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The Cursed Blue Rose
Yards and drying sheds line the bank at Casobar, where a taiga river slows into a lake, and the whole settlement smells of wet timber and woodsmoke. Forest and water serve as raw material and road together: what the taiga gives up arrives by water, is cut and worked and finished in the sheds, and leaves the same way, by boat while the lake is open and by sledge once it hardens. Nothing here is made on a grand scale. It is made steadily, in small workshops that have learned exactly what the cold will and will not permit.
Casoban families came up on the fifth and most recent wave of expansion, and they still reckon themselves newcomers beside older neighbours. They are Lohanar, a small and practical population with a workshop's regard for a job done properly. Darolas rules the settlement and Keberun holds its allegiance, an arrangement felt here as orders for goods, obligations of service, and the general understanding that a frontier settlement is expected to be useful. The Religion of the Ruby is the faith of the place, and its priestesses carry the observances through a winter that shuts water and road alike.