Realm: Xathoryn
Nature: Major efreeti city-state and planar trade power
Ruler: Sultan of Brass
Notable Military Forces: Brass Legions, Crownfire
Associated Organization: Brass Blades
The City of Brass is one of the great city-states of Xathoryn and the realm’s most important center of extraplanar commerce. Its wealth and influence derive from control of several unusually stable Vergeways, extensive trade with other realms, and centuries of infrastructure developed to move goods, travelers, information, and political influence across planar boundaries.
For much of recorded Xathoryn history, the City of Brass has stood among the most powerful states in the Realm of Flame. During some periods it has been clearly preeminent, particularly when its planar trade routes were secure and its rivals depended heavily upon access to foreign goods and markets. It has never ruled all of Xathoryn, however, and its rulers have always had to contend with other major powers such as Drazhul, Selqara, and Ithraz.
The city is predominantly associated with efreeti civilization, although centuries of commerce have brought inhabitants and visitors from across Xathoryn and beyond. Its wealth has produced monumental architecture, powerful noble houses, sophisticated institutions, and one of the realm’s most formidable military traditions.
Location
The City of Brass occupies a comparatively stable and heavily developed region of Xathoryn where several important planar and internal trade routes converge. The surrounding territory has been reshaped over immense spans of time to protect the city from environmental extremes, channel useful heat and molten flows, and maintain reliable access to nearby Vergeways.
The city’s location is valuable precisely because it allows movement between otherwise distant or difficult-to-reach realms. Some Vergeways connect Xathoryn with physical worlds, while others provide routes toward regions of Creation important for trade, diplomacy, military operations, or acquisition of resources unavailable within the Realm of Flame.
Control of these routes has always been a central concern of the city’s rulers. Fortifications, military outposts, customs facilities, and settlements supporting planar commerce extend well beyond the city’s central districts, making the political territory of Brass larger than the urban center alone.
Appearance
The City of Brass takes its name from the metal’s long association with its architecture, civic identity, and political culture. Brass appears prominently in monumental facades, towers, gates, statues, bridges, military equipment, ceremonial spaces, and symbols of authority.
The city is not constructed entirely from brass. Much of its oldest architecture uses dark stone, heat-resistant ceramics, alloys, and other materials suited to Xathoryn’s environment. Brass is frequently used where visibility, prestige, craftsmanship, or symbolism matters most.
Against the dark volcanic landscape surrounding the city, polished metal catches and reflects the ambient glow of Xathoryn. Towers and elevated structures can appear almost luminous when nearby vents, distant eruptions, or engineered channels of fire illuminate them.
The city has grown through many eras rather than according to a single master plan. Ancient districts sit beside later expansions, and noble estates, military precincts, markets, industrial quarters, foreign enclaves, and working neighborhoods possess distinct architectural traditions.
The Sultan of Brass
The City of Brass is ruled by the Sultan of Brass, an autocrat whose authority extends across the city’s government, military, dependent territories, and major commercial institutions.
The Sultan does not govern alone in practical terms. Powerful efreeti noble houses control immense wealth, estates, industries, military commands, and political networks. Their support can matter enormously to the stability of a reign, and rival houses constantly compete for offices, contracts, privileges, and influence.
Their power should not be mistaken for constitutional restraint upon the throne. The Sultan possesses broad authority to confiscate property, remove officials, imprison enemies, revoke noble privileges, impose exile, and order execution. A sufficiently powerful house can make such actions politically costly, but the legitimacy of the throne itself is not normally dependent upon formal approval from an assembly of nobles.
The result is a political culture of patronage, rivalry, calculation, and fear. Noble houses compete vigorously with one another while remaining careful not to appear openly disloyal to the Sultan.
Succession can therefore be a dangerous period in the city’s history. Even when inheritance is clear, factions may maneuver to strengthen their positions beneath the new ruler, settle old grievances, or eliminate rivals whose protections have weakened.
Efreeti Nobility
The noble houses of Brass form a major part of the city’s political and economic structure. Many possess histories stretching back for ages and maintain extensive interests in trade, industry, military service, landholding, and planar ventures.
Competition among houses is often indirect. A noble may fund a commercial expedition intended to undermine a rival’s trade route, support a proxy conflict in another state, manipulate access to an important Vergeway, or sponsor mercenaries for an operation that would be politically inconvenient for the city itself to conduct openly.
Marriage, inheritance, adoption, political sponsorship, and personal loyalty all shape these networks. Houses can rise quickly through exceptional service to the throne or collapse when a ruler determines that their influence has become threatening.
