Rumakel

"In my dreams, I see Rumakel towering over me... and every night, it draws closer" - Enekon, The Honest And the Damned, Act II
Rumakel is the holy city of Kivishta and the crown jewel and religious center of the Empire of Kizen. It is the tomb city, where the Kobold dead of Reverent-Path Kivishta are sent and vast amounts of Ederstone are stored. Body horror is frequent in this passage, as flesh yields to terrible forces within this cursed city.
The approach to Rumakel is a long one. As one approaches the valley, the first thing one notices is the security. The hills are covered in watchtowers and fortresses and the vegetation is cut low to make any movement in or out of the valley noticeable. The suddenly barren, shrubby landscape can be ominous- but it is hard to notice when you walk the roads in or out. The highways into Rumakel are packed with pilgrims, Kobolds to a man. They often wear festive colors and there are many roadside inns and pilgrim's hostels with welcoming hearths. But while you walk you can see in the distance the Gravekeeper's road, with anonymous Kobolds in full-body plague garb in a slow procession of grave-carts making their own way into the valley. No unsuited person can walk that path, so you turn back to the Pilgrim's road and see the Great Pilgrim's Gate ahead. Congested, a marketplace, shrine, and military outpost in one, the Pilgrim's Gate is more of a place of commerce and worship than a defensive structure. It marks entry into the Holy Valley, and the devout are offered candles to carry from shrine to shrine in pious processions to bless their spirits.
Passing through the market square and following the road into the valley, one can see Rumakel proper: a great basin of lush but twisted forest cordoned into many carefully regimented squares, all surrounding a great city of bone-white towers. The countryside here is no place for stragglers- those who dally in areas closely locked down are likely to be told to hurry on their way by monks, and the wilder areas can be outright dangerous to rest in. Hostels exist for those who cannot press on, but these are bare of luxuries (if full of pilgrim's excitement).
As the bone-white walls get closer and close, flower-carts offer flowers and perfumes- much-needed for the outskirts of the city. To the left, you see the great mulch pits, massive warehouses and factorial mixing grounds buzzing with construction. To the right, great wooden cranes hauling squirming chunks of wet flesh from immense pits below the city wall. But in the center, the great bone gates of Rumakel, opening up to needle-like white towers and grey-white concrete streets.
Once through the gates, not all is bone-white. Many buildings are painted in a variety of vibrant colors, many small gardens bear sweet flowers whose scents drift down over the streets. Everywhere, statues of Kobold heroes loom. Religious art is everywhere: painted onto apartment walls, statues lining the rooftops like a great crowd of gargoyles, beautiful statues and fountains in town squares, sometimes art is even painted or carved into the street itself. Everywhere there are pamphlets sold and fancy engraved Uvikovs, as well as tokens and charms. The city is a maze of rings, rising up around the towers in the center, but full of many little alcoves and divets where markets and shrines have popped up. Priestly orders, gurus, and monks are a common sight here, and in the Pilgrim's Districts the mood is ecstatic. Circuses, festivals, and feasts are common there- particularly the luxury suites, which seem to be full of perpetual revelry. Once one continues beyond the Pilgrim Housing, the atmosphere becomes more typical of a city: gruff workers, street food, little community gardens, regular temple schools. The conditions here might even be better than most cities, all agiven. There are many scars there, though- old buildings with signs of old water damage, half-repaired buildings, signs of decay that are not untreated but not solved. Beyond the working sector is the physically elevated priestly sector: temples, monastic cells, high priestly estates, and great libraries and administrative buildings.
Walking further, one reaches the towers- the heart of Rumakel. The heart of Rumakel is large but often quiet- a temple of muffled white walls and carefully walking robed figures. It is not nearly as densely populated as the rest of the city, and once you are beyond the guards much of it is empty. Walking up, one finds rows and rows of little model apartments, idealized shrines containing the mummies of old Kobolds, each with their own name and legacy carved into their homes. The guards patrolling here are quiet, and most of the rest of its residents are Ghosts. Descending downwards, one hears the echoes of the great mines at the heart of Rumakel, the bustling of many clerks and priests, and the footsteps of observant guards. Everyone here is on their toes. The deeper one goes, the more one notices the whispering- or is it whistling?- in the air. The Whispering Star, it is called: a great chunk of Ederstone. Even under its layers of imprisoning bone, the whispering effect still is noticeable. Surrounding it are the great rows and rows of carefully locked chests, each containing an imprisoned Ederstone fragment. Carefully trained beasts stalk these rows alongside the elite guards, always looking for intruders. This is the heart of what Rumakel is: an Ederstone frontier that has been drowned in Kobold bone and bodies until it could no longer properly irradiate the landscape. It is a project to achieve mastery over the chaos that defines Stildane, and while it is not complete it is nearly there. That is what makes Rumakel holy: by having one's body become part of the city, a Kobold physically asserts mastery over Ederstone and declares their own physical purity in the most fundamental way possible. It is where the dead become immortal, and the living can walk with them and meet them as equals.

