The Maw of Korrath 

At the top of the world, where the seas freeze to glass and the sun abandons the land for months at a time, lies the Maw of Korrath. It is not a kingdom in the way Antioch or the Concordat might name it. It is a cult masquerading as a nation, a people bound together by hunger, cold, and devotion to something buried in the ice.

No roads lead to the Maw. Caravans do not pass through it, ships do not call at its harbors, for there are no harbors. What lies there is a people who cling to survival by worshipping the thing that waits beneath their land, a presence that gives and takes in equal measure. To live in the Maw is to believe, or to die.

The Land and the People

The Maw is a frozen expanse of tundra and broken glacier, cut with jagged cliffs and fissures that belch strange vapors. Villages huddle in permafrost valleys, their huts built of bone and driftwood lashed together with sinew. Herds of tusked caribou and pale elk once sustained the people, but in recent generations their numbers have dwindled. Crops do not grow here. The only reliable sustenance is what is offered in sacrifice and returned in warped abundance.

The people of the Maw are gaunt, pale-skinned, and hard-eyed. They cover themselves in hides, bone charms, and tattoos that mark their devotion to the Maw. Outsiders sometimes call them mad, but there is a quiet calculation behind their worship. They endure because they believe, and they believe because they must.

Every generation is taught the same lesson: to turn from the Maw is to freeze, to starve, or to vanish into the ice.

The Hunger Below

At the heart of this land lies the Maw itself, a vast sinkhole rimmed by black stone and frost, descending farther than sight allows. The Maw exhales, steaming even in the dead of winter, filling the air with the stench of copper and rot. The priests say it is a wound in the world, a gate to the devourer, a mouth that must be fed.

Offerings are cast into the pit: livestock, tools, flesh, sometimes entire villages in times of famine. In return, hunters return with beasts swollen to unnatural size, veins glowing faintly beneath their fur. Fish caught in the rivers near the Maw sprout too many eyes, yet their meat keeps a family fed for weeks. It is corruption and blessing intertwined, sustenance bought at the cost of purity.

There are whispers, even among the faithful, that the Maw is no god but a prison. They say that deep within, entombed in the ice, lies the shattered soul-cage of some necromancer-lord who once sought to conquer death itself. His phylactery broke, scattering his essence into the land, tainting it, hungering still. The priests deny such talk, calling it heresy, but they do not speak it loudly near the pit.

The Cult Hierarchy

The Maw is ruled by the Pale Synod, a council of bone-masked priests who claim to hear the voice of the Maw in their dreams. They interpret its hungers, declare its feasts, and condemn its heretics. Their word is absolute, and their rituals shape every part of life: when to hunt, when to offer, when to cull.

Beneath the Synod are the Maw-Bearers, enforcers clad in stitched leathers and armor carved from caribou skulls. They wield glaives tipped with obsidian pulled from the Maw itself, and their duty is to ensure that offerings are made in full. Behind them are the ordinary folk, farmers of ice-moss, herders of warped beasts, mothers who teach their children to bow before the pit before they can walk.

Dissent exists, but it is quiet, buried beneath the snow. Those who reject the Maw vanish in the night, their absence unspoken.

Faith in Devouring

The Maw is not prayed to in temples, for the land itself is its temple. Shrines are made of skulls set into cairns, tokens of carved bone left along frozen paths. Families sing low chants while cutting meat, children are taught hymns before their letters, and every meal begins and ends with thanks to the hunger that provided it.

The people of the Maw do not call themselves damned. To them, survival is sanctity, and the Maw is both the proof and the price. They look at Antioch’s flame and the Concordat’s oaths as luxuries, doctrines that only those who live in warmer lands can afford. Here, there is no pretense of choice.

The Maw feeds, or the Maw withholds. That is faith enough.

The Maw’s Shadow

Though the Maw’s people rarely leave their frozen land, its influence seeps outward. Traders whisper of ivory stained black by frost, of strange charms that ward off death, of warriors who feel no pain until their bodies give way. Every few decades, raiding bands emerge from the ice, striking settlements in the northern reaches before vanishing back into the white.

What they seek is unclear: sometimes food, sometimes captives, sometimes nothing but slaughter. Yet those who survive such raids often bear strange marks upon their flesh, sigils that pulse faintly when the wind blows from the north.

There are even darker tales, spoken in secret: that the Maw hungers not only for flesh, but for memory and soul. That those who die near it rise again, pale and hollow-eyed, bound forever to the will of the pit.

No one outside the Maw knows the full truth. Perhaps no one within does either. But the sinkhole waits, steaming in the dark, and the Synod listens to its breath.

And when the Maw calls, its people answer.