Saint Ronges
Saint Ronges is a city in steep decline, a place where memory lingers longer than the living, and where plague carts outnumber carriages. Nestled along the upper Musarde River, not far from Pont-a-Museau, Saint Ronges was once Richemulot’s cultural gem, famed for its libraries, its perfumeries, and its hilltop gardens. But that time has long passed.
Now, Saint Ronges is a monument to sickness.
While plague haunts all of Richemulot, in Saint Ronges it thrives—cyclical, cruel, and inexplicably sentient in its recurrence:
- Each year, the plague returns more virulent, its symptoms evolving, as if learning.
- No curative measures last, and no preventative wards hold; magic suppresses it only for days, if at all.
- Locals speak of the sickness as if it were a creature or a curse, calling it “the Grey Breath” or “Her Hunger.”
Some believe the Plague in Saint Ronges is not natural at all, but fed by something sleeping beneath the city, or shepherded by a cabal of plague-doctors whose porcelain masks are not masks at all.
Amid the rot, glimpses of the city’s former grandeur still flicker:
- The Hall of Verdure, once the epicenter of perfumery and botany, stands filled with miraculously preserved herbs—and one greenhouse where every plant grows black.
- The Sanctorium of Saint Finé, once a pilgrimage site for healers, remains unbreached by plague—though its priests are long dead and its doors mysteriously locked from the inside.
- The Library of Seven Hands still draws scholars—those desperate, brave, or mad—seeking forbidden lore on disease, death, and transfiguration through suffering.
To the rest of Richemulot, Saint Ronges is an open grave that somehow refuses to close.
- Pont-a-Museau sends no aid.
- The Reniers do not speak its name.
- Travelers skirt its borders in silence, or make elaborate offerings at its milestones to ward off attention.
But some still come:
- Cultists, who believe the Plague is a divine test.
- Alchemists, hoping to bottle immunity.
- The desperate, who would rather face a known death than an uncertain one elsewhere.
They enter.
They rarely leave.
Saint Ronges does not welcome visitors.
It adopts them.
Demographics
Saint Ronges’ population is sparse, divided, and haunted:
- Widow-led households, grim and grimly efficient, are the most common remaining social structure.
- Gangs of orphaned children prowl the streets by day, avoiding libraries and cellars they say are "whispering to the sick."
- The few medical professionals that remain are part of the Order of the White Veil, a group of plague-tenders said to be immune to infection—but who never remove their veils, even when alone.
Most of the citizenry dwell in sealed-off neighborhoods, lighting black candles in their windows to signal when plague has struck inside. Few approach these homes. Fewer still ever exit them again.
Infrastructure
Saint Ronges sits atop a network of catacombs and sewers once used to transport clean water and bury its dead. Now, they are whispered to be home to:
- The Rat Choir, a tangle of disease-bearing vermin that speak with one voice when angered.
- Survivors of previous plagues, transformed into wretched, mask-wearing things, hollow-eyed and unnaturally fast.
- A rumored Plague Mother, a crone-like being cloaked in black lace, said to be the source of all outbreaks—and who nurses the city like a dying child.
Many believe that whatever the Renier family fled from long ago, they left buried beneath Saint Ronges—and it is still digging upward.
Architecture
The architecture of Saint Ronges still speaks of wealth and pride:
- Marble colonnades grace municipal buildings now choked with ivy and silence.
- Tall mansions with delicate ironwork balconies overlook weed-choked avenues, their shutters sealed, their residents long dead—or worse.
- Crumbling public baths and amphitheaters stand in eerie stillness, where once music and laughter echoed.
But its beauty has curdled. The streets are too quiet, broken only by the wheels of plague carts, the caws of carrion birds, or the scraping of something unknown behind a shuttered door.
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