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Varneth
Crest: Argent, a black tower rising from a mire, flanked by twin crescents sable
General Information Realm The Reaches Population ca. 160,000 Dominant Culture Migrant-stock, smuggler families, marsh clans Local Demonym Varnethi Ruling Authority The Council of Nine Key Features Founded Informally settled post-Shattering (~400 years ago) Known For Assassins, black markets, poetry, political intrigue Landmarks The Black Stilt, Fogglass Forum, Shrine of the Drowned Military Presence Personal guards, shadow militias, contracted blades Temples Veil shrines, spirit cult enclaves, old marsh totems Trade Goods Marshroot, smoked eels, poisons, rare inks, information
Overview
Varneth clings to the southern edge of the Reaches like moss on stone - wet, dark, and older than it lets on. Built atop stilts, levees, and reworked ruins, the city sprawls across the coastal mire, half-floating on silt and secrets. The scent of brine and smoke hangs in the air, masking quieter currents: betrayal, blackmail, whispered debts. No city in the Reaches speaks softer or strikes sharper. Varneth does not announce its power - it simply waits for you to owe it something.
Culturally diverse and politically volatile, Varneth is a city of contradictions: poets share taverns with poisoners; cult leaders dine with merchant princes; assassins leave offerings at Veil shrines before vanishing into fog-choked alleys. Governed by the elusive Council of Nine, whose members change often and never publicly convene, the city exists in a state of elegant chaos - surviving by balancing danger against opportunity. In Varneth, truth is rarely spoken plainly, and trust is a currency more volatile than coin.
History
Varneth was not founded - it formed. In the wake of the Shattering, as southern trade routes collapsed and refugee caravans floundered at the river's edge, bands of displaced families, exiles, and marsh-folk began to stake claim to the coastal lowlands. The site where Varneth now stands was once a flooded ruin - remnants of some forgotten outpost buried in silt and salt. Raised walkways, driftwood stilts, and scavenged stone formed the first "streets". Over generations, the city grew like a fungus in the wet earth - improvised, decentralized, and impossible to uproot. It became a haven for those who had no other, a swamp that offered safety not through walls, but through secrecy.
Its most infamous chapter came during the event later known as The Ninefold Severance, when several Free Cities formed a quiet alliance to eliminate Varneth’s influence over black market trade and undercut its growing control of southern commerce. What followed was not a war, but a quiet unmaking - over a hundred foreign officials vanished, merchant fleets burned in the night fog, and entire guilds collapsed under forged debts and poisoned oaths. No formal declaration was ever made, and no victor named, but after that, no city dared speak of Varneth as lawless again - they simply learned to negotiate differently.
Notable figures have rarely survived long in the public eye, but a few endure in story. Ysera Thorne, called “the Widow of Coins,” once ruled five of the Nine seats through blackmail and marriage alone. Kelem Vos, a former slave, created the Fogglass script, a coded writing style used by spies and smugglers across the southern Reaches. And the Silent Choir, a nameless collective of assassins, is rumored to have been born in the drowned catacombs beneath the city’s western quarter.
Geography & Layout
Spread across the marsh-riddled southern coast, the city’s foundations a patchwork of stilts, sunken stone, and levee walls that divide it from the deeper wetlands beyond. The city has no natural elevation - its skyline is mists and lanterns, rising in broken layers of black-tiled roofs, wooden scaffolding, and coral-pocked towers built on reclaimed wrecks. The Black Stilt, a tower of stone and wrought iron that leans ominously over the central ward, serves as the city’s oldest structure and symbolic center - part lighthouse, part prison, part temple, depending on who tells the tale.
The city is roughly divided into four irregular wards:
- The Driftmarkets, a tangle of boardwalks and barges that serve as floating bazaars, anchored but never still.
- The Saltvein Quarter, home to guildhouses, smugglers’ dens, and poison distilleries hidden behind respectable fronts.
- The Tidal Row, where artists, scribes, and glassmakers work beside dream-herbalists and ink-sellers, beneath painted eaves.
- The Lichenwalks, a sprawling slum of tilting structures, half-submerged shrines, and sagging footbridges that vanish in mist.
