Ch01-015 (Patreon)

Durlyne is Duane's hometown, and we only saw a sliver of it in the last book, and always from his very narrow perspective. But Durlyne is one of the largest cities in the world, extending to the horizon and to the sky and far below both, in a cluttered mess of sewers, alleyways, ruins, and half-collapsed ogre tunnels.

There's a lot of things you can read into the backgrounds of Durlyne scenes, but probably the most important is just to see what most of the surrounding figures look like. If everyone has the same colouration, you're probably in one of the Aldish ghers. A ghers is a closed caste community of pooled resources. Members are called ghersit, and they are something like the Aldish middle class, with voting rights, and ghers-provided education and policing. The Adeliers lived in one. Outsiders are usually allowed into the ghers to spend money, but they have to beat it by nightfall, when the gates close.

To those who live outside the various ghers, Aldish life is harsh and short.