Atlas entry
What the charts and ledgers of Kworgalya record of this place. Its own story has not yet been told.
From a distance the country gives nothing away: flat lake-shore pasture, wind-combed, good for grazing and little else. Closer in, the turf breaks into spoil heaps, washing floors and the timbered heads of shafts driven straight down into the rock beneath the grass. That rock is why Zahara stands where it does, and the lake supplies the rest: water for the washing, a landing for the boats that carry the ore away, and a shoreline flat enough to build on. The town was raised in the first wave of expansion that followed the original foundations, and the diggings have dictated its shape ever since. Streets follow the haulage lines; houses stand wherever the waste is not.
Modest in size and wholly Ashanar in temper, Zahara reckons its households by which working they hold and how long they have held it. Contracts are remembered here longer than quarrels. Authority runs to Mazarka, the greater city of this country, while the bloc containing them both bears the name of Kerevoz. Ore goes out; instruction comes back. The arrangement is old enough that nobody treats it as remarkable.
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…
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.
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.
CityZilakoThin frozen ground under the western evergreens gives Zilako its living: a modest Ashanar mining town of the taiga, sending out rock and answering to the power seated at Torolok.
CityAndronisThe Walls that Walk — a disciplined bridge-fortress that sells war by the wall, fielding mobile fortress units that raise a textbook fort wherever they halt, ruled by 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…
CityArodinThe grey wool-and-fish city on the great lake's desert shore — Caminor arms the Infernate; Arodin feeds and clothes it, and lifts lake-water into the desert's throat.
CityAskavesThe yards of Askaves put hulls on the water where a boreal river meets the northern ocean, a naval city of the third wave of expansion whose ships answer to the Glacial Dominion.