Kemret

=Founding Year= Circa Pre-Marnic Year 1100.

=Location= Kemret has, since the Unstained Conquest (the virtually bloodless annexation of Idroslekh by the Federation in MY 344), been known even in the farthest regions of the former Marnic realms as the western gateway, the last civilised place for travellers bound to cross over the near-impassable Great Western Dakylsthas, into the sweepingly vast Dahlimi Steppes beyond. The city lies in the high northwest of Idroslekh, and the first of the Dakylsthas summits can be seen on a clear day from the western walls. No surviving Idroslekhi cities of notable size lie nearby, though there were once many little cities in the lower east that were burned and left to ruin during the Great Orc-Wars. The Kemreti refer to their home as “the Lonely City.” Not without cause: the nearest city, Shekin, lies over six hundred kilometres to the southeast, along the shores of the Straits of Zyimlun.

=Climate= Kemret, situated as it is in both northern latitudes and the highlands of western Idroslekh, is by all accounts a cool city. In the winter, the snow comes heavily, and the Dezbuj River may even occasionally freeze despite its swift current. It is a fairly dry city in warm months, though it never experiences particularly hot summers. When the winter snows come, commoners in service to the city government spend much time clearing out snow from the streets and dumping it into the river. Houses are built solidly of three layers: an external layer of granite, an internal layer of wood, and an insulating central layer of earth. As is typical in an Idroslekhi city, the commoners have sod roofs, while the nobility construct their roofs of slate and maintain roof gardens.

Terrain: The most ancient part of the city, the Isle of Pragdi, sits in the middle of the Dezbuj River, and constitutes approximately a third of the city. The rest of Kemret lies in a crescent along the southern shores of the river. Three bridges span the river between the Isle and the mainland, and a fourth bridge spans the north-western corner of the island to the northern shore, from which the road to the Dakylsthas runs. While the terrain to the north and south of the river is generally rocky with coniferous forests, Kemret lies in the fertile valley of the Dezbuj, with rich mud and marshes along its shores. The Isle itself was originally little more than a swamp in the middle of the river, and it is heavily bolstered with rock and earth along the edge to prevent flooding in the spring.

=Ruler= Although obedient to the High Senate and the mandate of Marnoz during the two and a half centuries of Federal rule, Kemret has retained its traditional autocratic rule by the Daprakhos since (according to local myth) its foundation two thousand years ago. Traditionally, there have been three degrees of power within Kemret, from lowest to highest being: the Likursoi, the city’s military (which, unusually, is drawn purely from the common ranks); the Savricutoi, the Houses of the nobility; and the Daprakhos, who is elected from the ranks of the Savricutoi by the ranking members of the Likursoi.

=Population & Demographics= Despite its economic importance and vitality as the stepping stone between the West and Kerlonna, Kemret remains a mostly uniform and ethnically homogeneous city. The krolgashi are the most frequently seen of the nonhuman races, as traders, adventurers, or emissaries from the tribes of the Dakylsthas. A small section of the city on the southern shore of the Dezbuj River, called the New Village, is set aside for non-native inhabitants, but for the rest of the city, only the Kemreti can own property. Even in the days of the Federation, the Kemreti insisted on this rigid separation of foreigner from native. The centuries of their physical solitude has created a remarkably isolationistic attitude for such a trade-wealthy city. The Kemreti, like most Idroslekhi stock, are of medium height, fair, with almond-shaped eyes and a hairy body.

=Government= As the stories go, Kemret has always been under the reign of the Daprakhos, the noble-born lord who is divinely ordained to guard and command the people of the city. Compared to most human rulers in the rest of Kerlonna, the Daprakhos maintains a startling degree of power, and is given the authority to both legislate and execute the law. The rights of native citizens are guarded by the Decrees of Hiyuri (r. c. PMY 475-430), which forbade the enslavement of Kemreti and established a system of proportional punishments for crime respective to the class of the victim. The Decrees, authored around PMY 445, constitute the first known body of laws outside of the Sea of Injil and its environs. During the Unstained Conquest, Kemret, as the most powerful Idroslekhi city, negotiated heavily with the High Senate and managed to establish a high degree of autonomy concerning the Federal rule. Indeed, the Kemreti never even established use of Marnic currency, and has, to this day, maintained its traditional coinage. The Likursoi governs itself as the military, and the nobility typically maintain control of the markets, an unusual departure from the structure of eastern Kerlonna, where merchants constitute a particular rank above the commoners and below the nobility. The Daprakhos is considered the commander of the Likursoi as well as the lord of the Savricutoi, and is deeply revered within the city as an almost paternal figure.

=Language= As one might expect from the Lonely City and from Idroslekh in general, the Kemreti resisted any Federal attempts to encourage the use of the Marnic language in the populace. The language used by the Kemreti, Dwe-Kemret, is similar to but not mutually intelligible with the Idroslekhi languages spoken farther south. Dwe-Kemret is also commonly used in the regions surrounding the city, though the variety of dialect means that one can easily tell whether a speaker is from the city or the rural regions. Marnic is used in the markets, but it is heavily coloured with Kemreti accents, vocabulary, and grammatical structure, and few other than the merchants can even understand Marnic. Most travellers to Kemret will be greatly inconvenienced if they do not at least learn rudimentary Dwe-Kemret. Caravans from the Dahlimi Steppes will typically be made up of steppe-folk speaking the multifarious tongues of their homeland, who speak the languages of Kerlonna with considerable difficulty. Nonhumans can be expected to speak their typical dialects as well. As in the other regions of the former Federation, there is a noticeable divide between the speech of commoners and of the nobility, and generally, the nobility speak in a more archaic mode of Dwe-Kemret amongst each other.