Evaskara

Snowline and Cold Water

Snow holds Evaskara for most of the year. The city is terraced into mountain ground at the centre of the continent, on slopes where nothing grows in quantity, and its one dependable way out is the river that comes off the ice and falls away into gentler country below. That river is why the place matters at all. Anything moving between the high country and the lowlands passes within reach of the walls, and the city is arranged for exactly that: watch-posts on the shoulders above, storehouses cut back into rock, drill ground and stabling on the few level shelves. Evaskara grows almost none of its own food and has never bothered to pretend otherwise.

A First Foundation Still Under Arms

Among the original elven foundations, Evaskara has been a military one from the beginning and has never been asked to be anything else. Elves are long-lived, and here that length is spent on the same duty repeated — the same passes, the same seasons of ice and thaw, held by people who remember precisely how the last hard winter went and what it cost. Grain comes up from the grasslands; soldiers go down. The city is sworn to the Glacial Dominion, and its garrisons are that power's grip on the heights.