The history of Ustalav is in many ways one of the footnotes of the history of Tar-Baphon. It was over a thousand years after the death of the wizard-king’s mortal incarnation that Soividia Ustav unified the Varisian clans and gave a name to the resulting country. Even during this golden age, the fractious Varisians would not be ruled by a lone monarch. To avoid disintegration of the country, one of Soividia’s descendents elected to share his power, dividing responsibility for its government among sixteen counties and thus calming the most ambitious powerful clan leaders. For five centuries afterward, Ustalav flourished among the other nations encircling Lake Encarthan, each of its long succession of monarchs believing that Tar-Baphon had met his fate at the hands of the now-dead god Aroden on the Isle of Terror. None realized that the immortal warlord merely slept, awaiting the completion of the rituals he had set in motion centuries earlier. When he rose as the lich known as the Whispering Tyrant, Ustalav was the first human land he held in thrall. He culled those who would not serve, raising their lifeless bodies to form his first legions. By the time he combined these with forces from the orc nation of Belkzen, the neighboring lands were unprepared for his assault. It took over five hundred years for the nations of Avistan to mount a unified defense. They might never have done so except for the rallying cry of the Taldan empire’s Shining Crusade combined with the dwarves of Kraggodan and the Knights of Ozem. Armies of dwarves and men struggled against the seemingly inexhaustible might of the Whispering Tyrant for more than seventy years before the Taldan general Arnisant broke the Shield of Aroden upon the staff of the Whispering Tyrant, sacrificing his own life in the act. That fraction of the god’s power contained within the artifact washed over Tar-Baphon, weakening him sufficiently for the abjurers and priests of Taldor to imprison him beneath the roots of his own seat of power, the dread Gallowspire. Ustalav rose from its ashes not as a phoenix but as a frail shadow of its former self. The counties once known as Virholt and Grolych had been reduced to a blasted range of desolate mountains pocked with the ruins of the Tyrant’s monuments. The lords of Ustalav have been content to leave that land to the restless dead, and they call it Virlych. The Shining Crusade claimed another portion of Ustalav as a bastion against the awakening of Tar-Baphon, and today that is the nation of Lastwall. Even among the central counties of Ustalav, three have overthrown their feudal lords to declare themselves the Palatinates, and the Prince has neither the will nor the power to defy them. Rather, he must concern himself with the ambitions of rivals for his seat, now in Caliphas, far from Soividia Ustav’s home of Ardis.
