The Floating Plains of Emuna

Emuna is the Province of the Angelic Unison hosting the Floating Plains, one of the shards of the Beyond.
Emuna has a mostly flat landscape with the occasional hills, a pleasant and almost tedious panorama made awe-inspiring by hovering slabs of rocks and massive levitating stones.
These “floating islands” are anchored to a specific point in space, different for each of them. The bigger the mass, the stronger the anchoring: a floating rock wide 100 paces or more is unmovable.
Smaller rocks have a sort of buoyancy that pushes them toward their “place” but can be moved around with effort proportional to their size. The wind is enough to move the finest particles, and the area is constantly enveloped in a delicate haze of this never-settling dust.
While spectacular, the floating islands are not particularly useful, a least for farming: their rocky core makes them unfruitful and prone to all kinds of hydrological problems (some will retain too much rainwater, while others will not help with any retention).
Still, many constructions, usually military and religious take advantage of the strategic position and inspiring nature of those places. Castles, abbeys, schools, and deposits are built on floating lands, even small helmets with a stable population. These structures and groups have been both a key asset and a thorn in the side of the Angelic Unison. The levitating castles have proven themselves as excellent defenses against the raids of the Antipope’s missionary hordes and the local religious orders have been always at the forefront of technological innovations, inventing hot air balloons and gliders, and improving winches, cranes, and elevators.
But the Floating Plains have also been a hotbed of heretic movements and schismatic rebellion against the papal authority. The out-of-reach convents in the sky have been home to outrageous ideas, grown more and more radical in their isolation. Similarly, the tactical advantage of high-ground fortresses has made it possible for dissidents and malcontents to hold their ground against papal armies. Countless bishops have declared themselves “independent” in one way or another, sometimes motivated by new theological ideas, delusions of grandeur, or just plain greed. But these seditions happen at all levels, with communities claiming to have built utopia on the rocks hovering over them, or just refusing to pay taxes.

This political restlessness has its roots in what’s beneath the levitating lands. The plains produce a key resource for the Unison: horses. The vast distances of the Angelic Unison and its centralized rule demand an efficient network of roads traveled by fast and reliable mounts. No other province can match the horses of Emuna both in quantity and quality, and that gives the local rulers some leverage and consequent attritions. Besides the numerous variety of mundane horses, the Floating Plains breed some of the most wonderous mounts, first and foremost the Pegasi.
The winged horses are the fastest means of transport, traveling places ignoring terrain altogether, and are also the most excellent war mounts, gifted with tangible courage and able to bond deeply and truly with their riders. Their value is also exorbitant due to their slow breeding and fastidiousness while growing up: only top-quality hay and the cleanest stable will make a couple of pegasu mate and their offspring grow up healthy.
Pegasi are not the only animals that breed here, since the vast grasslands can host many kinds of livestock. Enormous herds of bovines move from pasture to pasture depending on the season, driven by herdsmen in their migrations. The Celestial Drovers who tend the cattle have a specific and peculiar culture, inheritors of druidic traditions elsewhere disappeared or were absorbed into the church. The Drovers have a supernatural link to their herds managed through some apparently trivial means, their lassoes and whistles. They use different kinds of ropes, knotted in complex ways, that act like magical tools, and via elaborate flourishes, they cast enchantment spells that compel the herds. Their whistles can travel far beyond what normally sound would do or can be made selectively audible by different people.