Atlas entry
What the charts and ledgers of Kworgalya record of this place. Its own story has not yet been told.
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.
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…
CityVenestaHalf working port and half house of study, Venesta ships, teaches and mines on the southern forest coast, governing itself while owing allegiance to Arkenta and standing with the…
CityArkentaGreat, walled and mineral-rich in the southern shrubland, Arkenta heads the allegiance that carries its name, is governed from Venesta, and stands within the bloc gathered at…
CityBareshumBareshum spreads across the open southern grassland, a major Ashanar city that lives by arms, muster and remount, and answers to no seat above its own.
CityMazarkaWhere dry chaparral meets a wide lake in the south-west stands Mazarka, a great Ashanar trading city that gathers the ore and the levies of the towns around it.
CityMelekesOut in open grassland beside a lake sits Melekes, a modest Ashanar mining town that imports everything but ore and answers, with its neighbours, to Mazarka.
CityMendizurOn a cold western coast where boreal forest runs down to the surf, Mendizur digs ore within sight of the water, ships it out by hull, and answers to Kabaso.
CityMenyetsBoats do the work of roads at Menyets, a modest Suvanar town on an eastern rainforest lake that trades in goods, forest harvest and learning under Bannevar and, above it, Risbern.