Chyredalm (Kai-red-alm)
Chyredalm is a massive underground city built in the vaults of the eponymous Chyredalm Island. Once a minor regional power within the greater Kingdom of Rosethorne, the residents of Chyredalm have been forced to move to the surface and barrelhomes in their Grand Triskele Lake environs due to a mysterious curse that blighted their water supply.
Demographics
The population of Chyredalm is primarily of human extraction. The waters surrounding the island play host to a number of small langostinite villages. The underground aquifer that flows beneath most of the city once also contained one of these villages, subsisting on the detritus of the city and the occasional lost pet, but whatever caused the water to become undrinkable also killed or drove off this isolated population.
Government
Chyredalm is ruled by a council of descendants of the five adventurers who found and made the island's vast caverns safe for inhabitation around half a century ago. Scions of the ruling families who aspire to political power must travel out into the wider world and prove their chops as adventurers in their own rights, whether by achieving high ranks in the Kingdom's navy, clearing new trade routes through the ever-shifting Grand Triskele's waterways, or slaying some monstrous or unusual beast. Because of this tradition, the rulers of Chyredalm have thus far proven brave and competent in the face of the challenges facing the city, only reaching out to external parties for support in modern times because even the best arcana-user amongst the council can find no cause or means of ramediation for the water crisis.
Infrastructure
Stone and tile boardwalks provide street-level connections between buildings, but leave space in the middle for canals over which much commerce was once conducted. Through a system of locks and artificially-constructed waterways, trade vessels coming from the surface can pass through what were once dry entry caverns and be lowered to the water table at the city's street level.
Architecture
Chyredalm is constructed within a series of lava tubes on an island formed from an extinct volcano. The stone pillars and stalactites that once upheld the largest and most central of the caverns were hewn out to provide both living space and building materials. Walls were constructed of the hewn stone bricks created as a byproduct of this excavation. Decades of construction and expansion have resulted in the original formations being subsumed under successive layers of masonry, forming undergound 'skyscrapers' that lend the place an eerily futuristic look. Daylight enters through numerous high-set lava tubes that either naturally pierce the surface or were expanded through excavation, with one - the former mouth of the volcano - situated directly over the downtown area. At night, a combination of oil street lamps and endemic bioluminescent algae in the water provide illumination, casting the hall in mellow blue and sepia hues.
Natural Resources
Chyredalm sits around and partially over a vast underground aquifer which, until recently, provided ample fresh drinking water, fish, aquatic plants, and fungi for the consumption of the citizens. At some point in the last few years, the water in this aquifer suddenly lost its ability to quench thirst; aquatic life could still breathe it, and no change in salinity or other toxic changes could be detected, but those who tried to subsist upon it would remain dehydrated and eventually die of thirst. The waters around the island were unaffected by this change, however, allowing the citizens to evacuate before too many succumbed to thirst. Theories about what caused the strange phenomena abound, but the most prominent one is that some clandestined mage made a mistake in the course of trying to make a Decade Draught and, instead of creating the ultimate thirst-quencher, brought down some sort of transmutation-based curse on the waters of the aquifer from which he drew the raw materials.
Type
City
Population
Around 50,000
Inhabitant Demonym
Chyredalmer(s), Chyrener(s)
Location under
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