Atlas entry
What the charts and ledgers of Kworgalya record of this place. Its own story has not yet been told.
Caminor has one sentence written into every stone of it: ore enters; armies leave equipped. Its iron mines have been famous for nearly two thousand years — deep fortified shafts sunk immediately beside the walls, so close that covered galleries carry the ore from minehead to weighing court to furnace without ever touching open ground. The city was already a great iron town in the second wave of expansion; it was the Second Crusade against the Beasts that remade it, when the whole war effort's forging, mustering and training were concentrated here and never afterward dispersed.
The city is built of its own bedrock: black basalt walls, foundations and furnace-bases, grey andesite gates and civic halls, red refractory brick glowing in the forge quarter. Beneath it runs its quietest treasure — a dwarven-built water system, almost entirely underground, whose covered channels and cisterns keep clean, industrial and recycled water strictly apart and drive the trip-hammers and bellows of the great halls. Charcoal comes in along three long roads — from the western forest coast through Linniska and Brennisa, from the southern woods through Portavena, and down the lake route through Derosam — and the city's controlled smoke columns can be read from miles out like weather.
Caminot truesteel is reckoned second only to Daskilon's among the forges of men — and truesteel here means exactly what it says: honest steel, made properly, with no sorcery in it but skill. Silver, gold and tin from across the Infernate come to Caminor's crucibles as well; the state prefers its refining, like its coercion, concentrated where it can be watched.
The city's very name is a dwarven compliment. During the Second Crusade, the dwarven smiths who came to arm the crusader hosts were so struck by the skill of the local steelmakers that they coined an honorific for them — and the city took it as its demonym and has answered to nothing else since. (The dwarves' other famous coinage, given to Rupater in the south, was not a compliment.) The Hall of the Caminot keeps that memory, alongside the Crusade's memorial court; and at the heavy forges one may still see the city's strangest smiths — retired Red Hoof minotaurs come down from Duradun, whose reach and strength no human striker can match.
Most of the hands in the shafts are not free, and the city does not pretend otherwise. But Caminor offers what the pits of Cinergis never will: a narrow, real ladder. A bound laborer who masters smelting or forging becomes too valuable to waste, and everyone in the shaft-field knows a name or two that climbed it.
CityLinniskaFresh water in a desert made Linniska: a substantial Lohanar trading city on a western lake where caravan traffic is the whole living, ruled from Saradir and sworn to the Creed.
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…
CityPortavenaA city half-carved into the mountainside at the western gap of the Greathammers, drinking from fractured stone — the fortified gate through which the southern coast's trade…
CityDerosamThe largest oasis in the world, ringed by a garden-city that guards its sealed spring with capital law — where desert nymphs keep the water and the water keeps the north.
CityDaskilonThe armoured heart of the south-east — an original Suvanar foundation on the edge of the Ashen Plains whose merit-chosen Strategoi teach war as a craft, whose forges alone can…
CityRupaterThe City Beneath the Mountain Bones — a fortified cistern-city where the volcanic desert meets the Greathammers, in which water is counted like scripture, safe passage is bought…
CityDuradunA soldier-built iron town of the northern frontier — open ore cuts, veteran grid-streets, and the Red Hoof minotaurs who muster there between wars.
CityCinergisSilver pits worked by the unfree over the grave of murdered Argentum — a state mining city where exhausted workings become cisterns and captured giants change hands.