Le Roi

The swamp swallows whole. 10 years gone, a wooden house will be overgrown. 20 years, it begins to sink into the mud. 30, and it is a framework of petrified wood. Even stone sinks.

Le Roi is a city of stone. It was designed after Paris, with wide avenues, magnificent monuments, and dense blocks of apartments.

The city is now 100 years old, and is 2 stories below sea level. Having sunk for a century, no building stands straight. The avenues have become canals, populated by gondoliers and alligators. Balconies have become entrances. Parks have become marketplaces, stalls built on rafts tied to the tops of drowned trees. In summer it is like a great simmering sauce pan, baking the stone. In storms the city seems already drowned and howling for breath.

The youth are fond of jumping into the water from the rooftops, or diving into the flooded ground floors, hoping to find left behind treasures. The city council has attempted to stop these activities do to injuries and parasites, but with little success. Among adults fishing is a common pastime, often done out of windows. Most are the businesses of smuggling guns and rum.

The manors built along the shore are hardest hit by the shores and were quickly abandoned by the rich and seized by the poor. Isolated families live in attics, surviving on what they can fish from the sea.

Hamun-ran

South of the mountains streches a great salt desert, white dunes as far as the eye can see and a wind that stings the eyes. It is not hot, but rain never falls, and the air is drier than anywhere else in the world. There are no rivers, but there are oases, where water bubbles to the surface. The greatest of these springs is surrounded by the palace of the god-king Hamun, which is surrounded by the city of Hamun-ran, "Hamun's Household," built entirely out of salt.

Hamun has absolute control over the spring. Not a sip is drunk in the city without his blessing. It is his terrace-tower gardens that supply all food. It is his masked and voiceless guard who keep the peace, it is they who prevent any from leaving the city.

Hamun's wife, the Queen of Birds, keeps watch over the people through the eyes of vultures. She alone lives in a building not made of salt, but a gilded stone tower whose shine becomes painful to look at when the sun has risen. No one has seen the Queen of Birds, and it is rumored that there have been many Queens, discarded and replaced at Hamun's whim.