Their rivalry contributes substantially to the demand for independent military and planar organizations. A noble house may require armed specialists for an operation beyond Xathoryn without wanting to request formal deployment of the Sultan’s forces.
The Brass Blades prospered for thousands of years in precisely this environment.
Society
The City of Brass is wealthy, sophisticated, and deeply hierarchical. Political status, family, wealth, military achievement, commercial success, and proximity to powerful patrons all influence an individual’s position.
Its civilization has produced skilled artisans, scholars, merchants, engineers, administrators, soldiers, explorers, and magical specialists. Great wealth supports public works and artistic traditions on a scale few smaller Xathoryn states can easily match.
These achievements coexist with significant cruelty. Slavery has historically been an entrenched institution within the city and its economy, and both the state and private elites have benefited from forced labor. The legal and social position of enslaved people has varied across different periods, but the institution itself has long been accepted by much of the ruling culture.
Political punishment can also be severe. Confiscation, imprisonment, exile, destruction of a family or organization’s status, and public examples made of suspected traitors are all consistent with the authority claimed by the Sultan.
This does not make every resident personally cruel or every institution uniformly oppressive. It does mean that the prosperity of Brass has developed within a system that accepts stark differences in power and treats the ruler’s authority as considerably more important than individual equality.
Planar Commerce
Planar trade is the foundation of the city’s exceptional wealth. The City of Brass controls several stable Vergeways and has spent ages developing the expertise necessary to use them reliably.
Foreign goods enter Xathoryn through its markets, while Xathoryn metals, elemental materials, crafted works, rare substances, and luxury goods move outward into other realms. Information can be just as valuable as physical cargo. Political developments, magical discoveries, maps, languages, military intelligence, and knowledge of newly accessible planar routes all have markets within Brass.
The city regulates this trade heavily. Access to important Vergeways, permission to establish foreign commercial operations, tariffs, transportation rights, and ownership of warehouses or trade facilities can all become subjects of political competition.
The Sultan’s government profits directly through taxation and licensing while noble houses compete for individual routes, foreign contacts, and specialized markets.
This commerce gives Brass tremendous influence beyond what its territory alone would justify. A state elsewhere in Xathoryn may dislike the Sultan intensely while still depending upon Brass for access to extraplanar customers or resources.
Foreign Districts
Unlike many settlements in Xathoryn, the City of Brass regularly receives visitors who are not adapted to the Realm of Flame. This has encouraged development of districts and facilities where heat, atmosphere, and other environmental conditions are moderated sufficiently for outsiders to function.
These accommodations exist because foreign commerce is profitable rather than because the city regards visitors as equals. Travelers entering Brass remain subject to local law and are expected to understand that tolerance depends heavily upon usefulness, sponsorship, and behavior.
Foreign districts often contain merchants, emissaries, mercenaries, guides, translators, specialists in planar travel, and communities descended from outsiders who chose to remain in Xathoryn.
The existence of these populations has made Brass unusually cosmopolitan by Xathoryn standards, although the social hierarchy of the city still strongly favors those connected to established efreeti institutions.
The Brass Legions
The Brass Legions are the principal professional military forces of the Sultan of Brass. They defend the city and its territories, protect critical Vergeways, maintain important fortifications, suppress major internal threats, and conduct conventional campaigns against rival powers.
Their existence reflects the political realities of Xathoryn. Brass is wealthy enough to attract invasion, strategically important enough to threaten its rivals, and dependent upon trade routes that must be defended across large territories.
The Brass Legions are therefore a standing military institution rather than a temporary force raised only in wartime. Their organization, equipment, logistics, and command traditions have developed through centuries of conflict with other sophisticated Xathoryn powers.
Individual rulers have expanded or reduced the force according to political conditions, so its exact size has varied considerably across history.
The Crownfire
The Crownfire is an elite military formation associated with the City of Brass. It is deployed against exceptional threats, enemy elites, critical defenses, and situations where ordinary formations are unlikely to succeed.
Membership carries enormous prestige. Service in the Crownfire can elevate an individual’s standing within military and political society, and veterans often retain considerable influence after leaving active service.
Zokhail The Mighty served in the Crownfire before the founding of the Brass Blades. He was badly wounded while defending the city during a major frost giant assault, and those injuries eventually ended his career within the Sultan’s military.
Surviving accounts do not reliably identify who commanded the attack, what larger conflict produced it, or how such a substantial force reached Xathoryn. They agree that the assault represented a serious military threat rather than an isolated incursion and required the commitment of the Crownfire to the city’s defense.
