The Severed Anvil Marches

Renegade March — Border Forts and Reclaimed Quarry-Citadels#

"They call their commanders by rank, not title. No lords, no blood-right, no hereditary anything. I find this either admirable or terrifying depending on which side of the gate I am standing on." — road merchant, western Reach

The Severed Anvil Marches exist because the Iron-Bound invasion of the western Aurelian Reach moved faster than its supply lines. Three assault columns — totaling perhaps eight thousand soldiers and their support apparatus — were cut off when the destruction of Magnus Prime severed their chain of command. Their king was dead, their orders had stopped arriving, and they were standing in the middle of territory they had just finished conquering. Rather than disintegrate into banditry or surrender to the shocked local populations, the senior commanders held a field council and declared themselves a self-governing march under iron-bound military law.

Over the subsequent century the Severed Anvil Marches have evolved into something more complex than an occupation force and less legitimate than a recognized state. They hold twelve significant fortifications along the western border zone, collect taxes from a farming population that has learned to prefer their disciplined administration to the chaos that surrounds it, and maintain a merit-based officer corps that genuinely promotes on ability rather than birth — a radical enough notion in the current Reach that it attracts recruits from populations with no Iron-Bound ancestry whatsoever.

The Marches' existential problem is legitimacy: they are conquerors who have outlasted their conquest's political justification, holding territory through force of habit and the absence of anyone strong enough to displace them. The Iron-Bound kingdoms that spawned them do not recognize their authority. The surviving Reach noble houses regard them as occupiers. Only the communities actually living under March administration tend to express preference for the current arrangement, which is not the constituency that fields armies. Adventurers operating in March territory encounter governance that is efficient, unsentimental, and deeply uncertain about what it is supposed to be governing toward.