Bayhe Merchant House

At the heart of Shal’Azura’s ever-turning economic engine, the merchants of House Bayhe move with the precision of seasoned players in a game whose rules they themselves helped inscribe. Their name is invoked in the hush of counting rooms and the clamor of open-air bazaars alike, sometimes with reverence, more often with wary admiration. For nearly a century, the Bayhe have forged the arteries through which the city’s lifeblood—silks, spices, knowledge, rumor—flows. It is said among the dockhands of Makira that even the clouds pay a toll to pass above a Bayhe warehouse, and in the tea-houses of Fajirun, children trade stories of the family’s founder outwitting a pair of rival houses with a single, decisive gesture: a gift of candied almonds soaked in oil and laced with forget-me-not.   Today, House Bayhe’s influence seeps into every district, from the rarefied salons of Marifat to the warren-like backalleys of Eatifat. Their sigil, a snake clutching a coin in its left eye like a monocle, decorates not only ledgers and banners but the dreams and ambitions of all who squander, save, or inherit. They are famed for their implacable memory for debts—favors counted, slights remembered, kindnesses repaid with interest or something quite the opposite—yet their generosity is legendary when the occasion demands, as at the annual Festival of Clouds, where their pavilions overflow with honey-cakes and rare wines and no beggar leaves unfed.   Their formal headquarters, a stately assembly of riverstone and dark wood perched at the apex of Jamin’s Placebo Peaks, is as much a trading floor as a sanctuary for the city’s restless capital. Within its colonnaded halls, junior Bayhe clerks are inducted not simply as servants of commerce, but as careful stewards of the patterns that hold Shal’Azura together. Even the Erudite Triad is said to consult the family matriarch, Lady Maresha, before initiating reforms that might ripple through the city’s delicate balance.   Not all of the Bayhe’s pursuits are strictly mercantile, nor is their reach unopposed. Rumors swirl of secretive alliances, of lost heirs exiled to Earther outposts, and of shadowy compacts with the cunning Auctioneers who rule the city’s underbelly. Yet the Bayhe endure, adapting to each new current as if born to its turbulence.