Atlas entry
What the charts and ledgers of Kworgalya record of this place. Its own story has not yet been told.
Hard-leaved thorn scrub covers the country on three sides of Mazarka, stony and aromatic and burnt brown by midsummer, while open lake fills the fourth. The whole commercial logic of the city lies in that contrast. Caravans crossing the chaparral come in dry and unload where the water opens; boats carry back what the scrub will never grow. From the first wave of expansion onward Mazarka has lived on the exchange rather than on any one product, and it grew great doing so, with warehouses along the shore, weighing yards and beast pens set back from the water, and roads leaving inland toward the grass country.
Its people are Ashanar traders to the marrow, patient in a bargain and unforgiving about terms. The mining and garrison towns of the surrounding grassland send their allegiance here, and it is from Mazarka that their ore and their soldiery are directed. The city itself stands within the wider bloc that carries the name of Kerevoz, so that what is decided in Mazarka is decided under another town's name, an inheritance its traders long ago stopped disputing.
PeopleThe AshanarThe Ashanar are the humans of Kworgalya's storm-lashed southwestern coast — corsairs, deep-sea mariners, and pact-makers who dwell beyond the reach of any written law. Bound only…
CityKerevozA modest garrison town on the open grassland of the south-west, set beside a lake, where Ashanar families live by soldiering and take their orders from Mazarka.
CharacterAlysiraSix hundred years of whispers have worn through a dozen of her names — Samakta, the Queen of Deep Shadow, Malkat ha-Tsalmavet — but the world keeps returning to the simplest and…
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.
RegionSouth-Western KworgalyaSixteen settlements of grassland, lake and thorn scrub in the continent's south-west — entirely Ashanar, and the only region of the Atlas whose towns are all of one people.
CityZaharaGrass hides the shafts of Zahara, a modest Ashanar mining town on a south-western lake, whose ore goes out over the water and whose obedience runs 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.