The City of Asku-Korla

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Once the Western-most city on the edge of the Jade Pillar Dynasty, the city of Asku-Korla was a lynch-pin in the major overland trade route between the Dynasty and the Emirates of the Silver Sun. After the Sundering, the value of Asku-Korla as a trade link was diminished but some several hundred years of fighting to control it still followed before this was fully realized. Dynastic troops, steppes raiders, Emirate soldiers, mercenaries and others all fought and bleed for the city before it was abandoned to those willing to rule among the ruins and dust.

Now Asku-Korla dominates an ill-used trade route, more frequented by smugglers and criminals than honest travellers. T’sang Al’Rashad, the ‘Bronze Lion’, rules the city and the trade routes with an iron grip, his rule enforced by his rag-tag army of mercenaries and killers, the ‘Lions of Sunset’. He seized control from the previous ruler, Michaud ‘the Uncaring’, twenty-odd years ago in a palace coup.

Nominally a vassal of the Jade Pillar Dynasty, T’sang Al’Rashad is a law onto himself. A magistrate of the Dynasty is stationed in Asku-Korla but it is widely accepted that being stationed here is a punishment and he has little or no actual authority. The Dragon Imperium does not bother to assign a satrap to Asku-Korla, considering it beneath Imperial notice. Thus, the law of Asku-Korla is “the weak are meat, the strong eat”.