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The Cursed Blue Rose
Temperate seasonal forest covers the country behind Azurat, and the ocean closes it in front; the city occupies the seam, timber at its back and salt in its air. It is one of the original Ashanar foundations, among the oldest settlements that people made, and it has kept the advantage age confers, which is not defence but accumulation. Azurat lives by learning. Its substantial size is made of teaching halls and lodging houses, copyists' rooms and instrument-makers, and the steady trade in paper, ink and lamp-oil that a city of students consumes without noticing. Scholars arrive by ship and leave the same way. The forest keeps the fires lit through the wet seasons.
Its people are Ashanar to the bone, covenant-keepers with a taste for far horizons, and the scholarly turn here is less a departure from that than a version of it: what is agreed must be recorded, and what is recorded must be kept. For all its age and standing, the city does not govern itself: its allegiance runs inland to Bareshum, out on the grassland, and the halls here work under a seat they will never see.