Zakaid: The Land of Blades and Badlands
"We don't have kings or queens. We have contracts. A royal can change their mind. A contract can't."
– A Broadhaven mercenary, explaining Zakaidian governance to a confused Verdanian noble
The Nation That Runs on Steel and Reputation
Zakaid is not, strictly speaking, a nation. It is a geography populated by people who have agreed to stop killing each other just long enough to make a profit. It had a crown once. The crown is gone. What replaced it is louder, meaner, and considerably better armed.
The badlands stretch across jagged plateaus, sun-scorched canyons, and deep ravines where rain is rare and, when it arrives, turns dry gullies into flash-flood deathtraps overnight. The terrain is brutal, the climate worse, and the settlements that cling to scarce water sources and sheltering rock are populated by the ambitious, the outcast, and the ruthless, people who ended up in Zakaid because everywhere else had laws they found inconvenient.
What holds this together is the mercenary system. Zakaid has companies instead of armies, contract law instead of courts, and professional soldiers as its primary export. The finest mercenaries in Mystaria are hired by kings, warlords, and merchant princes across the continent to fight wars that Zakaid itself couldn't care less about, so long as the payment clears.
The Two Companies
Every nation has its institutions. Zakaid has the Twelve Swords and the Broadhaven Mercenaries, and the rivalry between them is the closest thing this land of badlands and blade-work has to politics.
The Twelve Swords operate from Khairadden, a grim stronghold northeast of the capital where black banners fly over stone towers and fields of training dummies give way to rows of grizzled veterans. The company is led by Warmaster Adrigar, a man whose frost-grey hair and unyielding gaze reflect the cold practicality of his command. The Twelve Swords maintain a strict human-only recruitment policy, viewing themselves as defenders of "the ancient virtues of warfare." Their motto ("Steel unwavering, blood untainted") encapsulates a philosophy that scorns the multi-racial composition of their rivals. Draconians and cambions are despised. Goblins are beneath contempt. Each of the twelve Swordlords commands a battalion with absol ute authority, and the company's internal cohesion is maintained through enforced loyalty oaths, ritual duels, and the swift execution of defectors.
Across the Mazahran River sits Broadhaven Keep, headquarters of the Broadhaven Mercenaries, and everything the Twelve Swords hate. Led by Lord Marshal Korian Kaellan, Broadhaven is famously, deliberately multicultural. Humans, goblins, and draconians serve in its ranks, united not by bloodline but by a shared commitment to tactical excellence and contractual honor. The Keep itself is a fortress of stone and pragmatism: thick walls, underground tunnels, training grounds, armories, archives of past contracts, and even a multi-faith chapel where warriors of any creed can find solace before a campaign.
The enmity between the companies has roots deeper than ideology. It goes back to the Fall of the House of Zakhari.
The Fallen Crown
Zakaid was not always a land without a throne. For centuries, the House of Zakhari ruled from Nazmadden's old palace quarter, maintaining a court that was, by Zakaidian standards, remarkably stable. The Zakhari monarchs kept the mercenary companies in check through a system of royal charters: each company operated with the crown's license, and the crown retained the right to revoke that license if a company grew too powerful or too ambitious. The system worked because the Zakhari understood mercenaries. Several of the dynasty's founders had been mercenary captains themselves.
The balance collapsed roughly a fifteen ago when the Twelve Swords, under a previous Warmaster, backed a palace coup against Queen Rashala Zakhari and her court. The Swords' leadership had grown to resent the crown's charter system, which they viewed as a leash on rightful military authority. They also despised the Zakhari court's nonhuman composition: Queen Rashala's household guard included Draconians and cambions, and her inner circle employed goblin advisors. To the Twelve Swords' purist ideology, this was an abomination wearing a crown.
Broadhaven attempted to defend the royal family. Lord Marshal Kaellan's predecessors mobilized a relief column, but they arrived too late. The palace had already fallen. The queen was dead. Most of the royal household was slaughtered in a single night of fire and steel, and the Twelve Swords installed a puppet merchant council that dissolved within months, leaving the power vacuum that defines Zakaid today.
The Night of Broken Contracts (~79 BFE) was the aftermath: a Twelve Swords ambush on a Broadhaven column during what should have been a shared deployment, designed to finish what the coup had started by crippling Broadhaven's fighting strength. Letters recovered later confirmed the attack was premeditated. The shadow-warfare that followed (sabotage, espionage, tavern brawls that left scars on pub walls across Nazmadden) has never truly ended.
Rumors persist that the Zakhari bloodline survived. Whispers in the borderlands speak of a royal daughter spirited from the palace during the coup, protected by a household warrior who cut through the Twelve Swords' lines and vanished beyond the badlands into Nyambra. The Twelve Swords treat these rumors as a threat: the Warmaster has standing bounties on anyone claiming Zakhari blood or sheltering Zakhari loyalists. Broadhaven's Kaellan, for his part, says nothing publicly about the surviving heir. His silence is widely interpreted as strategic. A living Zakhari is leverage that Broadhaven may one day choose to use.
Nazmadden and the Badlands
Nazmadden, Zakaid's capital, sits near the salty shores of the Sea of Shrimata. Once a remote trading post, it has grown into a city of high walls, shifting alliances, and treacherous intrigue, ruled by a rotating cast of merchant princes and mercenary captains whose authority lasts exactly as long as their funds and their hired blades. The streets are alive with whispered deals and the permanent, underlying threat of professional violence.
Beyond the capital, the badlands are dotted with fortified settlements that exist to service the mercenary economy. Mazah, at the heart of the badlands, is a trading and hiring ground where weapons, goats, and stories change hands with equal frequency. Arkala and Yasmat are smaller, harder-bitten staging grounds for minor companies and outlaws, their allegiances shifting seasonally depending on who can pay and who can fight.
Life in Zakaid is shaped by hardship, resourcefulness, and a deep skepticism for authority. The people are fiercely independent and stubbornly proud. Goat herding remains a way of life in the wilds: herders, scouts, and smugglers traverse secret paths between isolated homesteads and tough-walled towns, carrying goods and information along routes that no cartographer has ever accurately mapped. Martial skill and reputation are the primary currency. Loyalty is transactional but fierce within one's chosen company. A Zakaidian who breaks a contract is finished, not because a court will punish them, but because no one will hire them again, and in Zakaid, that's a death sentence.
The mercenary companies' reach extends far beyond Zakaid's borders. Broadhaven Mercenaries operate across Zakaid, Nyambra, Sadoros, Khurayari, and Caldoria, taking contracts from caravan guard duty to full-scale sieges. The Twelve Swords project power into Sadoros, where they compete for influence in a fractured post-imperial landscape. Draconian mercenary bands, present in the region since ~570 BFE, have added their own tactical traditions to Zakaid's already formidable martial culture, and their "desert code" of warfare (ambush, patience, brutal efficiency) has been adopted by both companies.
