Atlas entry
What the charts and ledgers of Kworgalya record of this place. Its own story has not yet been told.
Yards and drying sheds line the bank at Casobar, where a taiga river slows into a lake, and the whole settlement smells of wet timber and woodsmoke. Forest and water serve as raw material and road together: what the taiga gives up arrives by water, is cut and worked and finished in the sheds, and leaves the same way, by boat while the lake is open and by sledge once it hardens. Nothing here is made on a grand scale. It is made steadily, in small workshops that have learned exactly what the cold will and will not permit.
Casoban families came up on the fifth and most recent wave of expansion, and they still reckon themselves newcomers beside older neighbours. They are Lohanar, a small and practical population with a workshop's regard for a job done properly. Darolas rules the settlement and Keberun holds its allegiance, an arrangement felt here as orders for goods, obligations of service, and the general understanding that a frontier settlement is expected to be useful. The Religion of the Ruby is the faith of the place, and its priestesses carry the observances through a winter that shuts water and road alike.
PeopleThe LohanarThe Lohanar are the humans of Kworgalya's southern coast — a cosmopolitan civilization of jurists, merchant-princes, and guilds who trust the charter and the court where their…
CityDarolasThe Steadfast Grey City — a severe gneiss fortress on the shore of a frozen inland lake, holding the only bridges and crossings of the northern frontier with massed slingers,…
CityKeberunKeberun cuts ore from the mineral ground under the western boreal forest and ships it off its own ocean frontage; raised in the fifth wave of expansion, this Ashanar city answers…
LoreThe Religion of the RubyThe Ruby is the most beloved and most feared of the gods of the human south — and of all the divine powers of Kworgale, she alone is worshipped not as a distant maker but as a…
CityCelasorA scaffolded expedition camp above an intact buried temple-city of a vanished reptilian race — silver reliquaries, sealed doors, blind gold-furred guides, and the place the Ashen…
RegionCentral KworgalyaThe heart of the continent and the most crowded region of the Atlas — twenty-eight settlements across dry interior and grassland, where three faiths and two great blocs press…
FortressCinder PeaksGarrisoned high in the rocky mountains of the south-east, this small Lohanar fortress keeps itself under arms for the Emberguard and the Daskilon bloc, and holds to the Firewife.
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.