Demographics

All 8,000 inhabitants of Rumakel are Kobolds, and all non-Kobolds are banned from entry. Few non-Kobolds would want to live here, as the ambient Ederstone radiation in the city limits is unhealthy for non-Kobolds. There are also many Kobold pilgrims here, so population numbers range from 8,000 to 15,000 on a given day.

Government

Rumakel's government is completely theocratic, as the priests are given full control over the city. In practice, the military runs the Outer Ring, but in coordination with the military-priests of The Order of the Flame of Gevig. The Priest-Mayor of Rumakel is selected as the leading administrator by the Kizen Empire's Star Chamber, but nominated by the local priestly orders within the city. The Priest-Mayor leaves individual holy orders with much of the day-to-day operations, and these coordinate with the priest-clerks of the Mayor to keep order

Defences

Due to the softness of bone and even bone-cement, the actual walls of Rumakel are more for containment than military defense. The bulk of Rumakel's proper defensive capabilities are in the Outer Circle: the fortresses that weave around the valley and regulate all transit in or out. These defenses are far enough away to be made of stone, and they are quite difficult to penetrate. Great expense has been paid to renovate and upgrade these fortresses, and their overlapping defensive layers make raids or small attacks impossible. These defenses are manned by the warrior-monks of the Order of the Flame of Gevig, the war Goddess.
Within the city itself, a unique defensive force lays in wait: the School of Pure Sun and the School of Pure Night, the two great monastic academies of the Empire of Kizen. Kivish Kobold Dhampires who show signs of promise are offered positions of wealth and prestige if they join up to train with the School of Pure Night. Kivish Kobolds who seek their own path to physical mastery join the School of Pure Sun. Both are holy orders devoted to the perfection of Kobold-ness and the defense of Rumakel. Having a large number of supernatural martial arts murder-monks in the defensive garrison is critical because of the nature of Ederstone warfare. Ederstone melts and distorts all non-Kobold material, meaning that conventional metals are often ineffective- so, any potential combat needs a large contingent of Kobold-bone-armed warriors. But bone weapons (even those treated in Rumakel style to be more durable) are not great weapons and bone-and-leather armor has its limits. But monks and dhampires need no weapons or armor- they rise above the entire issue and can even pick up and wield used ederstone fragments. In short, attacking Rumakel is not a good idea unless you have allies on the inside.

