Veren

Veren lies away to the east of Idir, far enough east to touch the Peredhel border and far enough that it is reached in the opposite direction from everywhere else the roads go. Cut off is how it gets described by anyone planning a journey there. Some accounts call it a town and some call it a region, and both usages are old enough now that neither is going to give way. Its business is horses, and has been for something close to a thousand years.

The Horses

Idir has the finest equine stock in Erôth, bred and alchemically improved under the Mól by the House of Säv, and four thoroughbred lines are still raised by families around Veren who have kept the method inside the family ever since: Farid, Rihal, Jalil and Khalid. Steeds roam loose near the town, which is why its leatherworkers use horse-hide and not cowhide. It makes a more comfortable leather, does the same job, and costs more. Veren wastes no part of a horse and values them highly besides.

What that costs at the source is a matter of some disagreement. A fine light steed raised in Veren is hard to come by under thirty gold, by the reckoning of a woman raised there, and heavier stock runs to sixty. The set prices written against the four lines run a little differently, and the two have never been squared. Drovers bring horses west along the road and stop the night at the tavern in Harad, which is the only part of the trade most Idirans ever see.

There is a rumor, told mostly by people who do not want to pay Veren’s prices, that Orsugo is not real: that the burning brigand of the eastern forests is a story Veren invented to drive up the cost of horses. He is real. He has set fire to the horses of Veren himself.

The Guard

Idiran towns are effectively city-states with their own governance, and above Veren’s guard nothing is named at all: no council, no lord, no mayor. Picard is captain of the guard. The corps has its own armor and a training tradition, and it will lend a protégé out to somebody else’s trouble. Hanza, a human woman in her early twenties, came west in Veren guard armor to fortify a stronghold and drill the people holding it. Picard answered the letters himself, declined for himself, and signed her off in his place.

Beyond that, nothing. No street, wall, gate, market, temple or river of Veren has ever been named. One of the cursed keeps stands near the town in the geography Mikhail has assembled of them, and the accounts disagree on which of the two lies north of the other. The keep was eyed as a candidate and never taken.

Campaign Updates

Gleb Meadows was the last of the Ten Lashes that anyone could put a name to, and he lived out here, moving supplies rather than people, which nobody thought made him innocent. Luca Green carried a letter east to deal with him and nothing further was ever heard of it. The ring dissolved regardless, and its remaining members are loose in Forven and in Veren, without a captain and without a captain’s protection.

Veren has become a quiet ally since. A bloc of its merchants and breeders will sell Idirian steeds at a fair price and lend aid against Beltran Grayeras, discreetly, spoken of in low voices so that word does not travel back to him. Hanza brought the offer with her. It was priced, weighed and declined, and no horses have been bought, so the offer stands where it was left. That the town would make it at all is partly the doing of the Valiant Few’s own legend, which reached Veren wildly embellished: children carried out of fires, collapsed walls lifted, gnolls and Orsugo fought single-handed and every enemy spared.

Not all the traffic ran that way. Beltran’s renowned trainers, mercenaries out of Peredhel who were loyal to coin and not to the cause, passed through Veren on their road to his army.

Koa’s parents live near the town, which is why he has wanted its keep cleared since he first raised it, and why the cover held: at the soirée in Haudh-Gwenn he went in as Garrett Breen, a horse-breeder from near Veren, and the company’s story for being in the city at all was that they were merchants trying to reach Veren for horses. Orvayne was routed east as one option among several. Whether he arrived was never discovered.