Location from Prince of Thorns by Mark Lawrence
Feudal Europe rebuilt on nuclear ruins — a hundred warring kingdoms that don't know they're fighting over the grave of the civilization that created them.
The Hundred Kingdoms are what happened to Europe after nuclear war destroyed civilization and feudalism grew back in its place. Nobody in the Hundred Kingdoms knows this — the Builders are a mythological precursor race, their technology is magic, and their ruins are ancient mysteries. The political landscape is fragmented, violent, and perpetually at war. Each kingdom is small enough to be conquered by a determined teenager with a band of criminals, which is exactly what happens. The Congress of Lords at Vyene is the theoretical mechanism for electing an Emperor who could unite them, but no one has managed it in living memory. The Dead King's threat makes unification not just desirable but existentially necessary. The Hundred Kingdoms are post-apocalyptic Europe refusing to acknowledge its own apocalypse.
The map of the Hundred Kingdoms is the map of Europe — distorted by a thousand years of post-apocalyptic reconstruction. Former nations have fragmented into dozens of small kingdoms, each ruled by a petty lord or king. The terrain includes everything from Mediterranean coastlines to northern forests, all of it scarred by Builder-era radiation zones and ruins.
Also known as: The Broken Empire