The greatest power of the valleys
At the entrance to the great land of Vashrath stands Cripta — the largest and most populous city of the Forgotten Realms, and for that very reason the most powerful. Little is known and much is said about how it all began: they tell that, in the beginning, nomads opened the first roads and routes of the continent. No one knows where they started, nor when. But camps were raised, and then walls, and then castles — and, at last, kingdoms. Cripta grew at the threshold of it all, guarding the gates through which the awakened enter the world.
The sovereign emperor
In Cripta resides the most controversial figure of all: the king Sangezer, held to be sovereign emperor of the lands of Vash — or, at the very least, of whatever he manages to control. It is under his name that the greatest city stands, and it is his throne that makes Cripta the political heart of the valleys.
Of his origins, of how he rose to power, and of how far his dominion truly reaches, little can be stated with certainty. Not even the Three Great Ones, unseen and spiritual, occupy the same kind of place as he does: Sangezer rules in flesh, in walls, and in decrees. Some see him as the only order possible in a world made of the banished; others, as just another exile who knew how to raise a throne wherever he found room for one. Much is said — and, in Vashrath, saying much is rarely the same as knowing.
The weight of ruling the banished
To reign in Cripta is not to reign over ordinary subjects. Every inhabitant of the city arrived banished, exiled, or fleeing from somewhere — and every newly awakened who crosses the gates carries a story no one knows. Keeping order over such a people demands more than a crown: it demands the registry of Cassius, the forward guard of Sirius, and the hard law that keeps the city from dissolving back into the chaos its people came from.
That is why Sangezer's dominion is at once immense and fragile. Immense, because no other city gathers so many people and so much strength. Fragile, because to rule "whatever one can control" is to admit that beyond the walls there is much that escapes the emperor — valleys contested by factions, regions that answer to other lords, and the open world where each one answers for themselves.
Echoes and rumors
Cripta is also the city of rumors. If there is a story unfolding anywhere in the valleys, chances are someone in Cripta has already heard of it before the people involved have. Among those rumors runs the one about the Countess — guide to newcomers and keeper of every shortcut in the city — who is said to have come from other lands in her childhood. But, as they like to say in Vashrath: they say that, and they say a great many things.
The regions beyond Cripta — Frostown, Kharvoss, Valdren, and Veskar — are told in The Known Regions.