Location from Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn by Tad Williams
The central kingdom of Osten Ard — heartland of the High King's realm, torn apart by civil war between two brothers and a winter that isn't natural.
Erkynland is the most powerful mortal kingdom in Osten Ard and the most fractured. Under Prester John it was the jewel of a unified realm — wealthy, stable, its armies respected from Nabban to the Nornfells. Under Elias, it's disintegrating. Nobles pick sides or flee. The cold deepens unnaturally. Trade routes fail. Refugees clog the roads. The culture is broadly Saxon English in flavor — practical, agricultural, suspicious of magic, devoutly Aedonite. The commoners know the old stories about Sithi and dragons but treat them as fairy tales. The nobles know better but pretend otherwise. Everyone knows something is wrong with the weather; no one wants to say what.
Rolling farmland and river valleys stretching from the western coast to the edge of the Aldheorte forest, bounded by Rimmersgard's mountains to the north and Nabban's warm coasts to the south. Cities cluster along the rivers — Erchester beneath the Hayholt, Meremund at the mouth of the Gleniwent. In peacetime, prosperous and green. During the Storm King's war, increasingly grey, cold, and emptied of people fleeing south.
Also known as: Erkynland, The High Ward