Asgard is a country of the Hyborian Age.
It's a part of Nordheim.
Geography[]
The Shimmering Path[]
This isn't a true place, but instead a supernatural phenomenon: a legend told that when the stars are right, the skies will darken, and the colorful array of the borealis will part, as if sliced by a sword. From within this opening in the benighted sky, a gleaming lance will stab forth from the heavens, coming to rest upon the earth. In this ray dance all the colors of visible light, shimmering and shining, a bridge-like path which the bravest and most redoubtable might walk upon, supposedly to the very abode of Ymir and his Daughters themselves.
Akram The Mysterious[]
Lost in the remote icy mountains far within the northern reaches of Nordheim, in a region negligibly more in Asgard than Vanaheim, is a strange and terrible place called Akram “the Mysterious”, familiar to few and shunned by those who know. Akram is a large town dating from times before the Cataclysm, surviving such an apocalyptic event undisturbed and barely changed. Somehow, this settelment went unnoticed by the forefathers of the Hyperboreans and Nordheimers when they migrated through this region. The snow apes, driven northward by the first primitive humans to inhabit the North, also passed through here without incident. Even to this day, Akram is inhabited by monstrous folk, unlike any in the region, barely known to the people of the Hyborian Age. Only time has diminished Akram, and now it is a veritable ghost town; the remaining few denizens mere shadows of their former strength or numbers, ineffectual and insane by the standards of even the barbarians of the north.
As one approaches Akram, located high within the mountains, one hears a weird whistling first, a product of some curious poles fastened throughout the area along their trails and the border of its territory. Festooned with skulls and full of cunning holes, these staves emit an eerie moaning whistle that inspires dread in trespassers, perhaps explaining the primitive superstitions that have kept this town safe.
Set in a mountain valley, crisscrossed with ditches and fields, much of Akram has gone stagnant and dormant; neglected fields long since withered and abandoned, fences falling down with age, decrepit structures dotting the whole valley. In the heart of the valley stands Akram itself. Once it was a proud redoubt, but now is a dingy little walled town that has been poorly treated by the passage of time. Visitors may also notice the unnatural warmth of the valley, sheltered surprisingly from the winter winds and the extreme surrounding cold, perhaps even fed from below by hot springs that allow such incongruities as palm trees to grow, though wanly.
Despite Akram's shabbiness, it is nonetheless quite unusual by the standards of the age, with a strong sense of planning and organization. The builders of Akram chose their city’s location well, with a distinct absence of snow and wind. Elsewhere, the town would have been buried millennia ago, but it has little snow and even patches of greenery. There are perhaps a few hundred houses and small buildings all in all, its oblong walls and shape defined in the center by a larger building serving apparently as some sort of town hall.
Trespassers will inevitably run afoul of the strange folk of Akram, a yellow-skinned, dark-haired people seemingly impervious to the cool air, dressing in little more than loincloths, sandals, and equipped with knives or metal-bladed spears. Their language is like none other, and to date no denizen of this strange village has taught an outsider their tongue, or even parlayed to trade. Whatever secrets Akram holds are its own, for their lack of any apparent wealth or resources make raiding a waste of effort.
History and politics[]
The Æsir (Aesir) fought several wars with their cousins in Vanaheim. Between these, the Æsir also assailed Hyperborea, destroyed city after city and pushed back its frontier.
One of Aquilonia's few humiliating defeats was when the Æsir almost completely destroyed an Aquilonian army.
In the following centuries, advancing ice fields of the glacier age started drifting so southwards forcing the Nordics to flee to the south.[1]
Stories set in Asgard[]
References[]
- ↑ Template:THA