There are no city walls - only the marsh, the tide, and silence. Those who seek Varneth by land often get lost in the reed-choked paths that shift with the season. Most arrive by boat, guided by lantern buoys and tide-runners who know which lights are safe to follow. Beneath the city lie flooded cisterns, catacombs, and drowned alleys - some sealed, some used, all rumored to listen when spoken to.
Governance & Law
Varneth is governed - if the word still applies - by the enigmatic Council of Nine, a body of masked figures whose names are rarely confirmed and whose meetings never occur in public. Each seat on the council represents a faction, guild, family, or hidden power center within the city, though their allegiances shift like the tides. Some members rule openly from estate halls in Tide Row. Others are never seen, their decisions relayed through whispered envoys and blood-marked seals. It is said one of the Nine is always a poisoner, another a spirit-channeler, and at least one seat is held by a dead man’s will.
There are no written laws in Varneth - only precedents and prices. Justice is a matter of influence, debt, and silence. Petty crimes are ignored if unprofitable to pursue; major crimes are punished only when they disturb the city’s equilibrium. Duels are legal if registered through the Fogglass Forum, and hired resolution is more common than formal trial. The city’s court, such as it is, exists beneath the Black Stilt, where disputes are arbitrated in candlelight by anonymous figures behind a gauze screen. Public executions are rare but theatrical - when someone must be made an example, they are left staked in the rising tide under lantern watch, to drown in full view of the Driftmarkets.
Society & Culture
Society is a web of debts, favors, and hidden pacts. Titles mean little - reputation is everything. A laundress with three good rumors might outrank a guildsman with none. Social mobility is fluid, but never free; one climbs not by merit, but by maneuver. The most respected citizens are not the loudest or richest, but those who are still breathing after two decades in power. Locals say Varneth has no aristocracy - only survivors.
Fashion in Varneth favors asymmetry, veils, and layered fabrics, often dyed in swamp greens, grey-blacks, or deep blues that blend with the mists. Masks are common during festivals, negotiations, or when anonymity is useful - which is often. Festivals themselves are rare, but highly symbolic. The Night of Broken Lanterns marks the founding of the city each year, when all public lights are extinguished for one hour, and citizens leave offerings to the drowned dead. The Fogward Wake, held at midwinter, involves dream-tinctures and chants said to keep the spirits of the mire from crossing into the city proper.
Class divides are murky. The closest thing to a ruling class are the bloodbound guilds - associations of spies, brokers, alchemists, and poison-smiths whose members often hold multiple aliases and loyalties. Beneath them are itinerant laborers, marsh-fishers, information runners, and scribes. Varneth’s many minority enclaves, including exiles from Kyourin, Lao-Shan, and the Mentralian Kingdoms, coexist not through tolerance but through necessity - each watches the others too closely for open conflict to endure.
Religion & Education
There is no formal religion - only vice, desperation, and delirium, each with its own spirit waiting in the dark. Most citizens do not pray; they bargain, drink, or bleed in ways that draw spirits to them like flies to rotting fruit. True worship is rare, but cults thrive in the city’s hollows - quiet, shifting things that promise escape, ecstasy, or power. In the backrooms of fog-lit taverns, men gamble not with coin, but with fragments of their soul. Some lose, some gain, but none leave unchanged.
Among the city’s so-called elite, worship has become indistinguishable from decadence. Lavish gatherings of masked revelers - part ritual, part spectacle - serve as offerings to spirits of lust, gluttony, or indulgence. The higher the station, the more theatrical the rite. These are not faiths, but fetishes masquerading as theology. The Shrine of the Drowned, half-submerged in the Lichenwalks, is less a temple than a warning - its caretakers murmur in madness and burn incense to keep worse things from answering.
The waters beneath the city once flowed with untainted spirits - clean, curious, and gentle. Now, they are rare and hunted. Most spirits that dwell in Varneth’s under-channels are twisted or drawn to the city’s psychic rot: loneliness, addiction, hatred. Even benign spirits grow bitter if left too long among the fog and filth.
Education, by contrast, is transactional. Knowledge is a currency, not a birthright. What learning exists is bought, stolen, or traded - scribes and cipherists sell time by the hour, and magical instruction (where it exists) is closely hoarded and riddled with traps. The Fogglass Forum is the closest thing to a public archive, though every record is partial, encrypted, or altered. Truth in Varneth is always suspect, but always for sale.
