Nexus Fantasy: Isz, and the Artificer Cabals

[Phorcys]

A wandering sage-mancer of Isz, displaying the gaudy favours he has earned in many foreign courts

Isz is not an ancient realm like the great eldritch empires to the East and the North. Too far from Azai, too far off the Old Road, too close to the savage Haglands, it has always been an unsettled hinterregion. The border of the civilised world. Many waves of migration and conquest have flowed back and forth across the Great Isthmus and the Occidental Straits, and to the masters of proud Azai or the reclusive clansmen of Loran, the Iszrians are little more than a mongrel breed devoid of history or lineage. But while those venerable peoples hearken back to the forever-fading glories of their vanished empires, the Iszrians are rising from their shadow. Their nascent nation is a place of constant flux and dynamism, a crossroads of new learning, new ambitions and undreamt progress. Shamanistic wisdom flows from the Haglands and lost texts are rediscovered from the Near-West, cross-pollinating with the forbidden sciences inherited from the fallen schools of Casrix and the thousand year alchemical tradition of Imperial Azai. An age of marvels is dawning - an age of gunpowder, magnetism, clockwork and steam. The Izrians know these things.

In the grand scheme of nations, the artificer cabals of Isz are still but petty provincial aristocracies, upstarts with bloated coffers that merely imitate and style themselves in the manner of the grander rulers of Azai. Most of the cabalate cities pay tribute to those Golden lords of the East, aligning with one or boldly playing them off against each other for fleeting favour. Outsiders see them as venal and cultureless, shallow imitations themselves of the grandeur of the Golden Cities. And there is truth in that. But the true glories of the Iszrians are not to be found in their homelands, but in their diaspora beyond. Natural politicians after centuries subject to greater realms, the pride of every Iszrian cabal is in those sons that have inveigled themselves into foreign courts as advisors, oracles, artisans and alchemists. Isz itself is little thought on, but the polymath sage-mancers of Isz are valued as courtiers from the East to the Occident.

In the Golden Palaces of Azai to the Merchant Manses of Manifest, Iszrians can be found tinkering away on outlandish projects for eager patrons. They may bear uncertain, even terrible fruit, but they are sure to leave their mark upon the world.