Mortigny

Mortigny is a city of walls that breathe disease—a crowded, clattering hive pressed tight against the slow waters of the Musarde River. As the smallest of Richemulot’s three cities, it should be quaint. But Mortigny is no quiet place; it is bursting at the seams, every narrow street clogged, every tenement filled to bursting, and every whisper carrying more than words—it carries fear.

Mortigny is overgrown without growing—it hasn’t expanded in decades, yet its population swells with every plague season:

• Crumbling stone apartments once meant for single families now host dozens of souls, entire clans stacked floor to attic.
• Awnings, balconies, and alleyways have become living quarters, markets, even makeshift clinics.
• Rooftop bridges and haphazard scaffolding connect buildings across streets, creating a second city above the first, where only the brave or desperate dwell.

No space is wasted. No breath goes unnoticed.

Mortigny does not resist the plague—it absorbs it.

• The city is swiftly quarantined at the first hint of outbreak. Gates are closed. Ferries stop running. The sick remain with the well.
• Yet entry is never forbidden. Anyone may come in—criminals, debtors, or the desperate—so long as they accept the price: they can never leave.
• Those with connections or coin might smuggle themselves out through underground tunnels or river barges, but they do so at great peril. Many vanish en route, and others wash up downstream, unrecognizable and wrapped in black.

It is whispered that some "choose" Mortigny, preferring its congested anonymity to a clean life under scrutiny in Pont-a-Museau or Saint Ronges.

Despite the disease, the city refuses to die. It pulses with an energy born of sheer, frantic survival:

• Night markets operate beneath flickering lanterns, where masked vendors peddle potions, charms, and meat of uncertain origin.
• Open-air apothecaries line the plazas, grinding herbs and bones in a futile attempt to hold back the next wave.
• Street sermons are shouted from ladders and balconies, each voice competing for attention—from doomsayers predicting the city's fall, to miracle-workers promising rebirth through rot.

The people of Mortigny live quickly and love louder, cramming into music halls, secret speakeasies, and rooftop gatherings—knowing any night could be their last.

The vermin problem is worse in Mortigny than anywhere in Richemulot:

• Rats pour from sewers and walls in unnatural numbers, as if summoned by something deeper.
• Whole neighborhoods disappear overnight beneath a tide of squeals and scratching.
• Children sing of the “Silken Tailor,” a monstrous rat that weaves burial suits from hair and sinew for the soon-to-die, visiting in the night to take measurements.

Some even claim that the rats speak—not in words, but in warnings.

Strangely, Mortigny fosters a kind of grim camaraderie absent elsewhere in Richemulot:

• Communal cookfires fill alleyways with the scent of burning herbs and stews of uncertain content.
• Graffiti blooms across buildings—murals of hope, grotesque prayers to the Plague Mother, or warnings like "She counts the coughs."
• A group known as the Threadbearers act as plague wardens, herbalists, and last rites givers. Their leader, Mother Lisette, is said to have survived four plague waves and looks as if she died after the first.

There is no pretense in Mortigny. Death is expected. But it is also resisted, mocked, flirted with. In some alleys, death is even worshiped.

To the rest of Richemulot, Mortigny is a cautionary tale, a holding cell for the doomed, a moral quarantine. It is a place where:

• Life is short, but vivid.
• Community blooms amid decay.
• Every locked gate is both protection and prison.

The citizens don’t pretend to be clean.
They survive because they embrace the filth, because they outdance the sickness, because they know:

In Mortigny, you either rot... or burn brighter than the plague itself.