The Western Provinces

The Western Provinces are Cathay's hard and pragmatic frontier, a region of high deserts, iron mountains, and wind-scoured wastes that stretches toward the Mountains of Mourn and the Dark Lands beyond. It is the poorest and most dangerous corner of the empire, plagued by greenskins, ogres, and raiders out of the west, and rich in one perilous resource above all: warpstone, the corrupting substance that seeps from the tainted earth and which the west has learned, warily, to mine and use. Here the eastern terminus of the great Ivory Road begins its long westward journey, and the caravan-cities grow fat on the trade even as they guard against the horrors it draws.

The provinces are ruled by Zhao Ming, the Iron Dragon, a son of the Dragon-Emperor as pragmatic and hard-edged as the land he governs. Where the north trusts to discipline and the Bastion, the west trusts to alchemy, gunpowder, and cold calculation, and Zhao Ming has dabbled deeper in the dark arts of warpstone than the Celestial Court might wish. His people are traders, miners, and soldiers all at once, a folk who have learned to wring survival and profit alike from a country that offers neither freely. They are the empire's restless, resourceful edge, where Cathay's ordered harmony meets the chaos of the wider world.