Koroussa

Koroussa, also known as New Koroussa, in many ways treats its current location as temporary. Five hundred years is really nothing compared to Old Koroussa, which maintained records dating back thousands of years pre-Starfall (one of the oldest collections of records about The World Behind before the introduction of magic and wonder). And so while it is a magnificent city, all spiraling Dromeus towers and branching networks of sandstone and imported mountain rock for Deinodon, Errants, and Ankyliers, new inhabitants eventually pick up on the air of assumption that one day everything will need to be moved 'back home'. When a house is finished for example, 'This will one day be a magnificent ruin' may be given as a grave compliment, an appreciation of the engineering even as the hope is to one day leave it behind.

The Koroussan tale is that a thousand and one years ago, before Starfall, theirs was a prosperous city at the border of a small desert and an immense sea. Their ships gleamed in the sun just as their coffers shone with the city's wealth, and all within Koroussa's territory benefited from it. Dasand was competition at the time, further up the coast, but it was only ever an economic rivalry. The city was at the time a republic, as it was composed of separate districts that came together to help manage the area as a whole, and generally peaceful. The small desert that separated them from the more northern plains and jungles was their defense, because the only viable offense that could press them would have to come from the sea, and their fleets were solid.

Then the stars fell, and everything changed.

While Soirenta lost land to flooding, the scale of devastation on Kayenta was easily five times their losses due to the geologic changes that rippled across the continent. The mountains that would come to be known as Aswar's Spine ripped the land apart in a span of days, and while the seas encroached on Soirenta they receded from Kayenta, stripping Koroussa of its lifeblood ports. When the earthquakes finally ceased, those who had survived left their homes to see new, jagged peaks towering to the west, and their many ships stranded on dry land. Many smaller communities were simply gone, and it would only take a handful of years to reveal that the mountains were expanding the desert dramatically by creating a rainshadow across the land between the peaks and the Azure inland sea. Koroussa, looking to salvage their livelihoods, realized that the closest coast to the rest of the world's surviving large trade centers was now through a mountain pass. This land was notably already occupied by Dasand, which had survived the earthquakes thanks to the sheer structural soundness of their walls and homes. It was only a matter of time and weapons manufacturing before a desperate Koroussan population voted to go to war.

While that first battle was barely a skirmish in the ledgers of history, it was the beginning of centuries of warfare wherein Koroussa and Dasand traded blows, until the origin of the fight mattered less than a determination to force the other side to capitulate. Koroussa started a trading network with smaller villages to the south and east, but it never regained its former prosperity, and Dasand grew in power as the sole large trading post on the western side of the mountains. Battles were separated by long periods of recovery and planning, with Koroussan tactics ever evolving to deal with Dasand's immensely effective defenses. Eventually, 500 years after Starfall, Dasand moved offensively and crushed the Koroussan army and gave them an ultimatum, move further inland away from Dasand or have the civilian population be eliminated next. In the end the population left, a fragment of what is once was, and built a new Koroussa on the coast of the Azure inland sea.

Nowadays Koroussa has well built trading channels with Edmonds and other villages/cities in Kayenta that utilize the Azure's passageway through the continent, but relatively little direct contact with the cities in Soirenta. The areas immediately around the city are surprisingly lush, as irrigation channels have been built from the Azure into fields for cultivating heat loving produce and livestock. However the main export that reaches the rest of The World Behind is Koroussan salt, as the combination of the brackish water and intense desert heat makes for very efficient desalination/salt extraction methodologies. These days even Dasand trades in Koroussan salt, a fact everyone carefully does not comment on.

The city is no longer a republic, instead led by the heads of the three largest families, not coincidentally those who first established the new city and began the work to make it habitable. Rumors say at least one of the families has made inroads with the dwarves who have dug into the mountains directly to their west, looking to establish alliances with the controversial mining establishment. This is supported by the recent appearance of dwarves and humans visiting Koroussa, an unusual enough occurrence to have sparked talk across that side of the continent.