Torolok

Lake and Timber

Boreal forest gives way to open lake water at Torolok, and the city holds that ground with soldiers rather than with ore or grain. The forest yields timber, pitch and game; the lake yields fish, a landing for anything too heavy to drag through the trees, and in the cold months a hard surface of its own. Between them they keep a standing force fed and moving. Substantial as the city has grown, its drill grounds, stores, stables and workshops serve one purpose, which is pushing armed columns through country where movement is the whole difficulty. The lake face gives it a flank nothing can turn.

Loyalty Owed Inward

Torolok is a seat rather than a subject, and answers to itself. Smaller mining towns back in the taiga name it when asked where their loyalty lies, and the wider bloc that carries its name reaches out of the trees and onto the western grassland. Its Ashanar came with the third wave, forest-hardened rather than sea-facing, though the south-western care for obligation plainly stated survives among them intact.