✅ This article contains no spoilers. Read on.
“Every valley has its own king, its own god, and its own feud with the valley next door. The one thing they all agree on is that they don’t like us.”
— Imperial Provincial Governor, Hill Country Dispatch, Year 847
North of the Empire’s fertile coastal plains, the land rises. First gently — rolling hills, terraced farms, small fortified towns that mark the frontier of genuine Imperial control. Then harder, steeper, colder. The roads narrow and eventually stop. The valleys deepen into gorges, the passes grow treacherous with ice for half the year, and the people who live there have been living there since before anyone in Maritana can reliably remember.
The Empire calls this region the Hill Country, and the peoples who inhabit it Barbarians — a label that says considerably more about Imperial attitudes than it does about the tribes themselves. The Empire has fought them, bribed them, contained them, and occasionally been seriously hurt by them. It has never conquered them, and after several expensive attempts has largely concluded that doing so would cost more in blood and coin than the mountains are worth. What lies beyond the highest ridges — the impassable peaks and the cold territories to the north — no Imperial expedition has ever successfully mapped.
The Hill Country is where the Empire ends. It is also where the Hill Tribes begin.
The Hill Tribes are not one people. They are dozens — perhaps hundreds, depending on how you define a people. Every valley has its own language, its own gods, its own customs, its own memory of ancient injuries and ancient glories. Imperial administrators, unable or unwilling to learn the distinctions, lump them together under the single word Barbarians and apply a single policy: keep them divided, keep them poor, and make sure no one chieftain ever becomes powerful enough to unite them.
To the Hill Tribes themselves, this flattening is both insulting and baffling. The Varadhi of the upper passes have nothing in common with the Sulekhan of the gorge-valleys except a mutual disdain for Sulekhan livestock-raiding practices. The Ardeni speak a language the Varadhi consider obscene in its vowels. The Tsarken build their dead into the walls of their houses and consult them before battle; their neighbours think this is deeply alarming. The Miraki consider the Tsarken’s horse-riding customs sacrilegious. Everyone considers everyone else’s marriage customs inexplicable.
What the tribes share:
If the Empire defines the Hill Tribes as a single category, nothing exposes the absurdity of this more clearly than their religious landscape. Within the Hill Country, you will find:
Ancestor worship — the most widespread tradition. The dead do not depart. They remain, in the walls, in the hearth-stones, in the high places above the village. Elders consult them. Priests speak for them. Important decisions — marriages, wars, the digging of a new well — are not made without asking. The Tsarken, who build their honoured dead into the walls of their houses, are the most visible practitioners; the underlying principle extends through a dozen other tribes in various forms.
Nature cults — forest spirits, river gods, the god of a specific peak, the god of a specific pass. Often local to a single valley or even a single family line. The divine landscape of the Hill Country is dense with presences, and it is considered unwise to move through it without knowing which powers claim the ground you’re walking on.
Shamanism — practitioners who cross between the living world and the spirit world through trance, ritual, and substances that no Imperial apothecary can reliably identify. The shaman is healer, negotiator, priest, and occasionally general. Among some tribes they are the de facto political authority. Among others they are kept carefully separate from political power — the theory being that a shaman who rules becomes too comfortable to cross between worlds freely.
Witchcraft — prevalent in the Hill Country, where the Conclave’s prohibition has no enforcement. Hill witches operate openly, pass their knowledge between generations without secrecy, and are generally treated as necessary rather than feared. Their potions, rituals, and curse-breaking services are woven into everyday life. This is the tradition that looks most familiar to Imperial observers and is therefore most casually misunderstood by them.
Blood Magic — not common, but present, and feared even within the Hill Country. A few lineages in the deepest valleys have kept blood-magic practices alive since before the Conclave existed. They do not advertise. Their neighbours know, and maintain respectful distances.
The Imperial Creed — in the foothills and the valleys closest to the Imperial border, conversion has occurred over generations. Usually through trade contact, missionary activity, and the straightforward calculation that being of the Creed makes dealings with Imperial merchants and officials marginally less hostile. The hilltribes who have adopted the Creed are regarded with suspicion by their neighbours — not for the theology, which few care about, but for the association with the Empire it implies.
None of these traditions cancels the others. Many tribes layer them freely — consulting ancestor spirits and a shaman and a local Creed priest and a witch, in approximately that order, depending on what the problem is.
The Empire’s relationship with the Hill Tribes is old, consistent, and deeply mutual in its frustrations.
For the Empire, the Hill Country is a border problem that never resolves. Containment is policy because conquest is impossible, and containment keeps failing in small ways — raids on frontier towns, harassment of the northern roads, occasional theft of Imperial livestock on a scale that crosses from nuisance to insult. Bribery works, for a time. Punitive expeditions work, for a time. Nothing works permanently.
The difficulty is geography. Imperial armies are built for open terrain, for roads, for the cavalry charges and siege engines that win battles on flat ground. In the Hill Country, none of this applies. The passes are too narrow for formation fighting. The valleys are death-traps for anyone unfamiliar with them. Supply lines stretch and break. Horses die of exposure. The Hill Tribes vanish into terrain that they have been navigating since birth, strike from positions that appear on no military map, and let the altitude and the cold do half the killing.
For the Hill Tribes, the Empire is simultaneously the primary threat to their independence and the primary source of trade goods they cannot produce themselves: iron in quantity, grain for the lean winters, cloth, medicine, salt. Raiding Imperial frontier towns is, for many tribes, not a declaration of war but a business model — one they balance carefully, taking enough to be worth the risk without taking so much that a serious Imperial military response becomes likely. The calculation is made anew every season.
