Brennisa

The Shadowflame Courts of the West

Brennisa is two cities stacked like a threat. Below: a dark, practical town of volcanic stone — warehouses, cistern houses, caravan yards — where the overland water trains from Linniska and the western Ashanar roads come groaning in through the Western Water Gate to be measured, tested and decanted into the buried Cistern Spine. Above, on ridges and stabilized mine-tailings, rises a pale city of cream and blush stucco, colored glass and silver-white tin screens, joined to the lower world by one monumental, guarded stair. The Guarded Descent is the city's whole social order rendered in masonry: everyone knows exactly how far up it they are permitted to climb.

The Faeries

What the upper city keeps is the reason travellers detour for a look and then wish they hadn't stared. The Shadowflame Fairies — fallen kin of the Radiant Fairies, who chose wrath over purity when healing could not save them — are beautiful, terrible, and entirely without mercy, and the Brennic aristocracy adores them. Noble houses compete ferociously to host one: as a performer whose art scorches the memory, as an agent whose errands do not miss, or as a lover, the sex of the noble in question being no obstacle anyone bothers to note. The fairies are independent in theory and hosted in practice, drifting ember-lit through the salons of the House of Embers; when one descends the stair, the lower city quietly empties before her. The whole precinct is built fireproof — stone floors, cistern-fed fire points, controlled drafts — because Brennisa long ago decided it would rather engineer around its guests than ask them to be careful.

The Best Traditions of Kworgalya

The demonym is old soldiery turned branding. After the Second Crusade the common veterans were settled at Duradun — and the officers and nobles at Brennisa, whose descendants kept the name the way one keeps a coat of arms. Their obsession now is the table: Brennic goat-dairy cooking — the milk, yogurt and cheeses of the western browsing-goat range dressed in sauces and pastry — is the haute cuisine of western Kworgalya, exported with insufferable confidence, and the city nurses a genuine grievance that Caminor's plain goat cheese is somehow better known. Each season the nobility also stages its strangest rite: the locust harvest, prepared by competing house chefs and eaten with expressions of studied delight that convince no one. The Shadowflame Fairies, at least, find them genuinely delicious — because of course they do.

There is tin under Brennisa still; the veins are not spent, merely beneath the aristocracy's notice, the Infernate having moved serious extraction to Brunthar. The city keeps what it prefers to keep: water bought by the wagonload, spent in reflecting pools — the driest city in the west displaying wealth as wetness, which is, a Brennic host will tell you, precisely the point.