Arodin

The Looms of the Great Lake

Arodin is what an empire looks like when it is being practical. A long, low, walled city stretched along the flat rocky shore where the enormous western lake meets the temperate desert, it was founded in the fourth wave of expansion for a purpose it has never outgrown: to turn lake-abundance into desert-endurance. Its harbor teems with freshwater shipping; its channels drive fulling mills; its reed beds filter its water; and the city works through everything the lake and the sheep-roads deliver — fish dried and salted by the warehouse-load, wool scoured and woven, hides tanned, fat rendered, brine boiled to salt on the southern pans. The saying runs that Caminor arms the Infernate and Arodin feeds and clothes it, and both cities find the division agreeable.

Undyed and Everywhere

Dinnic wool cloth is famous across the continent for three qualities: it is durable, it is cheap, and it is boring. The city took the insult and wove it into policy — undyed bolts in cream, grey, brown and charcoal, graded, measured and stamped at the Great Cloth Hall, hanging in pale fields from tenter-frames that give the grey city its one soft color. Half the working clothes on the continent's roads began on an Arodin loom, and the city's salted mutton and dried fish march beside Flammunder hardtack in every ration-pack the Infernate issues.

The city is built like its cloth: blue-grey gneiss walls and quays, red fired brick and roof-tile from the lake clay, blue-black slate over the warehouses. And it is planned around its wind. The northeast breeze decides everything: clean water intakes, reed filters and the better wards sit upwind on the northern shore; the harbor and loom halls hold the center; and the slaughter yards, tanneries, rendering sheds and salt pans smoke away downwind at the southern end, where the city releases what it has used through settling ponds and gravel beds. Order, in Arodin, is a matter of plumbing.

The Dawner City

Arodin holds one distinction no other city in Kworgalya can claim: it is the only majority-Dawner city in the world — the strawberry-blond people of mixed Suvanar and Lohanar descent, here so long and so thoroughly intermarried that mixture itself became the civic identity, worn in the clipped demonym Dinnic. Flammunder Suvanar form a wealthy minority, Lohanar migrants fill the laboring wards, and the town sorts itself by trade and water-access rather than by blood — a quiet anomaly in a continent that usually keeps its peoples filed neatly apart. Arodin answers to Flammund's sphere, feeds the desert cities, and grows slowly indispensable: which, as any Dinnic clothier will tell you, is the only kind of power that wears well.