The tribes are well aware that they cannot defeat the Empire in any conventional sense. The Empire is well aware that it cannot pacify the Hill Country without a sustained commitment it has never been willing to make. The result is an equilibrium of mutual hostility, occasional violence, and continuous low-level trade. It has held, with exceptions, for centuries.
The most significant exception in living memory occurred in the early years of Empress Maren’s reign — a crisis that is still the defining event in the Empire’s relationship with the Hill Tribes, and one that shaped Maren’s reputation permanently.
The background was internal Imperial weakness. The reign of King Marius De Valoren — Maren’s predecessor, whose incompetence is a matter of historical consensus — had left the Empire badly destabilised: factional infighting, financial disorder, diplomatic failures with both Highfolk and Deepfolk partners. The frontier garrisons were underfunded. The northern roads were poorly maintained. The signal the Empire projected to its borders was one of distraction and vulnerability.
The Hill Tribes read this clearly. Several chieftains tested the frontier simultaneously. And then, for the first time in several generations, something unprecedented occurred: a single leader emerged who could persuade the tribes to fight together.
His name was Acheh. Imperial chronicles call him the Barbarian King. He was a chieftain from the inner valleys, and he possessed in unusual measure the quality that hill country leaders most need: the ability to make other proud, ancient, mutually hostile peoples agree to set their feuds aside long enough to fight a shared enemy. He did not do this through conquest or threat. He did it through a combination of reputation, marriage alliances, and a charisma that the few Imperial sources who met him describe, with visible discomfort, as genuinely impressive.
United under Acheh, the Hill Tribes came down from the mountains.
The incursion was the most serious military crisis the northern frontier had faced in decades. Several Imperial provincial towns were captured outright. The northern reaches of the Queen’s Highway were cut. Acheh’s forces moved quickly, lived off the land in ways that Imperial supply-dependent armies could not match, and held territory that should have been impossible to hold. The frontier was burning.
Maren had just completed her coup and consolidated power. The Barbarian Wars were her first major test as ruler.
Her response is studied in Imperial military academies under the name it acquired afterward: The Snow March.
Rather than wait for spring to launch a campaign, or deploy a defensive posture that would have left the frontier provinces to bleed through the winter, Maren moved north immediately. Late autumn. Snow already falling in the mountain passes. The army she assembled was unquestionably powerful — but it was an Imperial army, trained for southern warfare, unaccustomed to snowdrifts and mountain cold, equipped with cavalry that would suffer badly in the terrain ahead.
She knew all of this. She went anyway.
The march into the mountains cost her dearly. Horses died of exposure on the high passes — dozens of them, then hundreds. Men died too. The supply lines were nightmares. The fighting in the narrow valleys was the worst kind: close, ugly, without room for the tactical movements that Imperial commanders were trained to execute.
She did not stop.
Acheh’s home valley was eventually reached. Besieged. Cut off from the supply and reinforcement networks that the tribal confederation depended on. The confederation, which had united for the attack, began to fracture under the pressure of being attacked in return — old feuds resurfacing, chieftains prioritising their own valleys over the shared cause, the always-fragile consensus of the Hill Tribes breaking under strain.
Acheh was captured.
He was brought back to Maritana and housed there for the remainder of his life — not in a prison cell but in comfortable quarters appropriate to a leader of his stature. Given an allowance. Allowed visitors. Treated, in every formal sense, as a guest rather than a prisoner. He complained constantly about the coastal climate — the heat, the humidity, the smell of the sea, the absence of proper mountains — and died some years later having never left the city.
Whether this was Maren’s mercy or her final mockery of him is a question that historians have not resolved and that Maren has never answered. She did not attend his funeral. She sent a representative. The flowers were expensive.
What the Snow March established was more important than any territorial gain, of which there were none — the Empire did not try to occupy the Hill Country. What it established was a message, delivered at considerable cost and received with clarity: the Empire, under its current Empress, will come for you. Through snow. Up mountains. At great expense to itself. Even when it would be easier not to. Touch the Empire, and it comes for you even up here.
No tribal chieftain has attempted what Acheh attempted since. The Hill Country raids continue, as they always have. The equilibrium of mutual hostility holds. But the memory of the Snow March sits in the background of every calculation — a reminder of what happens when the calculus shifts and the Empire decides to make an example.
The example cost Maren heavily. It was worth it anyway. That, as much as the campaign itself, tells you something about the woman.
🔒 INTERNAL NOTES (Remove before publishing)
Acheh’s name — “the Barbarian King” is the Imperial chronicle designation. His people’s name for him, and what the Hill Tribes call him in their own oral traditions, is not yet established. Worth deciding.
Individual tribes — Varadhi, Sulekhan, Ardeni, Tsarken, Miraki are placeholder names generated for texture. Author should confirm or replace with preferred names.
Marius’s exact failures — described as factional capture, financial mismanagement, diplomatic collapse. Full backstory in Maren’s character sheet. The Barbarian Wars are downstream of his reign but he was gone before they fully erupted.
Galenus’s possible origin — the Wild Baron theory that the first Emperor was a hill tribe exile is noted in the Empire article. Intentionally ambiguous. Do not stress here.
Cross-references: → midland-empire.md · maren.md · wild-baron-lands.md · non-conclave-magic.md
This article is about a Faction — Human Frontier Peoples
| World Overview | World Index |
| Wild Baron Lands | Wild Baron Lands |
| Peoples | Human / Empire · The Three Races |