Only once in the last thousand years has there been an earnest invasion against the Kingdom of Two Valleys. Even the Valleymen are not immune to the fickle whims of weather, and while amassing a great war fleet to engage in slaving raids against Nostrum, their fleet was lost at sea. It is said that ten thousand war slaves died in a single day, and for years afterwards flotsam and skulls would wash ashore from the sea.

Taking advantage of their adversary's weakness, Aethelwulf the Unready - king of Nostrum - rallied all the ships of Nostrum fit to carry men and a hundred more war galleys bought from Eastla. Thirty thousand men, the largest army ever amassed since the fall of Midasgard, sailed to the Wet Markets where Valleymen bought lives and souls with gold and steel.

It is said that the market fell in a day. A war slave betrayed the Valleymen, and left open a gate in the night. Nostrum's forces rushed into the city, and butchered the garrison. They freed all the slaves therein, and burned down the Guild of Commerce's hall. They prepared to march on The Rock, a mythical fortress a day's march inland from the sea.

And when they reached it, it is said that the king and all his men wept. No mere fortress, but an entire mountain. A mountain of carved arrowslits, portcullises, battlements, and exotic machines of war stretching from horizon to horizon. So much land was cleared in front of the fortress that the fortress seemed tinted blue from the distant perspective of the war host's camp.

The campaign ended that day. Aethelwulf left with his massive host, and a great bounty of plunder from the Wet Markets, not to mention thousands of freed slaves. Some years later, Aethelwulf fell to assassins and the following Valleyman invasion burned down Redwine, the Nostrum capital.

Valleymen

Those who rule this great land call themselves Cthonians, and they call their homeland Cthonia. Those who do not inhabit Cthonia often call it The Kingdom of Two Valleys. Both outsiders and natives will usually call the land, informally, "the valley." For the purposes of this article, we'll just call them Valleymen.

While Valleymen vary in height, most are slightly taller than the average man. The tallest Valleyman ever recorded is nine feet and four inches tall, though he could only be measured as he is a member of the Immortals, the slave guard for the king of Nostrum. The shortest, by contrast, is a little under five and a half feet.

In appearance, the Valleymen are universally strong, broad, and overbuilt. They are not rippling with aesthetic muscles in the way an elven warrior might be, but consider instead the appearance of strongmen. All other features tend to vary. Common eye colors run the gamut of usual human colors, but some Valleymen also have black or maroon colored eyes.

Their Strength

The most striking element of a Valleyman's appearance is their sheer physicality. The most unique feature of their anatomy is that their muscles never atrophy. No matter how long they gone unused, no matter how old they are, the strength of a Valleyman never fades. They are always and forever at the peak of their physical condition.

This could be said to be a double edged sword, but it really isn't. While a Valleyman must consume several times more calories than a mundane human, they are rarely left wanting for food. And that they are almost impossible to kill makes them also almost impossible to starve.

Their Fortitude

Valleymen are extremely hard to kill. Within moments of a wound's formation, no matter if they were even cut in half, their blood will staunch and the wounds will begin to close. If a Valleyman's head is cut off, the head will remain conscious for hours, and the body's heart will continue to beat for weeks. Longer, if they are tended to.

If a Valleyman is mutilated or maimed in the course of their life, assuming that Valleyman is able to return to Cthonia, it is not uncommon to see Valleymen with advanced, magical prosthetics. If a Valleyman is so maimed that they are unable to really function anymore, they will be made into what the Valleymen call a Dreadnaught. What remains of their body completely encased in magical armor, these elite constructs have never been seen outside of Cthonia, and even inside Cthonia are almost never seen outside of The Killing Fields.

Why not grafting?

While Valleymen may resemble most human derived lineages of man, under the hood they have extremely different anatomy. If a Valleyman is extremely injured, it is virtually impossible to replace their body part with another, unless that body part is from another Valleyman. This does happen, sometimes.

Their Souls

Cruelly, they were given souls. They are capable of all the magic of the Hours, though finding a Valleyman practitioner among modern circles is somewhat rare. Because of their uninterrupted history from the days when the Hours walked the earth into the modern day, most of their magic feels foreign and distinct from modern understandings of how magic derived from the Hours works.

What makes this cruel is that while they have all the capability of using their souls, including invoking the true names of others, they are denied from entering the Halls of the Dead. No one really knows what happens to a Valleyman when they die. Or rather, they used to not know. It was the life's work and legacy of Baal, first dictator of the Valleymen, to create his woods. Baal's Woods, an imitation of power vast and ancient, forms both an impenetrable protective barrier to the north of the Valley, and provides an afterlife for Valleymen.

The Bound

Valleymen who commit particularly egregious crimes suffer a punishment unique to their culture. Their soul and consciousness will be taken from their bodies, and emplaced in objects of power that require a consciousness to function. Their true names will be taken from the Hall of Names, and they will be essentially programmed with a series of complex but nonconflicting orders, making it functionally impossible for their souls to escape or refute their new purpose. Much of the functional magic of the Valleymen depends on these Bound, and makes the magic of Cthonia particularly stable and integrated into the daily lives of those who reside there in a way that magic simply isn't in the rest of the world.