Skaitos

The Ruined City of the Cinder Witch

Skaitos was a living city once — a Suvanar gateway of thirty thousand souls on the eastern rim of the Ashen Plains, where the road out of the ash met the civilized coasts. What stands now is a monument to a single winter. The invasion began in the last months of 1313 DS and was finished by the first thaw of 1314: the great gates blasted from their hinges, the timber hearts of the houses burned out of their stone shells, and the survivors driven into the walls themselves. Fewer than one in nine remain.

The Citadel of Sorrow

The cruellest touch is what the conqueror did not destroy. The city's original citadel stands whole at its center, captured intact and renamed the Citadel of Sorrow, and there Alysira, the Cinder Witch, holds her court. She rebuilt nothing; she had no need. Around the citadel spreads a city of roofless walls and scorched beam-sockets — the dark local stone endured where the wooden floors and roofs within did not — and through those quiet streets her skeletal soldiers walk their patrols in a silence that travellers describe as worse than any garrison's challenge. Where the fighting burned hottest, the ruin is fused into black glass: the locals who dare speak of the place call it graveglass, and they do not touch it.

Petitioners still come. The Witch seals bargains with those desperate enough to climb to her gates — boons bought at prices that are not always named aloud — and her Shadow Coven, a cabal of elven witches as brilliant as they are broken, serve her arts and their own obsessions inside the intact core.

The Living, Such as They Are

Some three thousand Suvanar survivors endure in the city's bones. They hold the outermost ramparts — the one part of Skaitos that was built to be defended and never taken — living in cramped bastions and concealed chambers, drawing water where the old aqueduct still runs, ranging the ruins for salvage and stolen caches. They do not rule anything. They ambush, they withdraw, and they endure, and their children learn the ruined streets the way other children learn a catechism.

The Broken Gateway

Before its fall, Skaitos anchored the eastern arm of the great southern road — the T-shaped route that bound Rupater's mountain gate to Vallaris and the Lohanar cities of the coast. Its conquest all but strangled that road, and the caravan wealth that once flowed through Skaitosi customs houses now moves north through Kharbeta's grasp, or not at all. On parchment, Skaitos still holds old claims over Rupater and the southern passage; in practice, its authority is a ghost that Kharbeta finds convenient not to exorcise. The city keeps one export the ash cannot bury: fear.