Atlas entry
What the charts and ledgers of Kworgalya record of this place. Its own story has not yet been told.
Nothing interrupts the southern grassland for a long way in any direction, and Bareshum sits in the middle of it: a major city on open ground, raised in the first wave of expansion after the original foundations and grown far past what that beginning promised. Grass country is easy to cross, which is both the whole of the city's fortune and the whole of its problem. Bareshum lives by arms. Horses, mustering fields, forage contracts, long low ranks of barracks and stores, roads kept clear because a road that cannot carry a column is not a road. Herds graze the surrounding plain, but they are remount stock and fodder before they are anybody's supper.
The people are Ashanar, keepers of covenant, and here that habit carries into service: terms of muster, contracts of arms, obligations counted out and honoured to the letter. Bareshum is the seat of its own allegiance. Nothing above it gives it orders, and the settlements of the surrounding country look to Bareshum instead, so that a decision taken on this grass is simply a decision taken.
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…
CityArkentaGreat, walled and mineral-rich in the southern shrubland, Arkenta heads the allegiance that carries its name, is governed from Venesta, and stands within the bloc gathered at…
CityAzuratSet where temperate forest runs down to the south-western ocean, Azurat is one of the oldest Ashanar foundations, a substantial city of halls and study that answers to Bareshum.
CityEresarGrain and pasture keep Eresar going, a modest and very old Ashanar town on the south-western grassland whose harvests feed a wider country and whose allegiance runs to Bareshum.
CityGrivallumOut on the open grassland of the south, Grivallum lives by plough, herd and garrison, owing its allegiance to Arkenta while Bareshum rules it and keeps it inside the Bareshum bloc.
CityMaterumSet among cleared fields and workshops in the southern seasonal forest, this Lohanar town turns raw country goods into finished ones and keeps men under arms for Venesta and…
RegionSouth-Western KworgalyaSixteen settlements of grassland, lake and thorn scrub in the continent's south-west — entirely Ashanar, and the only region of the Atlas whose towns are all of one people.
RegionSouthern KworgalyaFifteen predominantly Lohanar settlements on the ashen plains and tropic forests of the south, divided evenly between the Ruby and the Infernal Creed, with the Greathammers and…