Industry & Trade

Rumakel has a large number of priests, but the average resident is still working-class. Jobs here have better benefits than in many other cities, and if one can stomach the strangeness of the jobs and landscape and the endless pilgrims, Rumakel can be one of the nicer places to live in Kizen.
Flesh harvesting from the Meat Pits is one of the more common jobs here. What is that, you ask? Well, many centuries ago, the Whispering Star was nestled in the embrace of what must have once been animals (or perhaps Starspawn but the residents like to think not), but were transformed into an ageless pile of growing flesh. When Kobolds took up control of the Star, they found that parts of this flesh thing could grow rapidly apart from the rest. It could only grow at such rates without being fed large amounts of biomass if it was near Ederstone, so it never took off as a competitor to poultry or other animals, but it has been tended to here for millennia. Parts of it often mutate and change as they grow, and Fleshkeepers spend their lives observing the properties of each new change and removing the affected tissue entirely if it is problematic to eat or keep- the meat is a kind of garden, kept usable only through great effort. Most workers here operate less careful tasks: they carve off bits of meat and haul them out of the pits, then cut them into more manageable slices, then roll the meat off for salting, smoking, or cooking. While anti-Kivish propaganda will often point to the Flesh Pit as evidence of continued magic Kobold cannibalism, there is no proof that any piece of the flesh was or is sentient.
Graveworking is another big Rumakel industry. It is here that the operators of Kizen's corpse carts are trained and where their efficiency is tracked, but even more raw manual labor is required in the processing of the Kobold bodies. Tanning of hides, removal of bone, and the fashioning of this bone and leather into containers, bricks, and usable leather all takes a great deal of work. This further bleeds into construction, as experienced graveworkers with a lifetime of knowledge in boneworking create Ederstone storage containers, buildings, and weapon handles.
The Mulch Pits are where the unused parts of graveworking go- both the leftovers and the remains of Kobolds too broken for use. What ingredients go into the mulch pits are a trade secret but the process is pretty clear: bits of kobold are made into something of a slurry to serve as a base for a specific kind of concrete. Bone concrete is unique to Rumakel, and it isn't as effective as pure bone. This concrete still does warp under direct contact with Ederstone, it just resists radiation better than any other material and can hold its shape even while mutated. While component ingredients of the concrete try and transform into new life when touched by Ederstone, the interwoven microscopic bits of Kobold do not- meaning that even if it radically changes properties or becomes living, it cannot move and is stuck as concrete regardless of its new nature. The layers and layers of Kobold-particles also double as a radiation screen, further containing the radiation of the Ederstone held in Rumakel's heart.
Mining may seem like a strange thing to do under such a fragile city, but it remains vital to the Rumakel project and will likely continue until the radiation is entirely contained. When the Ederstone first fell during the Divine Scouring of Stildane in 100DE, much of the Ederstone blasted off of the original meteors in a shower of radioactive shrapnel. The shrapnel fell most heavily directly around the impact sites, and the great Rumakel mining project seeks to extract every last shard for containment. Mining is the most dangerous of Rumakel's employment opportunities, as mining cannot be done with bone tools- so while miners who find shards of Ederstone receive massive bonuses, they also often face great danger. Miners work closely with the construction crews, as the entire mining system is built around trying to preserve Rumakel's stability- and areas of the mines are often strategically built in with bone concrete to either act as foundation pillars or underground buildings (typically warehouse storage). The countryside surrounding the city is dotted with small mines as well, as careful observation of the centers of mutation have begun to reveal where shards are around the impact zone proper.
For the Kobold more drawn to interpersonal work than manual labor, the large entertainment and guest-services industry here is booming and open. From circuses to museum curators to minstrels to dancers to cooks, the large pilgrim population begets a large service industry (perhaps one of the larger in the world, as pilgrims here cannot garden or forage).
Monster Husbandry is a great form of employment and industry for Kobolds of a more agricultural mind. While many monsters and creatures of Ederstone are bred and kept away from sources of radiation (to preserve their more controllable traits from random change), populations of monsters are kept here for further modification and experimentation. This is the crucible for monster-ranchers: you prosper here as a monster-hand, and you've got a straight shot to any prestigious monster-hand job around Kizen. A select group of monster-stock here are reserved for transformation- essentially, controlled exposure to Ederstone to induce random change in a controlled environment. While most of the time, nothing of worth occurs, creatures with favorable traits manifested are immediately sent away for study and possibly introduction into the greater breeding population. This is also where uncontrollable creatures from around Stildane are imported and tested on- while they cannot be controlled in their existing state, the small chance of inducing a more docile trait is worth the attempt.
As one can see, all of these jobs both make money and cost a great deal in investment: Rumakel is not wildly profitable, but profit was never the point.

