All cities have a character. Sacaan is no different.

Sacaan is a thieves’ city – mazes of back-alleys and side-streets, bolt-holes and hidden passages, and jumbled rooftops pressed so close together in places that you can run from the High Temple to Dockside without your feet ever once touching the ground.

Sacaan is a spies’ city – shadowed corners and bolted doors, secret handshakes and hidden knives, innocuous-seeming businesses hiding bloody secrets behind dusty windows and dull names.

Sacaan is a magicians’ city – researchers poring bleary-eyed over ancient texts, wild-eyed scholars drawing impossible geometries in chalk on stained floorboards, students in lecture halls dutifully copying down equations and copperplate lists of herbs.

Sacaan is a priests’ city – temple bells tolling the hours across the snow-covered roofs, red-robed acolytes heatedly discussing theology in freezing courtyards, quiet worshippers prostrating themselves in prayer in incense-scented darkness.

Sacaan is a mercenaries’ city – raucous returned soldiers clattering along the streets after dark, scarred veterans drinking together in the back rooms of taverns, medals and missing limbs mingled in a well-worn understanding of the price that was given and the safety it bought.

Sacaan is a city that loves her children, and sends them out to die, and welcomes them back again with every part of her ancient, twisted, ramshackle, shadowy heart. And her children, cheerful and violent and clever and subtler than they seem, love her back with a ferocity that burns.