Koravel

Koravel is a cold continental moon whose roads, campaigns, and harvests all answer to winter. Fortified holds command mountain passes and frozen bays, while broad plains and inland seas disappear under seasonal ice. The brief thaw opens agricultural valleys and movement corridors; the freeze closes them again, often with ships and travelers still on the wrong side.

No court governs the whole moon. Each fortified principality keeps its own territory, armed traditions, ports, and external bargains. Once each year their representatives meet at the Oath Basin under the Compact and swear only what they are willing to undertake. A principality that does not swear is not bound. A promise that is sworn does not expire, and the Basin’s custodians maintain the one register no court may revise for convenience.

That structure makes cooperation narrow but durable. Principalities combine for trade, dynastic interest, outside threat, and access to routes, then resume their rivalries when the common purpose ends. Valdyr remains Koravel’s industrial protectorate and mutual-defense partner, retaining local administration while Koravel supplies external security and long supply. Edrane coordinates most convoys across the Shatter, a service Koravel depends upon without accepting Edrani authority.

The Twofold follows the same divisions. Dawn belongs to public oaths, collective defense, rebuilding, and the warmer season; Gloam to scouts, winter travelers, archives, and communities cut off by snow. Summoners find passes and safe lines through storms. Eclipsers are retained openly by some principalities and punished by others, even when both sit in the same defensive alliance.

Koravel builds walls, fortified ports, and crew-powered engines intended to defeat such defenses. It can make agreements that outlive their makers, but it cannot make one court speak for another. That refusal limits its reach and preserves its sovereignty: outsiders must negotiate with the principality in front of them, not with an imagined Koravelan state.

Koravel builds the walls the rest of the system measures itself against, and the engines meant to bring them down. Its yards turn out cranked and counterweighted machines that no arm could draw alone, which the Koravelan position holds to be lawful on the grounds that every measure of the power is put in by the crews who wind them. Rhovan disputes this in principle and buys the smaller models regardless. The argument has never been submitted to anyone, because there is nobody to submit it to, and both moons have learned to find that satisfactory.