Kretavia is the desert nation on the southern shore of the Sea of Coin, and the only power in the charted world that rivals Feldia for age, reach, and certainty about itself. It is governed by a council drawn from religious and military authority, in roughly that order of precedence. Its faith is older than Feldia’s and considers itself the source of it.
The land
Desert dominates, and everything else follows from that. Water decides where people live: cities cluster at oases and along the few river systems, and the distance between them is measured in the water a party can carry. The climate is not dramatic so much as unforgiving. It kills the unprepared quietly and in ordinary weather.
Caravan crews will tell you the deep desert has places where time does not keep. The stories are consistent enough to be worth repeating and vague enough to be worth doubting: a rider who arrives three days before he set out, a camp that burns down every night and is whole every morning, a man who came back speaking of forty years and had not aged a season. Kretavic scholars argue about whether these are divine, diabolical, or simply a flaw in the country — a scar in the world that never healed properly. The argument is old and nobody has won it. Guides charge more to cross the stretches where the stories cluster, and they do not linger.
People and faith
Kretavic society is hierarchical and devout, and the two are the same fact. Standing comes from faith, from birth, and from martial skill, in that order. The Kretavic Faith teaches that the unconverted live in darkness and that bringing them out of it is the highest work a life can do — which produces missionaries, and produces them armed. A Kretavic trade delegation carries more soldiers than the goods require. Whether that is escort or reconnaissance depends on who you ask, and both answers have evidence.
The language is Kretivic. It is spoken well beyond Kretavia’s borders, mostly along the trade routes and mostly badly.
Trade and craft
What the desert does not provide, Kretavia buys, and it buys a great deal. Farming is confined to irrigated ground near water — dates, grain, vegetables. Against that, Kretavic metalwork and textiles are as fine as anything made in the north, and the country maintains a standing army in peacetime, which few of its neighbors can afford to do.
Most Feldian merchants never see the mainland. Trade happens at the Bagii Atoll off the eastern coast, where northern and southern ships meet, settle, and go home.
Feldia
Relations are cold and entirely transactional. The two nations trade because both profit and trust each other not at all — a state of affairs with three centuries of history behind it and no obvious end. Kretavic raiding on the Feldian coast around Seehaven is regular, destructive, and has made that duchy permanently hostile to anything sailing up from the south.
More recently, and more quietly, Kretavic trade with the Feldian duchy of Eisenmark has grown a great deal, and diplomatic contact between them has become routine. Neither party has explained why. In a relationship this old and this cold, that is the kind of thing merchants notice and talk about.