~Aelukema Tauma~ - the Stormshield Mountains

If one looks at Paizo’s map of Castrovel, one sees a mountain range running the western edge of the Asana continent. It starts at Qabarat, though the islands of the Eastern Shattersea are more likely the crowns of its submerged members, and runs all the way northward, even to the legendary Coldstone (ice) Lands of the Far North. These are the Stormshields, so named for the endless, battering weather they receive from the Western Sea, and from which they shield the cities of the Yaro Valley, even as they hide mysteries.   On their eastern, landward side, the Stormshields’ lower slopes cradle the birthplace of Lashunta civilization. Wild Lashunta clans freshly migrated the from Retaea Savanna-Moors first settled the Yaro’s mountainside bank, opposite the eastern bank’s marshes and swamps. Yet as much as it rains pretty much everywhere on Castrovel (and it rains a lot), the Yaro Valley receives maybe but a quarter of what the Stormshields’ western shoulders get, settling for a fairly cyclical annual monsoon, instead of an almost constant downfall for three-quarters of the year. This buffer is owed to the mountains’ height, as tall or taller than anywhere else on the planet. While the tallest height in the range is not definitively known, it is popularly believed to be Ta-Shestaru, the mountain on which the Hall of Stars observatory-temple stands. Here, seldom upon this world, the peaks rise high enough to pierce the cloud-layer and find sight to the stars above. On a clear Heaventide (winter) day, more than one tall, stony god (for so the Lashunta worship them, as the children of Mahaere = Greenmother) shine silver, wrapped in a fresh shroud of ~quruvil~ - cold-dust / snow.   Within the mountains’ twisting dales and passes, however, the river-valley Lashunta cities swiftly lose control even as they depend on the mountains’ wealth and resources. Mahyat, sitting between Son to the north and Hanazhyana to the south, holds greater influence upon the highlands than most others, since the River Laul on which it sits, the Yaro’s largest western tributary, offers a winding path into the hinterland, on which ore and coal come back down. Yet even this influence fades. Instead, the Lashunta highland clans make their own way, handle their own business, and play out their lives widely ignored, or invisible, by the lowland river-cities. In truth, while commerce has flowed readily from North to South on the Yaro’s shoulders, it has not done so easily from East to West. Over the millennia, the city Lashunta have lost touch with their western Highland kin. The higher from the river one climbs, the stranger the language becomes, full of words all but forgotten by the more civilized lowlands, more reminiscent of when the Warrior-Queens first claimed these lands, or even earlier, when wandering Lashunta first fled into these dales, seeking to escape the Moqeva’s reprisals. Visitors and scholars, depending on their predecessors travelogs from the Age of the Sage-Queens are regularly astounded to learn that a clan has switched valleys or even disappeared, all without any record or explanation, even in the memory of the neighboring folks’ legends.   The ancient Sage-Queens came closest to bringing the Stormshields under control. Yet even their hold proved tenuous, for many highland clans took pleasure in defying - and raiding - them. Father-Yaro’s headwaters pour down from the mountains but a couple days northwest of Son. At the Sage-Queens’ height, they succeeded at colonizing it banks up to the Dale of Amaea, formed between the Stormshields’ main range and the Inaeusama Spur. Yet as the Sage-Queens’ might weakened, they lost touch with Amaea, though not before weird legends whispered back downward. Now none knows the fate of the shrine the Sage-Queens built on the slopes of Ta-Anossu, marking the spring held to be the Yaro’s birthplace.   The more prosperous dales among the Stormshields hold a ~Sezaola~ - freehold: small tree-towns open to trade and offering more crafts and wealthier amenities, possibly controlling a tradeway down to the nearest lowland city. Outside of them, semi-nomadic clans wander the upland jungles, hunting, gathering seasonal fruits, and maybe herding meat-thurses.   North of the Dale of Amaea, there is little word of the mountains’ inhabitants. Only the Retaea Moor-Wanderers have any contact, and they deem these northern highlanders savage even by their standards. Around their moorland campfires they tell wild tales making them seem almost un-Lashunta, attributing weird powers at which more civilized travelers from the Yaro Valley see fit to scoff.   The further west one goes within the Stormshields, the more unsettled they become. Assuming one can find a pass over the Great Ridge, one eventually comes through the mountains’ western side, the Land of Ten Thousand Waterfalls, assuming one can see them through the driving rain and endless mist. Here Castrovel’s great Megadendron trees change, and even in some places disappear. This is a torrential land of mushroom forests and moss-wastes, as alien as any world beyond Golarion and Castrovel. Things dwell here, even tales of Elves. Yet these Elves are nothing like the refined, gentrified citizens of Qabarat’s Elf-Farthing, who proudly keep their ties with far Sovyrian (even as they fiercely ward their independence). What the lowland cities have heard of these Elves are tales of a folk gone fey, lost in the Stormshield Shore’s mists, wild like the birds and salamanders they hunt, and dreadful in their will to keep these lands as their own.   The Stormshields are a wilderness right on the Yaro cities’ doorstep,