Chondolos River

The Chondolos river is a large river that follows a winding path through the western environs of the Alluvial plain to the south of the Eleven Cities. It has several small tributary streams, most of them deep enough to support raft travel, and these form a substantial network of riverine trade on the plain. The city of Chogyos is situated at ts broad mouth, and thus exerts control over traffic on the river, a key contributing factor to the city's enduring economic power.

Mythology

Jalens of the South briefly refers to the Chondolos in The Spring of Many Waters, stating that it was in a wood within sight of the river the the goddess Maryas witnessed the emergence of the god Pergyad from among the beasts of the wild.
Jalens offers no mythological origin for the river. The Chogyan Book of Favour, however, proposes an eitiology for Chogyos's imperial control over the river. Chonyos, the mythological hero who founded the city, is said to have arrived at the mouth of the river to find it bedevilled by an evil serpent, who was poisoning the waters with its fangs. In a great battle Chonyos throttled the serpent with the rigging of his ship, then used the monsters blood to purify the river, earning the gratitude of the farmers who lived along its banks. They allowed their daughters to enter a polygamous marriage with Chonyos, and the resulting children became the founding citizens of Chogyos.

History

Although the foundation myth of the city of Chogyos refers to the city's mastery of the Chondolos, it seems not to have been until the latter stages of the Mast Wars that the city's government took any active notice of the river. The city had long been fed via trade with the various rural communities to the south, which would send their produce north in small boats. Largely defeated at sea, the Chogyans turned their imperial ambitions inland, seeking to establish formal control over these communities and thus dictate their production and the prices charged for it.
Chogyos's ocean-going navy was inadequate to this objective, so the city forged an alliance with the corsairs of the neighbouring Loros and financing the construction of a fleet of boats with very shallow drafts in order to navigate the Chondolos and its tributaries. The corsairs were apparently paid in the form of shares of plunder from the initial conquest, which therefore appears to have been quite violent. For a period of roughly a century, the Chogyan Hegemony ruled much of the western alluvial plain, mostly via its control of shipping on the Chondolos.
The collapse of the Hegemony in the latter half of second century BWR was essentially due to the failure of this monopoly. As Chogyos sought to extend its rule further from the Chondolos to stifle food supplies to Pholyos, they encountered increasing resistance from the Boles of Dahan, who appeared to have objected to the use of famine as a weapon (or, alternatively, to the introduction of yams into the food supply; why this would be is an interesting question). These clerics led something of an agricultural strike which deprived Chogyos of food and made an ass of its mercantile control of the rivers. This eroded its control of the alluvial plain and made it immensely difficult to combat independence movements in Ramoros and Elpaloz. 
Chogys was able to re-establish its riverine empire in the years following the Wesmodian Reformation, in part because the Reformation had destroyed the power of the Boles of Dahan and therefore denuded the rural communities of any native capacity for organised resistance. This control has eroded again in recent years as the cities of Pholyos and Tyros essentially began buying the Lorian corsiars off in order to limit the economic power of Chogyos. The fact that this was possible reveals once again the pivotal importance of the Chondolos river to Chogyan power.