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The Cursed Blue Rose
Between its clearings and its work-yards, Materum keeps a balance that few towns of the southern seasonal forest manage. The woods are held back rather than felled outright, opened in patches for grain, orchard and pasture, and what comes off that ground rarely leaves the town in the state it arrived. Grain is milled, hides are tanned, timber is seasoned and joined, meat and fruit are cured for the road. Production is the trade here, and harvest is its feedstock. A third strand runs beside them: the town musters and drills, keeps arms in good order, and sends men out under contract when its masters call, which they do often enough that a Materan expects a season of it in his life.
The Materans are Lohanar to the bone, orderly and contract-minded, and their loyalties are stacked as neatly as their stores. Venesta rules them directly. Their allegiance beyond that runs to Arkenta, and past Arkenta to the wider bloc of Bareshum, so that a levy raised in the timber yards may march for a power its men have never seen. Raised in the second wave of expansion, the town has had generations to settle into that arrangement, and it wears it without complaint.