Welcome To The Imperial Mainland

 The Imperial Mainland, the third realm of Dabord-Giem, is the political and economic heart of the known world — a vast continent of countless cities and trade routes older than most nations, held in uneasy balance by three great powers. 

The Northern Imperial Kingdom is a Human-centered bastion of law, commerce, and learning, home to the Great Imperial Academy and an Imperial Guard that enforces justice with uncompromising rigor. Beneath that order, the Sabas — a mysterious karmic justice sect — dispatch elite warriors against those who inflict great suffering. 

To the south, the fractured Southern Empire burns with a different certainty: all magic is corruption, and spellcasters are hunted and executed without mercy. What they lack in arcane power they replace with the world's finest beast and drake tamers — fearsome military might mounted on creatures that aren't dragons but close enough to end an argument. 

Scattered across the southern territories, Urzak tribes wage unending guerrilla war against the empire that branded their traditions heretical, fighting with tribal honor and a hatred earned across generations. To the west, the ancient Elarin Empire watches with patient, centuries-long indifference — isolationist, subtle, shaping events through intelligence rather than warfare. 

The mainland's politics rarely reach Darkridge directly, but its people do — Academy graduates seeking adventure, criminals fleeing justice, mages escaping southern pyres, Urzak refugees, and Elarin observers pursuing agendas measured in lifetimes. Where Darkridge is cursed wilderness and the Dragon-Fey is wind and waves — the Imperial Mainland is ambition, ideology, and the slow grinding of empires against each other.