself. Their holy crusades, which once united the human kingdoms against elves and beasts, turned inward as the state sought to oust blasphemers and the unclean. After the cosmically tumultuous thousand-year age of the Middle Dawn, caused by the Order tampering with divine forces beyond mortal comprehension, the Empire began at last to sunder.
Sometime during the Middle Dawn, Anvil, and the greater Kingdom of Sutch was toppled by a mysterious army that swept in from the sea. Theorized to have been an invasion of the Maormer, or Sea Elves, the Gold Coast was sacked and looted in only a few years before the invadors retreated into the Abacean Sea. The territory was divided and traded hands over the following centuries, with Anvil itself becoming an infamous pirates' den.
Sometime in the 2200s of the First Era, a new disease swept across the continent, devastating its peoples like none had ever seen. This deadly pandemic was eventually attributed to the Sload, and is remembered by history as the Thrassian Plague. The Empire was crippled by its devastating losses so soon after the chaos of the Middle Dawn, and failed to mount any sort of defence against it. It was left up to individual cities to independently work out quarantine protocols, treament for the ill, and mass burials of the dead. The western counties of Colovia, who were reliant on overland trade to survive, formed a loose alliance to coordinate their efforts. They housed caravans in quarantined assylums outside city walls, where their goods were magically sanitized and purchased in bulk for distribution. Once the isolation period had elapsed, cavaners were allowed into the city to purchase goods for the next leg on their journey. This system spared much the alliance the worst of the plague, but also drained the coffers of its nobility into the hands of a few well-positioned trade barons who went on to usurp power in the very cities that had sheltered their men so effectively.

A towering statue of Bendu Olo stands upon a rock in Gonfalon Bay

As the Thrassian Plague began at last to ebb in the 2250s, the Colovian Barons entered into negotiation with its neighbors across the western reaches of Tamriel on how best to retaliate. Common wisdom held that the plague had been sent by the Sload to soften the continent for invasion. After all, the alien race had long asserted they had an ancestral claim to the lands. Skirmishes erupted throughout the decade in the sea and skies of the Eltheric Ocean. Thrassian Skyships were shot down and the sea floor around ports were armed with undersea mines bearing magical sygils to counter undersea assaults by the amphibious menace. In 1E 2260, Bendu Olo, the first Colovian ever admitted to the Admiralty of the Imperial Navy, assembled a massive fleet in secret at the pirate-stronghold of Anvil.
This fleet bore the colors of numerous kingdoms from the Redguards, Bretons, Colovians, Argonians, Altmer, Dunmer, Khajiit, Orcs, and Nords, as well as the black flags of half a dozen Pirate Lords. Some accounts even attest that factions of Maormer, Druegh, and even Dragons had thrown in with the alliance. The fleet was dubbed the All Flags Navy. With secret intelligencee of the location of the Sload homeland, a great coral archipelago called Thras, the All Flags Navy set sail to at last bring the war to the enemy's doorstep.
The naval campaign was swift and effective, devastating the Thrassian navy at sea. To slow their encroachment, the Sload resorted to unknown weather magic and other supernatural forces. An impossibly dense fog surrounding the reef stilled the air and sea, slowing the fleet's advancement to a crawl. Supplimented with magical propultion, the ships were able to press forward, but the journey lasted weeks longer than should have been physically possible. When at last they reached the central island, they were met not with force, but a blinding azure light from atop the mighty Coral Tower. The islands began to crack and sink beneath the waves, forming great whirlpools which swallowed dosens of vessels before the fleet could retreat. As the fog cleared, the survivors looked back to a flat horizon where the Sload homeland once stood. Even beneath the waves, there was no sign of the sload or their coral islands.
Though their losses were great, the Sload's retreat from this realm was heralded as a victory for the races of Tamriel. The surviving admirals of the navy met at Gonfalon Bay at the heart of the Systres Archipelago to sign the Concordat of Fraternity, a mutual defense pact and trade agreement between the powers involved in the war. Tamriel was united for the first time in history against a common enemy, and vowed never to allow the Sload to bring such harm to its people again. The opening of trade routes also brought a great deal of additional wealth into the hands of the Colovian barons at the further detriment to the Empire.

Colovia Rising

With most of the pirate fleet decimated at the front lines of the assault on Thras, Bendu Olo was free to return to Anvil in glory and conquest in 1E 2261. In one night, Avil Fortress was taken and the pirate crews who stayed behind were arrested and executed the next morning. The civilian population of the settlement was forced to swear loyalty to Colovia and named Bendu the first King of Anvil.
With support from the Colovian alliance, Anvil quickly built up to become a major port of trade, formally opening up the Colovian Trade Network to the greater Direnni Triangle, the naval trade-network between the elven powers of Valenwood, Summerset, and the vestigial Direnni island kingdom of Balfiera in the Illiac Bay, alongside Hammerfell and Elsweyr, which had been admitted into the trade network at the same time. With an influx of wealth and goods from the elven world, the Colovian Estates had amassed enough independent power to undermine the Empire from within, forming a confederation and asserting its authority as an independent province within the Empire. The Colovian Merchant-Kings secretly began funding rebellions across the human-controlled provinces.
In 1E 2321, the Colovian Estates formally seceded, igniting the War of Righteousness, the final decade-long battle to end the oppression of the Alessian Order once and for all. With allies across the human kingdoms, the Imperial Legion resorted to total war, razing cities and countrysides across High Rock, Hammerfell, and Skyrim, while the Colovians held a line of attrition in the heartland. Some estimates indicate over half the population of the Illiac Bay perished in the conclict. Eventually, the Western Alliance prevailed, and the Colovians overran the lands of Nibenay. The last stronghold of the Order fell in the Siege of Lake Canulus, and the Alessian Empire was no more.

Alternative Name(s)

Strident Coast, The High Wood

Type

Region

Location under

Cyrodiil

Included Locations

• Anvil

Owner/Ruler

Adric Umbranox

Ruling/Owning Rank

Count