Pont-a-Museau

Pont-a-Museau, capital of Richemulot, is a city of elegant decay and gnawing dread, a place where beauty and filth walk hand in hand. Built atop and around a maze of bridges, canals, and islands in the Musarde River, it is a metropolis where the line between human and vermin is not as clear as it should be.

Nowhere in the Domains of Dread are rats more numerous—or more respected—than in Pont-a-Museau.

They are:

• Omnipresent, their nests hidden in eaves, cisterns, walls, and floors.
• Unnervingly intelligent, at times acting with coordinated purpose: disappearing en masse, swarming with intent, or even delivering small gifts to favored individuals.
• Unprovoked witnesses, present for births, arguments, murders, and secrets—watching with fathomless black eyes.

Citizens tend not to speak ill of the rats. Many even leave offerings for them: crusts of bread, bowls of milk, a child's tooth.

Some do it out of superstition, others out of loyalty—and some out of bloodline obligation.

Despite its creeping ruin, Pont-a-Museau is a city that pretends all is well. Its citizens are polite, fashionable, and charming—but behind every painted smile is a calculation, a hesitation, a whisper.

It is a city of secrets and masks, where gossip travels faster than news, and neighbors might vanish for weeks only to return... changed.

• Households lock their doors at night not out of fear of thieves, but of unwanted visitors who were once family.
• It’s said some of the city’s aristocrats have taken the rat as more than a symbol, embracing changes of flesh and mind in dark places beneath the city.
• Deep beneath the city lies the Warren, a network of catacombs and sewers where the line between humanity and ratdom is said to disappear entirely.

By day, Pont-a-Museau is bustling. Merchants hawk wares from flat-bottomed boats and riverfront stalls. Artists sketch on bridges while noble carriages roll over cobbled causeways. Elegant cafés serve wine and bitter cheese beside canals where the water looks too still.

But this charm is a performance. Everyone is watching, and everyone knows something rotten lies just beneath.

Even the rats are part of the act.

Pont-a-Museau is not dying. It is evolving—subtly, surely, and perhaps not in a direction recognizable to humankind. It is a city ruled by unspoken pacts, secret bloodlines, and the gnawing truth that civilization is only skin-deep.

To walk its streets is to know that something watches from every alley, beneath every grate, and just under the floorboards—something hungry, cunning, and patient.