East of Feldia, past the Spine, the maps stop being maps and start being guesses. The Wastes are the country on the far side of that mountain wall. Almost nothing about them is established beyond doubt, and this article will not pretend otherwise.
What is known
The Spine runs from the northern coast down to the south-east, and it is unbroken enough that crossing it is a matter of a handful of passes, all of them high, most of them shut by snow for the greater part of the year. Steinmark holds the Cold Gate at the northern end and keeps a garrison on it. Eisenmark holds what lies further south and does not discuss its arrangements. Past the passes the ground falls away into broken, dry, stony country that supports no farming anyone has managed and no settlement anyone can name.
Nothing is exported from the Wastes. No duchy claims territory there. No road goes in that was built rather than worn.
What is said
Accounts exist. They are few, they disagree, and the people who bring them back are rarely in a condition to be cross-examined. Herders on the Steinmark side speak of weather that arrives from the east against the wind, and of animals refusing a slope for a season and then walking it again. Old soldiers who served on the passes will tell you they never saw anything, and say it in the tone of men who would rather not be asked twice.
Feldian clergy have their own account, in which the Wastes are less a place than a consequence — the visible mark of something the world has not recovered from — and the learned in Kirchberg have written a good deal on the subject without settling it. The scholarly consensus, if it can be called that, is that the country is barren for ordinary reasons, that the stories are what frightened people at the edge of a map produce, and that the matter does not warrant an expedition.
Nobody has funded an expedition.
Why it matters
Feldia sleeps easily about its eastern frontier for one reason, which is the Spine. Whatever is or is not out there, the mountains are between. That has been sufficient for as long as the realm has existed, and it is a comfort that gets repeated a little more often, and a little more deliberately, than it used to be.