Sanctuary

For centuries Khur was thought of as an empty land, devoid of life or livelihood, containing only sand, stone, and sun. In truth the desert was home to many living things, each adapted to the stark environment. Beneath the sand dwelt creatures tenacious and frequently venomous. Above ground grew grass like wire, thorny vines, and waxen shrubs. By night the desert rose bloomed, source of the rarest perfume in the world. The scent was sweet, but the petals of the plant were deadly poison. Such was the life of the land of Khur.

The people of Khur were likewise shaped by their desert home. Most were nomads of hard mien and severe law, devoted to clan, tribe, and gods. Living on their own in a harsh land, they knew no master but the desert. Each tribe was its own nation, and every nomad his own lord. Ungovernable, they nonetheless had a king, the Khan of Khur, who dwelt in the city of Khuri-Khan.

The city had grown up in the east, where sea and sand met. Looted and sacked many times in the past (the last time by followers of the dread wyrm Malystryx), Khuri-Khan was rising again. Newly restored, the squat round towers and square dwellings once more thrust up from the endless sand. Scaffolds enfolded the shattered façade of the Khuri yl Nor—“the Palace of the Setting Sun”—and the city’s outer wall was checkered with newly cut stone blocks, repairing the destruction wrought by the recent war. City dwellers had picked up the bricks and shattered timbers of their homes and set them in place. Noble and commoner alike had planted thousands of date palm seedlings throughout the city, alongside the towering ancients that still survived. Trade resumed and life went on in the noisy, contentious Khurish fashion.

New construction was not the only change in Khur. Outside the walls of Khuri-Khan sprawled a vast camp of multicolored tents. Miles across, the conglomeration of shelters clustered under the city wall like fungus clinging to a fallen log. Crowded into this makeshift metropolis were a hundred thousand elves, former residents of Qualinesti and Silvanesti. The camp of exiled elves was known to its inhabitants (not without irony) as “Khurinost,” and to the people of Khuri-Khan as Laddad-ihar, the Elves’ Anthill.

Laddad was an old word whose literal meaning—“those who walk on air”—was a reference to the griffon riders of ancient times. Now it meant simply “elves,” encompassing Qualinesti, Silvanesti, and Kagonesti, since the Khurs made no distinction among the groups.

In the center of this great patchwork camp of tents was the home of the Speaker of the Sun and Stars. Gilthas, son of Tanis Half-Elven and Lauralanthalasa, was last of the line of Speakers great and ill, which stretched back to the founder of the Qualinesti nation, Kith-Kanan, and through him to the august Silvanos Goldeneye. On Gilthas had fallen the daunting task of leading his people out of their ruined homeland, abandoning it to the Knights of Neraka, mobs of wild goblins, and the bandit horde of Captain Samuval. The Qualinesti had fought their way across half a continent and come to rest here in this desolate desert. Thousands perished on the journey, felled by arrow and sword, as well as the less material but no less deadly menaces of heat, disease, exhaustion, and heartbreak. The sands of western Khur were littered with bones, broken carts, and abandoned possessions, and watered by the tears of an entire race.

When Gilthas first beheld the city of Khuri-Khan, a scant one thousand elves stood at his back. After the horrors of exile and the agonizing trek across the desert, the sun-baked capital of Khur seemed a dream of paradise, but the elves’ ballad of woe wasn’t done. As months passed, more refugees arrived, in groups of five or ten, as well as columns numbering in the thousands. From the far south came Silvanesti driven out of their forest glades and crystal halls by hordes of rampaging minotaurs. Fewer Silvanesti than Qualinesti abandoned their homeland, for no matter how wretched their existence, most could not bear to leave their sacred ancestral lands. Instead, they faded into the forest, there to dwell among the trees like their primeval ancestors. Those who had joined Gilthas were, for the most part, high officials, warriors, and nobles of the Silvanesti court. When Gilthas was proclaimed Speaker of the Stars by the abdicating Alhana Starbreeze, the exiled courtiers of Silvanost swallowed their outrage at having a Qualinesti (and one tainted with human blood!) as their ruler. If the race of elves was to survive, it needed a leader. The once-scorned “Puppet King” had proven himself capable. Elves of greater reputation had succumbed to death or, despairing, had given in to the enemy. Not Gilthas. The test of exile showed his true mettle, so the Silvanesti notables gathered around him, forming a tightly knit circle of advisors to the throne of the united elven nations.