The Beast Fears Fire - Remnants of the War

A very long time ago, the kingdoms in the west were united, more or less, under an empire, and the countries of the east were divided into colonial provinces under control of the empire.  It was a very long time ago, and records didn't survive in great numbers, at least not the ones that weren't recopied and edited to include the prejudices and agendas of their copiers.  Fact is, what people know about the empire is incomplete and suspect on its best day.

After the empire, or possibly just at its end, the Murrenic people and the Pineys of the east went to war, though, in this, the histories tend to agree that "war" was far to grand a word for what they actually got: a season of errors and hubris that led to mutual, back-and-forth slaughters and routs.  If it was the blood itself spilled or the pointlessness of the blood spilled, and if it brought the entity forth from nothing or from some other place, no one knows.  What they do know is that, deep in the center of the Ketteleye, where the Gulf of Catastrophe is now, a tower rose.

The tower was made of all the houses emptied of inhabitants by the war, and it bred awful scavengers that dominated the landscape for years before the entity, the Queen, finally faded, and the land beneath the tower fell into the water. 

The remnants dwindle in number without their queen, and, from having once dominated the east, only trouble the islands in the gulf and, occasionally, the shore.  That said, there are places in the Gulf of catastrophe where the war has never ended.