Lyonesse

Lyonesse is a storm-battered dukedom of the far northwestern coast, where the grey ocean hurls itself against the cliffs and the wind carries salt and the smell of distant burning. It is a hard, embattled country, forever at war on two fronts — against the Norscan and corsair raiders who come out of the sea without warning, and against the neighbouring dukedoms with whom its proud lords nurse feuds generations deep. The knights of Lyonesse are accounted the fiercest in all Bretonnia, and they have earned the name the bitter way, in a hundred desperate defences of burning villages above the tideline.

Yet Lyonesse's fiercest fire is memory. This was the home of Landuin, most perfect of all the Grail Companions, whose grace, valour, and courtesy set a standard that has haunted the dukedom ever since. Its knighthood measures itself against that lost paragon and finds itself forever wanting, and the gap between what Landuin was and what they can hope to be has soured, across the long centuries, into a pride that borders upon fury. A knight of Lyonesse rides to war carrying an ideal he cannot reach and will not abandon — which makes him magnificent in the charge, and very nearly impossible to live beside out of it.