The Border

The Border is the frontier between Valentia and Dagoneth, administered as part of the Neutral Territories. It is less a line than a zone, the seam where the authority of two crowns thins, overlaps, and is deliberately left unresolved.

That softness is a design, not a failure. A hard border would force a reckoning between the nation that holds the law and the nation that holds the food, and neither can afford it. So the frontier is kept porous: a place where merchants, mediators, and smugglers move with a freedom unthinkable deeper inside either realm, and where the question of whose writ applies is often answered by where, exactly, a person happens to be standing.

Its order is maintained not by walls but by arbitration. The neutral city of Duarn anchors the whole arrangement, giving the borderland a centre of gravity and a working venue for the disputes that would otherwise be settled by force. The Border functions for precisely as long as both powers prefer its ambiguity to the cost of resolving it, which has been long enough to feel permanent and is nothing of the kind.