The Lich Principalities of the Austral Pole

 "The Dead care not for Sorq! Not for its cities or seas or peoples. Sorq is a stain of squalor on an engine of unspeakable power. The Dead will take Sorq and possess it for eternity. We alone understand this instrument, we alone possess the whip to drive Sorq to the ends of this cosmos. We shall harry the foolish stars and cast them down into the Abyss! We shall feast on the murdered flesh of stars and defecate upon the restless churn of matter! The Dead will not rule this universe: this universe is beneath us, we will defile it and make of it what we will — and it is this orb presently smeared with living filth, that will doom any that oppose the Dead!!"

—Propaganda message from the Lich Principalities, delivered by resistless dream-sending to thirty-five of the 156 Vicegerents; twenty-four of whom have retired from public appearances, four slew one another in a melee, and three more Vicegerents have declared for traitorous parties and rebels.

Sorq is a planetary society. Unbroken equatorial sea, shepherds of the heavens making circuits by air,  airships for some cargo and travellers, and the fact that powerful and educated adepts of the Underworld may pop up in cities and other entrances anywhere on the globe that maintains modern infrastructure and facilities. Libraries, archives, and intelligencing memorious artifacts underly a host of education systems, including the temple academies intimately associated with power over the underworlds.

City-states and federations of such are very common; regional and . There are half a dozen preëminent cosmopoleis, great cities of prestige and culture, and hundreds more ancient, notable, and robust poleis at the forefront of the planetary order, and as many or more that have waned, or are recent creations. Periods of bloody-minded and vicious empires and warlords lay in the past, the last ending some -1200 standard years past, and the international order that succeeded it saw peaceful coexistence of vast dominions devolve into relatively peaceful regional polities linked with common laws and institutions, standardized units of measurement and currency, widespread and dense commerce, shared maintenance of roads, canals, aqueducts, and frontier defenses.

South of the Southern Discontinuity is the domain of a different kind of international order. Its rulers are liches and mummies who control legions of animate skeletons, golems, automata, and living slaves: humes and beaks, for the most part, bred as chattel, sacrificed or worked to death and raised as undead; the slave population fluctuates around two million humans and half a million beaks, with some ten thousand slaves of other sophont species. The industrial chattel economy is an innovation of the present princes, who seized power -60 standard years before fictive present. 

If either the Liches or Mummies can win a decisive victory and smash the power of the other, absorbing their dweomers and re-congealing their arrangement of phorce, the triumphant undead are positioned to conquer all of Sorq. It has happened before. Some of the undead rulers are relics from an age of great antiquity when they succeeded, and the Dead ruled the Quick for 808 years.