Traveler, cleanse your spirit of the Hesan iron and the Alendrian math, for we venture now to the Verdant Pact in the far Northwest. Here, the "Veil" you have heard me speak of—that divine curtain that keeps the Gods distant—simply does not exist. In the Pact, the sky and the soil are lovers locked in a permanent embrace. There is no distance. The Divine is not a thought or a memory; it is the sap rising in the bark and the heat radiating from the basalt. Here, the world is primeval—it is the raw, pulsing dawn of time that never bothered to set.
To understand this place, you must look to the Plateau Orcs and the Forest Elves, two peoples who realized that the flame of the forge and the root of the tree are but two movements of the same Great Breath. The Orcs teach us that they are the Children of the Celestial Forge, stars that fell and shattered upon the anvil of the world. They do not seek to "climb" to heaven; they seek to temper themselves here, cooling from raw celestial fury into purposeful, disciplined strength. And the Elves? They are the Seedlings of the First Tree, literal extensions of a cosmic genealogy. To them, a village is a flowering of the Mother Tree’s own dreams.
But beware, traveler, for where the Gods are near, the monsters are massive. In the Field of Colossal Beasts, mere legends in the cities of men, walk upon the earth in the flesh. These are the Star Colossi—creatures that are less animals and more living geography, veined with starlight and old as the stones. In the Pact, religion is not a matter of pews and prayer-books; it is a negotiation with the neighbor in the forest and a hunt against the titans of the ridge.
Ah, you have a keen eye for the marrow of a story, traveler. To understand the name Ark-Zul, you must look past the maps and into that first, terrible moment of union at the Okh-Ruhn.
The legends of the orcs tell us that in the beginning, the Heavens and the Earth were strangers who feared one another. The Sky was a realm of fire that that burned but could not be weighed, and the Earth was an empty stone with no eyes, wandering with no sense. It was the Great Smith—architect of the Grak-Tohr—who sought to put fire in the terrestrial clay. He fashioned a band of incomparable brilliance and cast it down. When that ring struck the plateau—the moment of the Zhak-Rinn—the impact was so great that the world gasped. The sky tore open to look upon its beloved, annointing her as Ark-Zul, The Sky's Bride, or Skybride.
We live upon the Ark-Zul, forever marked by this celestial jewelry. The stardust that pours into the pool at the Ridge is the eternal dowry, a reminder that this land was chosen and claimed.