Durwyn

Durwyn is a city out of a picture book: if a bard’s fine words could be built, they would come out looking like this. Its hundred and twenty-one thousand live comfortably and without much hurry, helped along by the magical devices that are everywhere in the streets, and the daily business of a country perpetually at war arrives there as a headline that most of them do not read. Skirmishes on the western front are somebody else’s.

It stands on the edge of its province rather than in the middle of it, close enough to Meshtes that the two are spoken of together. North of it the road runs out of Peredhel altogether and into Idir, where the curses begin more or less at the edge of the schools; north-east of it are hills that nobody sensible crosses alone.

The Theaters

A man could walk the streets for days and see a fraction of the performing. There are thirty-seven orpheums, and seeing everything staged in them in a season would beat anyone who tried. Whatever a person’s taste is, the city has it somewhere, and knowing where is the trick. It is generally allowed that the best performances of all are not in the theaters but in the red light districts outside them, where a large house emptying out draws the people of the night to arrive dressed very like the leading actors.

The Bardic College is here, founded to honor the Heroes of Bardh, the peren performers whose fortnight of flattery in a human court ended with a poisoned king, a besieged capital and a province taken. Their leader, Silver Tongue, was the first to hold the title of Bardhîr. Whether the city’s bardic families descend from any of that they do not say, but they behave as though the tradition is theirs to argue over: the Draus and the Lymeran houses have been feuding in song for long enough that their verses circulate as far as Loshev, and a Lymeran-made lute is an instrument worth the years it takes to build.

The University

The Arcane Congress sanctions more than one university in Durwyn. What is taught in them is taught under a provincial law of unusual generosity: nowhere in Bardh is there any tax at all on making or selling magic or magic items, and the province has become the educational and magical center of the country on the strength of it. Reagents can be had in the city without trouble, scrolls and potions turn up in almost every town and a good many villages, and the powerful items sit in the finer districts. Children are tested for arcane ability at public stations, free, and a child who tests positive is tested further, with the results put in front of the parents to guide where the child is sent to school. The highest marks each year go free.

Four dozen gnome instructors have lately come into Bardh’s schools, out of a warmer relationship with Ustos brokered by the Tarumbar who holds arcana. For all of that, Bardh’s magic is not spoken of in the same breath as Amulta’s, and the mages and bards of the province are said to be restless about it.

The libraries are the other draw. Mikhail Kethrel spent the better part of ten years in them, and the thesis he is still writing concerns the country that begins a short way north of the lecture halls.

Demographics

People	Share
Peren	61%
Humans	29%
Gnomes	8%
Other	2%

Government

Two authorities stand over the city, and how they divide it between them was never written down: k’Brulun Zudil, whose name carries the same prefix every civic head in Peredhel’s surveys carries, and Commander Melre Prehre. What the prefix stands for is nowhere explained. The people thought worth naming besides them are three Krangals, Vrila, Trurel and Leord, and a gnome called Dranta Vrabnargrualmu. What any of the four does in Durwyn went unrecorded, though Krangal is a name that turns up holding office all over the country.

Two Durwyns

The name is carried twice in Peredhel’s surveys, and the two entries do not describe one place. The first is this city. The second is filed under Yovincia and gives a small city of nine and a half thousand, third in its province at best, kept in severe order because it is where its Prince spends most of his time: no weapon may be carried there without a permit, a visitor has two hours from the gate to put his away, and any crime committed with an unlicensed weapon on the person is punished at triple, whether the weapon had anything to do with it or not. Mercenaries do not bother with the place. What has come instead is money, and with it the cooks and the performers, many of them moved west out of Bardh for the chance and to be away from what they call the cut-throat cities of their old province.

That second entry has since been read as the Yovinhîr’s own seat, which the surveys give as Renetslav, one of the twenty-seven regional-center cities, at the far western end of Yovincia. Whether Renetslav is that border town under a new name, or a different city entirely, has not been settled.

Campaign Updates

Mikhail left Durwyn on foot to see the cursed country for himself, since the thesis was what stood between him and the promotion, the laureates and the Arcane Congress license to practice. He lasted two days on the road and then bought a place in the back of a merchant’s wagon with music. What went missing in the grasslands three nights later included the university’s books, which were borrowed and are not replaceable. He has been in correspondence with the city ever since rather than in it. Danil writes from there, and once sent a masterwork lute east as a birthday present some months late. Gerald, whom Mikhail says was a student alongside him, went back to his college after a winter in Loshev, which worried Mikhail chiefly because of what he might say to their old classmates.