The Vallen Imperium

The dead bronze empire the Vale was only the far eastern edge of — a continent-spanning theocracy sworn to the god Vallen, ruled from the Bronze Seat at Correth, that went hollow the hour its god broke. No word has crossed the Rampart from the capital in four hundred years.

Everyone in the Vale lives in the Imperium's ruins and almost no one grasps how small the Vale was to it. The Imperium of Vallen spread west of the Rampart and on past the inland sea — provinces and bronze roads and tithe-cities the Vale never saw — and the Vale was its last frontier march, garrisoned and taxed for one reason: the god Vallen was said to walk here. When Vallen broke at Caer Vallen the march was cut off, the roads went quiet, and the order to stand down never came because the throne that would send it had its own catastrophe to answer. So the seals keep getting stamped (the Hollow Writ) and the silver keeps getting counted in a dead emperor's name. Whether Correth still stands, fell with its god, or simply stopped writing back, no one living knows — and that not-knowing is the size of the world pressing on the Vale's edge.