Infrastructure

Much of Rumakel was rebuilt from 1750 to 1800, to great expense. This provided the new government with an opportunity to make vital quality of life improvements- most notably, a functioning sewer system and better fresh water. It isn't exactly modern plumbing, but the new pipes actually work- and they are properly insulated this time, to prevent unfortunate mutations.
This city is a design masterpiece, mostly because the architects who have had to rebuild it the last few times have not only had to design it horizontally, but vertically. Due to the endless mining for Ederstone fragments under the city, Rumakel has had numerous foreign architects hired to inspect it and help design its support system (some of the few non-Kobolds to witness the holy city). Old mines have been turned into storage warehouses, and there is a whole network of tunnels and underground architecture accessible from the streets (if you know where to look).

Guilds and Factions

The Order of the Flame of Gevig manages most of the military operations here, and therefore basically run the countryside. It is a priestly order heavily integrated with the greater military, composed of pious aristocrats who were willing to abandon their family names for the glory of themselves and Kivishta (or were sent by their families for some reason). They basically manage the Gravekeeping, military construction, and monster husbandry businesses and have a major voice in city operations. The Grave Guild, Builder's Guild, and Rancher's Guild all have immense Flame of Gevig presence in them.
The Caretakers of the Curatorial Order of the Perfect Love of Kitesk have immense sway over city operations and trade, particularly in regards to the city itself. The Caretakers are in charge of keeping the Pilgrims fed, comfortable, entertained, and financially accountable. They manage the service industries, keep track of the pilgrims, and manage a lot of the budgets here. Foreigner historians and observers often gawk at how the Curators were historically priestly courtesans and some still act in that capacity, but insiders understand that this is intertwined with their role as cultural icons. Historically they were poet-priests who acted as companions and advisors to major aristocrats, where the personal, the political, and the religious intermingled. But during times of civil war, the retreated to Rumakel- and after most of their orders attempted to oppose the Children of Verkon in 1700, only the Rumakel order remained. While a few Curators have begun to try to return to their old roles as court advisors, the majority of the order is content with their monopoly on Rumakel's day-to-day operations and trade. They have a monopoly on the printing presses of Rumakel, the charm trades, on flesh-mining and food industries, on the entertainment industries, and on gambling. Most of the lower echelons of their order have been converted to clerks, who try and track the flow of pilgrims and what their tabs are. These tabs have slowly turned into a debt empire, where communities are made responsible for the debts of their individual pilgrims. Some pilgrims stay (or are sent back by their community) to work off their debts here in Rumakel, but many are unwilling to take lasting residence here. Oftentimes, communities will shift their debts upwards onto local elites, who also often have their own debts to the Curators. This began as a system of charity and convenience, but the Curators have started to fully understand their full potential in the last few decades. New leadership has worked to seize more and more power within Kizen's military bank, and there is a large casino complex under construction right now to further entangle/entertain wealthy pilgrims. But not all are happy with this change- there is a lot of internal bickering going on among the upper echelons, especially as the more profit-minded new leadership has toyed with removing restrictions on inebriating substances within the valley (the danger of the city, its fragility, and the potential clouding of enlightenment of the inebriated have all led to ancient laws against alcohol and drugs here).

