Cinergis

The Silver Pits of the First Crusade

There were two cities on this ground, and the desert remembers both. The first was Argentum, a silver-rush settlement of the first expansion, raised over deposits so rich the metal could be pried from the surface — until the year -778 DS, when the Ashen Colossi fell upon it without warning. The epics say fifty thousand lights were put out in a single day. The histories say only that no one came back. It was that massacre that made the Elders proclaim the First Crusade against the Beasts, and it was two centuries before anyone dared resettle the grave.

The second city is Cinergis: the same blood, the same silver, and a new name taken deliberately, because the people who returned would not pretend the dead city had never died. To be Cinergic is to be descended from a rupture — and the local idiom has never softened. "Blackened silver" means coin used in treachery everywhere the phrase has spread; only in Cinergis can it also mean the tenacity of people who mine their own graveyard.

The Pits

Modern Cinergis is a planned extraction city, and it does not disguise it. Broad terraced strip-workings open beside the walls, pale quartz spoil heaped against grey stone; the silver is worked under state control, and most of the hands that work it are not free. The guards watch the tallies, the stores and the officials rather than the laborers — flight into the tropical desert is its own sentence, and everyone in the pits knows it. What smelting remains is legacy craft; the serious refining moved to Caminor long ago, because in Cinergis water is worth more than pride. The city wrings every drop: roof-catchments, mine seepage, imported barrels under seal — and, most visibly, the exhausted strip-cuts themselves, lined and flooded into vast open reservoirs that hold the city's industrial water in the pits its grandfathers emptied.

The Giant Trade

Cinergis keeps one commerce found nowhere else: it is the transfer-yard for captured Ashen Colossi. The fire-maddened giants still wander down from the Greathammer foothills, drawn by the long-legged browsing goats the local herders run through the thornbrush — and hunting parties of off-rotation veterans stalk the same ground, for a taken giant is worth a fortune to the Infernate's great works. The memorial to murdered Argentum still stands, formally kept, among a people whose state now sells the descendants of the murderers by the head. No one in Cinergis finds the arrangement strange; the Creed teaches consequence, and this is what consequence looks like with the bark off.