Krios River

The Krios River is southern Duria's great border-water, rising deep in the Cambrecian Mountains and running south to the Maroshan Sea, cutting across or skirting the edges of Auteria, Daredonia, Kamaros, Malvetia and Neptaris along the way. Before the Foundation of Neptaris it was known to the Aris elves as Balinars; the name Krios has stuck ever since, and is now, somewhat inaccurately, more often associated with Neptaris's own sheltered Bay of Krios than with the river itself.

Krios River

Balinar

Continent: Duria

Course

Source: the Cambrecian Mountains

Mouth: the Maroshan Sea, roughly five miles southeast of the Freecity of Neptaris

Length: 346 mi

Realms

Flows Through: Auteria, Daredonia, Kamaros, Malvetia, Neptaris

Geography

The Krios rises in the high valleys of the Cambrecian Mountains and flows south into Auteria, whose Grand Duchy sits just below those peaks. In the foothills of the Cambrecian Mountains, it forms a border with first Kamaros and then Daredonia as it flows southward. On the southern border of Auteria, the Durian Road crosses the Krios where the Autrica River feeds into it, south of which the river forms the frontier border between Daredonia and Malvetia, and then Malvetia and the Neptaran Territories. It reaches the Maroshan Sea some five miles southeast of the Freecity of Neptaris. Visitors new to the city sometimes assume its waters feed the sheltered Bay of Krios beside which Neptaris itself stands, but the bay is a separate, silt-free anchorage cut off from the river entirely.

Tributaries

The Autrica River rises within Auteria and joins the Krios at the kingdom's southernmost point, adding its flow before the combined river passes on toward Daredonia, Malvetia, the Neptaran Territories and, eventually, the Maroshan Sea.

History & Lore

Long before Zarakos of Taranio's fleet made landfall, the river belonged to the Aris elves, who called it Balinars. When Zarakos's settlers founded Neptag on the six hills above the coast, they struck an accord with the Aris who held the river's eastern bank: no timber would be felled there, an agreement the newcomers kept in exchange for laborers to help the fledgling colony survive its first winters. The river's present name, Krios, came into use sometime around the Foundation of Neptaris, and it has outlasted every realm drawn along its banks since; Auteria, Daredonia, Kamaros and Malvetia have each risen, split from Cambrecia, or been renamed in the centuries since, while the Krios itself is content to just continue flowing through the history of men and elves alike.

Name

Before the Third Age of Man and the Foundation of Neptaris, the river carried its Aris name, Balinars. Krios is a newer name, adopted around the time Zarakos's colony took root nearby, and its exact origin is no longer recorded, though the similarities the word shares with the Aebasan word for 'ram' is not lost on scholars. It shares its sound with Neptaris's Bay of Krios, and travelers new to the city often assume one takes its name from the other, or that the bay is simply the river's mouth. Neither is quite true: the bay is a separate, silt-free anchorage that draws no water from the river at all, and which of the two names came first, river or bay, is a question Neptaran scholars still argue over.

Cultural Significance

Few watercourses in Duria carry as much political weight as the Krios. It stands today as the working border of five realms: Auteria, Daredonia, Kamaros, Malvetia and the Neptaran Territories, a role first set by Zarakos's own treaty with the Aris elves over the felling of timber along its eastern bank. Borders drawn on paper have shifted many times since Cambrecia's southern holdings broke apart, but the river itself has remained the one line every mapmaker can agree on.

This page has been identified as needing a map for clarity.