History & Cultures · Important Locations
Hope's Reach
- Nation
- Karg, of which it is the youngest settlement
- Position
- The north-east frontier, where Karg's farmland gives out into the plains
- Chartered
- 901AF — frontier land, granted to anyone who will work it
- Reached By
- A rough track back to Bello, the capital
- People
- Arrivals, almost without exception. There are no old families here
- Governance
- The charter-holders, in common. No warden and no appointed officer
Hope's Reach is Karg's youngest settlement, chartered in 901AF and two years old. Most people in Karg have heard the name and could not put it on a map. In speech it is the Reach.
It sits where the farmland gives out. Behind it the worked plots and hamlets run back toward Bello; ahead of it the ground opens into plains that carry on north and east until they are the southern Wildlands and nobody's country at all.
The charter
Karg takes people. That is most of its reputation and all of its self-description, and underneath it sits a practical problem: Bello cannot hold everyone who arrives. The capital is a modest fortified town that was never built to absorb a steady flow of strangers, and it has been absorbing one for the better part of a century.
The charter answers that directly. It grants frontier land to anyone who will work it, on the terms Karg applies to everything else — no questions about where you came from, what you were, or what was done to you. A charter-holder is a citizen from the day they break ground.
There is no warden and no appointed officer. The people holding the charter decide in common, which is what the nation claims to do everywhere and what a settlement this size can still do by standing in one room. Bello is consulted. It is not obeyed.
The land
Two years buys less than people expect. The Reach has a well, houses that are mostly finished, and a track back to the capital that is a track rather than a road: passable by cart in good weather, and an argument in bad.
Against that, the ground has been generous. Two harvests in, the fields have returned more than the people who broke them thought they would, and more than the same seed gives in the settled country behind. Nobody has explained it. The Reach does not much try, and takes it for the one piece of luck a hard place has been handed.
Who is there
Everyone here arrived. That is broadly true of Karg and it is completely true of the Reach: no old families, no established trade, nobody whose grandfather cleared the field they are standing in.
They come from where Karg's people have always come from. Escaped slaves out of Curath who crossed the wildlands to reach a nation that would not send them back. People who ran out of somewhere else and had nowhere further to go. And Kargish families from the older hamlets who wanted land of their own and could not get it in a country where the good ground was spoken for a generation ago.
What they have in common is that all of them chose this, and most of them had to fight to get it. It is not a comfortable place. It is theirs.
The plains
A frontier is a frontier. Kitteri range the plains of south-eastern Aropria, arak packs move across most of the continent, and both raid Karg's edge on a semi-regular basis. The settled country meets that as an occasional bad season. The Reach meets it as the direction it faces.
Karg's answer is the same here as anywhere: volunteers, trained by whichever capable people the nation happened to attract, holding the line against bandits and monsters rather than against any army. Nobody has ever wanted this land enough to invade it.
What comes and goes
The Clerks reach everywhere and they reach here too, though not often — a caravan up the track, contracts notarised, draas changed, and gone again by the end of the week. The Ion'cavar keep their modest offices in Bello alongside the Presider's, and a settlement at the end of a rough track sees them when it sees them. The Guardians of Tomorrow are the exception: the charter keeps one of theirs in the Reach, week in and week out, testing the adults who arrive never having been tested.
The Kindlers have no house here, because the Reach is too small for one. They have an arrangement instead: somebody in town sends word, and a newly woken kin goes down the track to the nearest house.