The southernmost portion of the Kellna Wastelands of the south, scorched and poisoned in the Kellna Catastrophe at the end of Emperor Devon-Lars I's reign, finally recovered enough to be livable during the Middle Imperial Era, during the reign of Drevis III, and, as none of the five nations destroyed in the Catastrophe had any successor state beyond the occasional tribe of nomadic barbarians, the lands were settled by Imperial Citizens, founding the famous twelve Frontier Towns as well as several smaller settlements.

Isolated by the still-dangerous Wastelands from land and air traffic, connected to the greater empire only by sea, and that only when not impeded by Hurricanes, the Frontier Towns quickly acquired a culture of independence and self-sufficiency. Their culture diverged further from the Imperial norm when the remnants of the barbarian tribes in the region settled in and around the towns, creating a culture that was a fusion of their own and the Uzdamalian settlers'.

Thus, the Frontier Towns gained a reputation for rampant heterodoxy and dissent. Representatives of the Embryonic Police who were sent there tended to either retreat in disgrace, go missing entirely, or 'go native', accepting the frontier's hybrid culture-which included aspects as shocking as the permissibility of group portraits of mixed-gender groups by artists who weren't even eumuchs. As could be expected, the rate of Borritry in the Frontier Towns was considerably higher than the imperial average.

As Targhandism began to spread, its missionaries found a poor reception in the Frontier Towns. "How can the world be hell," was the typical response to their sermons, "When it contains something so beautiful as the Gardens of Drevia?" The Targhandic response to this argument, Targhand's Epistle to the Southlanders (which, like most of the Works of Targhand other than Glorious Word itself, is much more likely to have been written by Ghizni or Zoeller than by Targhand himself), while reassuring to the faithful back east and in the central part of the Empire, did not win many converts among its supposed audience.

During the late Jacini Dynasty, Imperial accountants discovered that the cost of collecting taxes from the Frontier Towns was actually well in excess of the revenues received, and the cost of defending them military from any hypothetical threat would be astronomical. So the Frontier Towns were granted independence from the empire against their will. They formed a loose coalition which only lasted a few decades before collapsing into a state of occasional small wars between the towns and a shifting dance of alliance among them. Currently, Prince Drevis X of New Uzda (who claims the name by an extremely tenuous trail from one of the fleeing heirs of Drveis V) leads the largest such alliance, comprising five of the twelve towns, and has begun to fancifully refer to a 'Third Uzdumalian Empire', to much sniggering in the more sophisticated courts of the world.

See Also:

Borrits

Devon-Lars I

Embryonic Police

Gardens of Drevia

Hurricanes

Kellna Catastrophe

Works of Targhand

Hell