Trade, Craft, and Industry
The city thrives not by what it builds, but by what it moves - and what it hides. The city’s primary industries are smuggling, distillation, rare ink-making, and poisons, all of which are illegal or tightly controlled elsewhere in the Reaches. Marshroot, a pungent hallucinogen boiled from brackish tubers, is exported in sealed bone-glass ampoules. Smoked eels and swamp-bred fowl are sold to inland cities as delicacies, while more esoteric goods - alchemical tinctures, encrypted codices, veiled blade oils - move under silence and seal.
The city’s currency is the reedcut, thin silver coins marked with slashed edges to prevent forgery. More often, Varnethi trade in sealed debts - signed vellum tokens representing favors, obligations, or silence. Some are backed by coin. Others, by blood. Market days are deliberately unmarked, announced only by signal bells and shifting lanterns. The Driftmarkets - floating bazaars lashed to piers and moored barges - change location weekly to prevent taxation or sabotage.
Tariffs are impossible to enforce. The Council of Nine takes its cut through more discreet means: access fees, informant networks, and ritual offerings known as fogtithes. Traders caught cheating the wrong person often vanish; those who survive are sometimes branded with scent-marked wax seals that never wash off. Foreign merchants come to Varneth because it offers what no other city dares: things that do not exist, bought with things no one admits to having.
Military & Defense
The Council employs no standing army in the traditional sense. Its defense rests on secrecy, debt, and controlled violence. Each district maintains its own private enforcers - some loyal to the Council of Nine, others to guilds, bloodbound families, or unnamed patrons. These enforcers, often masked and unmarked, serve as watchmen, assassins, and message-bearers depending on the task. The closest thing to a public guard is the Tidebound, a loose confederation of marsh-trained fighters who patrol the piers and protect key crossings, often in exchange for protection fees or influence favors.
There are no city walls, and little need for them. The mire itself is Varneth’s defense - a shifting expanse of reed-choked waterways, collapsing trails, and drowned ruins that confound even seasoned scouts. Attack by land is almost suicidal, and most naval powers refuse to send ships beyond the fogline unless well-paid or desperate. When needed, Varneth can call on its contracted militias and criminal alliances: mercenaries from Karnost, poisoned blades from the Lichenwalks, or hired blood sorcerers from exile enclaves. These forces are rarely unified, but always lethal.
The only recorded siege in the city’s history - during the early days of the Ninefold Severance - ended not in battle but in confusion. Invading forces drowned in redirected canals, supply lines vanished in the mist, and command structures collapsed after key officers were quietly replaced or found dead in locked chambers. Since then, Varneth has not been challenged directly. It is said the city cannot be conquered - only infiltrated, and only once.
Points of Interest
At the heart of the Driftmarkets rises the Black Stilt, a lopsided tower of salt-scarred stone built on ancient pylons. Once a lighthouse, then a prison, now a relic, it leans like a dagger half-sunk into the mire. Officially, it houses record rooms and tax archives. Unofficially, it's used for interrogations, spiritual negotiations, and secret rites. Its bells ring only during executions or when one of the Nine calls for silence.
In the salt-shadowed west lies the Shrine of the Drowned, a half-submerged structure where candles are lit for the lost and drowned. Fishermen leave gifts - fish bones, driftwood icons, coin-marked cloth - while the desperate whisper names to the flooded altar and ask to forget. Spirits are known to answer here, but not always kindly.
The Fogglass Forum, a library, debating hall, and ritual auction house, stands near Tideglass Row. Here, knowledge is bought and sold in encoded scrolls or mind-bound rituals. Scholars of poisoncraft, dead-letter linguistics, and arcane geometry rent space beside dueling ciphers and memory sculptors. On quiet days, the wind through its halls sounds like laughter - though no one knows why.
Among the narrowest alleys of the Lichenwalks is the Grinbridge, a stone span flanked by broken statues of smiling men. Crossing it at night is said to erase memories - not all at once, but piece by piece. Locals avoid it, but smugglers and fugitives sometimes pay for guided crossings when erasure is more valuable than escape.