Type: Province
Country: Shenyun
Continent: Orethar

Akanegumo, the Cloud Province, is the corner of Shenyun the empire would rather forget: a remote land of fog-wrapped valleys, river gorges, and deep forest in the west-central reaches of the country. Here ghosts and monsters are not bedtime stories but a fact of daily life, and the customs its people keep, a lit lantern at every gate, the Eight Practices through the ghost season, offerings no one explains to outsiders, arise from necessity rather than superstition. Two years ago the Severing cut the province loose from the empire, and it has carried on much as it always has: self-sufficient, wary, and, so long as the old customs are kept, mostly quiet.

The province rises in the northwest to the temple-strewn highlands of Kibo No Taiga and falls away eastward through valley after fog-wrapped valley, cut by river gorges and cloaked in the haunted woodland of the Yūreimori, down at last to the great inland Sea of Ghosts that fills its eastern lowlands. Roads are few and the fog rarely lifts, so travel between its settlements means long stretches of forest and mountain trail where the living dangers are no less real than the dead ones. By provincial custom, a town without a lit lantern at its entrance is counted abandoned, and abandoned places, everyone here knows, invite things in.

Since the Severing of 3,013 AC, no imperial tax circuit has ridden Akanegumo's roads and no garrison has been posted within its borders; the court simply stopped enforcing its claim and stopped looking. In the disorder that followed, the province's abandoned officials turned briefly to petty tyranny, and then, folk say, the ghosts and monsters of Akanegumo's long memory swept down from the highlands and out of the forest and made the tyrants their first harvest. People speak of spider-women holding the province's high seats now, though few claim to have seen one. Beneath the stories, ordinary life goes on: scattered communities getting by on rice terraces, river fishing, and timber, keeping their lanterns lit and their offerings faithful. Its largest settlements are Tsuchi no Ichi, the grey market city in the southwest, and Shiosaki, the fortified market on the Sea of Ghosts, with self-reliant river towns like Yanagihama scattered far between.