Tengeri-Gol is the river country east of Tsarigrad, an east-west axis between Wendland’s forest edge to the north and Arzawa’s mountains to the south, ending at the open sea on the eastern shore. The Tengeri on the southern bank speak Altaic and trace their line to ancestors who arrived on the eastern shore two centuries ago and joined the corridor families already running the overland route from horseback. The Vogul on the northern bank speak Ugric, run cedar-framed barges between the crossings, and supply the fish and forest goods the steppe families trade for at every waystation. Every autumn the corridor families come home to the eastern shore for Naadam, three days of wrestling and archery and horse racing while the home families count the year’s foals and the children born along the route are introduced to the herd.
The gers stand with their entrances facing south. The horses are stocky and deep-chested, bred for the steppe, and the herd is what the family is worth. The del is heavy wool, cinched at the waist, the cuffs and collar trimmed with marten fur. At every crossing point an ovoo of stacked stones sits by the waystation door, and blue khadag are tied to mast poles and tent frames and the branches of significant trees. The waystation tea-houses serve salted brick-tea with butter at all hours, and aaruul travels in a leather pouch on every belt. The boat families paint their oars with charcoal and birch tar each spring before the ice goes out and the season opens.
The corridor runs once a year. The river comes up with the snowmelt in spring and the goods are loaded onto the barges, which ride the flood west to Tsarigrad while the wagons follow overland through soft ground. By autumn the river has dropped, the steppe is dry and hard, and the return becomes one column moving east against the current: wagons on the bank, barges on the water, spare horses harnessed to the towlines for the hard pulls. Six months of the year the working population is east of Tsarigrad and moving; the other six the river is frozen and the column is home at the eastern shore.
At every ovoo the traveler stops, adds a stone, and walks clockwise three times. The Tengeri call this the toll of the land, and a Caravan-Lord who skips a cairn finds the next stretch of road harder than it should be. At the spring thaw the headman pours milk into the river at the headwaters. The corridor families gather at the great ovoo on the eastern shore for the takhilga, where stones are added by every hand that is going, khadag are tied to the cairn poles, milk and airag are poured, and the horses not making the run are released to summer pasture. Half the community is going away for six months, and everyone at the gathering knows some who left last spring did not come back this autumn.
At the eastern shore the home families stay year-round, the elders and the children and the breeding herds that produce the next column’s horses. When a corridor family loses one of theirs on the road, the body is carried east for three days before being returned to the sky, and the youngest in the family ties a piece of the deceased’s harness to the nearest ovoo. The clan that passes the ovoo the following spring still knows whose it was, and the next traveler to add a stone walks the protocol for the dead too.
In Grimmloch the Ka’Agorate’s Consortium runs the long trade halls and keeps a ledger of every route the syndicate has crews on, and a Caravan-Lord who has kept the corridor open through the season arrives speaking the trade-tongue. The Dunraven Folk’s Nemedain walk between worlds, and a Tengeri who has carried the dead east for three days and tied a harness to the ovoo arrives knowing how to walk for someone who can’t. The Aelfyn Sith’s Horde keeps the cave systems and the high routes that the settled world abandoned, and a Tengeri whose home comes down at dawn and goes up at dusk arrives knowing how to live in country that does not provide walls.
Grimmloch is an alternate reality — not a retelling of history. I have spent decades studying the stories of our own world so that each region feels grounded in something real, even when the fiction diverges. The map is not the territory. If I have, at any point, failed to honor the spirit of these cultures, please email me directly. I welcome the opportunity to address it.