Atlas entry
What the charts and ledgers of Kworgalya record of this place. Its own story has not yet been told.
Rain is the constant at Nurazar. Temperate rainforest closes over the country and drips through most of the year, and a lake lies below the workings to take whatever the slopes shed. The city rose in the first wave of expansion after the original foundations, and it rose for one reason: there is metal in this ground. Adits and spoil heaps break the green at intervals, and smoke from the smelting sheds hangs low because the wet air will not lift it. Water is both the great ally and the great enemy, driving the wheels and flooding the levels, so that half the labour of a season goes to pumping, draining, timbering, and cutting back a forest that would close the cleared ground in a summer.
Ashanar work these shafts, a people better known for coastlines than for deep ground, and the trade has marked them: a mining city keeps its covenants underground, where a bargain broken gets men killed. Nurazar carries its own name as an allegiance, and the surrounding country answers here, but the hand above it is Saradir's, which both rules the city and gives the wider bloc its name. Ore leaves. Direction arrives.
CitySaradirRiver-cut boreal forest surrounds Saradir, a major Ashanar military city of the west that owes allegiance to no other seat and draws it instead from cities out on the grassland.
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…
CityKadumaCut into cold conifer forest in the south-west, Kaduma is a modest Ashanar mining town where the trees that shelter it timber its shafts, and where allegiance is owed to Nurazar.
CityRumaselAshanar crews cut ore from saturated ground at Rumasel, a fourth-wave mining port on the south-western rainforest coast that ships everything out by sea and answers to Nurazar.
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.
CityPortavenaA city half-carved into the mountainside at the western gap of the Greathammers, drinking from fractured stone — the fortified gate through which the southern coast's trade…
CityPratanaCattle move, grain ripens and the festival calendar runs long in Pratana, a substantial savanna city sworn to Vallaris within Mareva's bloc and faithful to the Ruby in her…
CityPristanovRain falls most of the year on Pristanov, where mills, wharves and cleared orchards make a substantial Suvanar city of the temperate rainforest at the continent's centre. It…