Location from Malazan Book of the Fallen by Steven Erikson
Eastern continent where a debt-enslaved kingdom fell to the Tiste Edur, and where the Crippled God's influence seeps through cracks in reality like poison through fractured stone.
Lether is a continent that monetized its own destruction. The Letherii kingdom built an empire on debt — not military conquest but economic subjugation, buying nations into servitude through loans they could never repay. The entire society organized itself around the acquisition of wealth, from the Drownings that punished debtors to the gladiatorial contests that entertained the elite. When the Tiste Edur invaded from the north under Emperor Rhulad Sengar — a young warrior made immortal and insane by the Crippled God's cursed sword — the Letherii military crumbled because the system had rotted from within. The continent holds older scars. K'Chain Che'Malle nesting towers dot the interior, abandoned or inhabited by degenerate remnants. Jaghut ice persists in northern reaches. The Crippled God's influence radiates through the land like infection through a wound — Rhulad's sword was merely the most visible symptom of a corruption that had been building for millennia. Tehol Beddict crashed the entire economy with a single act of financial engineering, revealing that the wealth was always an illusion built on suffering.
River-veined lowlands and dark northern forests stretching to a cold sea. The kingdom of Lether sprawls along waterways, its cities built from pale stone stained by centuries of commerce and corruption. The Edur lands to the north are old-growth forest — shadow-draped, the trees so ancient their canopy blocks the sun entirely. The coastline is rocky and treacherous, scattered with the wreckage of trading vessels and Edur longships alike.
Also known as: Lether, the Letherii continent, the Letherii Empire