The Brass Blades
In 1523 SE, Zokhail The Mighty founded the Brass Blades after leaving service with the Crownfire.
The new organization filled a gap between the City’s conventional military forces and the needs of its rulers and nobles. The Brass Legions could fight large campaigns, while the Crownfire could confront exceptional battlefield threats. Neither was ideally suited for extended operations in foreign realms where deploying the Sultan’s soldiers could be impractical, expensive, or politically provocative.
The Brass Blades specialized in planar operations. They learned to navigate Vergeways, survive unfamiliar environments, negotiate with foreign cultures, and complete military or exploratory objectives beyond Xathoryn.
Their clients included wealthy merchants, efreeti noble houses, and occasionally the Sultan himself. Over thousands of years, these contracts transformed the organization into one of the most experienced planar mercenary forces associated with the City of Brass.
Although they remained closely tied to their homeland, their work also gave them unusual independence and relationships far beyond the Sultan’s direct control.
The Melting of the Blades
The relationship between Brass and the Brass Blades ended catastrophically in 8496 SE.
While serving an efreeti noble, the organization became implicated in treason against the Sultan. Whether the Brass Blades knowingly participated or were manipulated by their patron remained disputed among the organization’s survivors and later historians.
The Sultan responded decisively. Zokhail was imprisoned within the Sultan’s vaults, assets accessible to the government were seized, and the Brass Blades were expelled from the City of Brass.
The event became known within the organization as the Melting of the Blades.
Although the Sultan’s direct authority did not extend across all of Xathoryn, the Blades found sanctuary elsewhere in the realm difficult to obtain. Rival rulers had little reason to trust an ancient military organization so closely associated with Brass, while smaller states risked economic and political retaliation if they openly sheltered declared enemies of the Sultan.
The organization’s exile from the City of Brass therefore became, in practical terms, an exile from Xathoryn.
The surviving Brass Blades eventually established themselves in the physical world and founded the Brass Bastion in Elgaard in 8721 SE.
Rival Powers
The City of Brass exists within a political system dominated by several major Xathoryn states rather than above them.
Drazhul controls enormous mineral and manufacturing resources. Selqara possesses extensive productive territories and biological resources. Ithraz dominates important elemental and magical sites.
Brass depends upon all three despite competing with them. Its industries require materials from Drazhul, its population and economy benefit from Selqara’s cultivated products, and its planar markets profit from Ithraz’s rare magical resources.
The other states likewise depend upon Brass for access to extraplanar markets and goods.
This interdependence makes war common but total conquest dangerous. A ruler who destroys a rival may also destroy resources or trade relationships upon which their own state relies.
Conflicts therefore often involve limited wars, proxy states, border disputes, embargoes, raids, mercenary operations, espionage, political interference, and struggles over Vergeway access.
The City of Brass has frequently been the strongest participant in this balance without ever becoming powerful enough to eliminate the system entirely.
Vergeways
Stable planar connections are inseparable from the history of Brass. The city rose partly because several useful Vergeways could be accessed and maintained from its territory, allowing it to become a center of travel long before many mortal societies possessed reliable planar magic.
These routes have changed across the ages. Some disappeared when the relationships supporting them weakened, while others were stabilized through repeated use or deliberate magical intervention.
Control of a Vergeway can become an issue of state security. Important approaches are guarded, mapped, monitored, and maintained, and knowledge of an undisclosed route can be worth extraordinary amounts of money.
The city’s political influence has therefore risen and fallen partly with the accessibility of the wider planar network.
The Sundering dramatically altered many of the connections upon which ancient Brass commerce depended, reducing the ease with which the City could interact with Kor Sirok and other realms compared with earlier ages.
Mortal Understanding
The City of Brass is better known outside Xathoryn than most of the Realm of Flame’s other states because its merchants, mercenaries, diplomats, and travelers historically appeared throughout Creation.
This prominence has produced considerable misunderstanding. Some mortal traditions describe the Sultan of Brass as ruler of all Xathoryn or portray every efreeti as a subject of the city. Neither is accurate.
Other stories emphasize only the city’s cruelty, slavery, or extraordinary wealth and overlook the broader society that produced them. Still others romanticize its markets and planar wonders while ignoring the political system sustaining that prosperity. Both perspectives reflect recognizable parts of Brass without describing the whole: it is an ancient center of trade, scholarship, craftsmanship, military power, and planar exploration whose prosperity developed within a deeply hierarchical society and under rulers who have rarely regarded mercy as a necessary restraint upon power.