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The Cursed Blue Rose
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.