The Beast Fears Fire - Hidden Lahey

Crickton is smaller than it appears on the map. Much of the central part of the country is locked up in a tiny chain of mountains that might have gotten its start in the creation of the Gulf of Catastrophe and the sinking of the Ketteleye. There are some competing explanations - tales of a mobile mountain range that worms its way through adjacent realities being one of the more plausible of that lot, so for now we'll just go with geological upheaval in the wake of part of the continent collapsing. What we do know for certain is that the central region of Crickton wasn't always mountainous and now it is. Also that it is very difficult to pass through outside of a handful of well known passes.

The higher reaches of the mountains are lined with visible structures, mostly massive, snaking walls, and half collapsed towers, forming a labyrinth protecting some of the higher peaks. Historians assumed that the structures, similar to those all throughout Crickton, if somewhat grander in scale, were some Murrenic make-work project or perhaps some older folly from one of the Oak Oligarchs. In any case, exploring the central mountains was a low priority for the country and surveyors and adventurers found actually gaining access to the areas challenging and much of the structures choked off with drifts of mineral ice which seemed to move and spread in unnatural ways. The whole area is well known to be lousy with ghouls and goblins in any case, so very few went up, some did not return and those who did mostly returned empty-handed and frustrated.

Then the war came and the vampire epidemic followed on. We now know that a group of refugees from several of the settlements in central Crickton fled the vampires into the mountains and lived a generation and a half up in the places beyond. Recently, they returned in much greater numbers, with spouses friends and children from a group of people, thought to be descendents of the Ash and Birch people (light skinned, but having significantly different features than western people) and tales of a tiny country in the mountains, Lahey, ruled by tyrannical crystalline beings and full of trolls, metallic shape changers and stranger things, kept in check by the ice and their fear of water. These refugees speak of frozen villages, tucked between walls, girls taken to the mountaintops by strange forces, and a brutal cult the oversees the day-to-day life of the people of Lahey. The Crick government has no idea, so far, what to do about the existence of Lahey. Their diplomatic envoys do not return, people in the central regions are starting to report raids and monsters, and no other official word has come from the mountain kingdom.