Olympia

Olympia is high, dry, and old. Its mountains hold empty temples that the priesthood guards without explaining, and the pilgrim roads that climb to them are older than any nation on the map.

The story every Olympian child hears is the same. When the stones fell, the ones who caught them came here. They lived on the peaks. One by one they walked down to build nations, and the last one to leave went north to Frysia. Olympia treats the empty temples as proof and everyone else treats them as tourism.

Three years ago Britannia annexed the southern valleys, called it a protection treaty, and started conscripting. Olympian recruits stand at the back of Britannian briefing halls in their own tight line and do not mix. The mountains still hold. The valleys send their sons to Frysian towns to shoot people who look like Frysians, and the sons come home changed or do not come home.

The priesthood has said nothing about the annexation. What the priesthood has done is close the highest temple to pilgrims for the first time in recorded history.