History

Rumakel was once the heartlands of an Ederstone wasteland known as the Northern Wastes of Azkurbak. This is the homeland of the ancient progenitor of the Kivishta, Verkon the Honest, and a region known for its fierce and unhinged Kobold warriors. The Ederstone of this land fueled the Kivish Scourings of the continent and it is here that the early elite cult-group known as the Children of Verkon trained and studied.
But after the rise of the First Kivish Empire in 470, the heartlands of Azkurbak became a site of pilgrimage. The heart of the Ederstone comet, a massive chunk of the stuff called the Whispering Star, became a kind of shrine for Kobolds across Stildane. But every shrine and temple to it mutated indescribably, and some priests and gurus started to build little altars of kobold bone. The residents of Azkurbak destroyed these altars, as they defeated the point of the chaos, and began to drive away outside priests and pilgrims. These failed pilgrimages became a symbol of the backwardness and instability of the empire- of its unwillingness to build, only to destroy. As the Empire disintegrated, the debate around what to do with the Whispering Star became a kind of identifying argument to which faction you belonged to. Traditionalist Truthful Path Kivish wanted no pilgrims or shrines, the Liberated Path Kivish saw the chaos of the star as beautiful and wanted a monumental temple to allow others to meditate through it, and the Reverent Path Kivish saw the star as powerful but inconvenient and wanted it locked in a vault so that it could be cherished and protected (and contained). From 980 to 1100, the three factions fought- and the Reverent Path ultimately won (though not before the Liberated Path tore off a good chunk of the Whispering Star to carry with them while being driven from the area).
In the 1100s, containment of the Azkurbak wastes began. The first version of Rumakel was built from the Kobold dead around the Vault of the Whispering Star. Empire of no, the Reverent path priests kept Rumakel safe and busy. Wars dared not go here, and Rumakel was happy to lend Ederstone to Reverent Kivish leaders as long as it eventually returned. From 1100 to 1420, Rumakel went from being a pipe dream to a real, tangible thing: the wastes receded and the city rose. Its structures were not stable and it was not well planned, and it had terrible sanitation problems and frequent building collapses- but it was proof of concept.
The civil war of 1420 to 1440 was particularly unkind to Rumakel. Every Path of Kivishta took turns occupying the city- Liberated Path tried to destroy it before being driven out, Promised Path tried to make it their base of operations, and Exalted Path tried to figure out how to make it mobile (and mostly caused destruction). When the Reverent Path finally had complete control again in 1440, the city was ruined- but the materials remained. Innovation in trying to rebuild led to the invention of Bone concrete, and the razing was in some ways an opportunity to start again with better planning. The work was often imperfect and it still had its issues with water drainage and management, but Rumakel 2 was much more stable. This time, it had planned foundations, clear structure, a sewer system, aqueducts, and clearly designated housing areas. Now that it wasn't terrible to live in, Second Rumakel really exploded population-wise. Unfortunately, conditions began to worsen again in the 1600s as population growth and pilgrimages outpaced planned expansion.
Sadly, it took another tragedy to get the empire to invest in another remaking of the city. The Children of Verkon coup in 1680 led to many priestly orders retreating into Rumakel for sanctuary. The Verkon government was at constant odds with Rumakel during this period, as they wanted the Ederstone weaponry within and faced a costly military operation taking it by force. They were forced to promise the priestly groups inside absolute protection and autonomy in exchange for their cooperation, and while the Children of Verkon began moving many agents and assets into the city to try and increase their influence it was always a shaky partnership that ruled the city. As the Children of Verkon lost more and more of their own empire to rebels and factions, they retreated to Rumakel as their armory- they believed that they could lose everything else but if they kept the Ederstone armory they would eventually regain control. It was their own failure to project power over Rumakel that cost them everything in the end. In the 1740s, they lost more and more of their government to factions, and in 1749 even lost the emperorship itself. From 1749 to 1750 they clung to Rumakel's armory, hoping that they could use it to place their own candidate on the throne- but in 1750, the Week of Cleansing began: a series of anti-Verkon purges across the Empire. All surviving Truthful Path Kivish retreated into Rumakel, hoping to survive there- only to be cornered at the end of the week within the valley. As legions of Reverent Path Kivish paladins under the banner of the Order of the Flame of Gevig descended upon Rumakel, the Truthful Path threw everything it had into one final battle. The fighting destroyed much of the city and it looked like the Truthful Path might be able to survive on raw destructive power. In the night, a group of priestly orders led by the Curator poet-priests finally were able to convince the non-interventionist Monks of Sun and Night to join them in rebelling against the Truthful Path. The Children of Verkon were destroyed from within and almost instantly crumbled. Not one of them survived the week.
From 1750 to 1900, Rumakel was a site of massive investment and recovery. Foreign architects were allowed in to help with the urban planning, and this time there would be great water management, efficient sewer systems, and room for expansion. The Third Rumakel was intended as a symbol of a new age of prosperity and careful planning.

Alternative Name(s)

The City of Bones, the Holy City, The Tomb City

Type

City

Population

10,000

Inhabitant Demonym

Rumaken

Location under

Stildane

Owning Organization

Empire of Kizen