Atlas entry
What the charts and ledgers of Kworgalya record of this place. Its own story has not yet been told.
Temperate seasonal forest covers the country behind Azurat, and the ocean closes it in front; the city occupies the seam, timber at its back and salt in its air. It is one of the original Ashanar foundations, among the oldest settlements that people made, and it has kept the advantage age confers, which is not defence but accumulation. Azurat lives by learning. Its substantial size is made of teaching halls and lodging houses, copyists' rooms and instrument-makers, and the steady trade in paper, ink and lamp-oil that a city of students consumes without noticing. Scholars arrive by ship and leave the same way. The forest keeps the fires lit through the wet seasons.
Its people are Ashanar to the bone, covenant-keepers with a taste for far horizons, and the scholarly turn here is less a departure from that than a version of it: what is agreed must be recorded, and what is recorded must be kept. For all its age and standing, the city does not govern itself: its allegiance runs inland to Bareshum, out on the grassland, and the halls here work under a seat they will never see.
PeopleThe AshanarThe Ashanar are the humans of Kworgalya's storm-lashed southwestern coast — corsairs, deep-sea mariners, and pact-makers who dwell beyond the reach of any written law. Bound only…
CityBareshumBareshum spreads across the open southern grassland, a major Ashanar city that lives by arms, muster and remount, and answers to no seat above its own.
CityBannevarSet between seasonal forest, river and lake, Bannevar works timber and grain, drills its levies, governs the country around it in its own name, and answers to Risbern in the…
CityBasaranShipbuilding and lake water carry Basaran, a substantial Ashanar city in the boreal forest of the west, raised in the fifth expansion and seat of the allegiance that bears its…
CityBerevikWhere an eastern river meets the ocean, Berevik builds and crews ships, works iron and canvas behind its yards, and keeps the Ruby's Beaconmistress; it is the seat of the bloc…
FortressBlood GateAn elven military fortress high in the snowy mountains at the centre of the continent, raised in the third wave of expansion and garrisoned ever since under the Bloodbound…
CityBrennisaA dark lower city hauls the water; a pale upper city spends it — the decadent western gate of the Infernate, where aristocrats keep Shadowflame Fairies the way other nobles keep…
CityBruntharThe brown city of four roads — gold shafts, tin-cut cisterns and the great sheep exchange of the north, where hostile blocs trade with the Infernate through a polite fiction…