Wyrmwatch¶
Wyrmwatch went up fast. Within weeks of the decision it stood at the Skunk River crossing — small, sturdy, and immediately part of Athanor's domain, a settlement that existed because the crossing needed holding and waiting was not an option.
It is a wet place. The Narlmarches begin more or less at its back door, and the ground between the town and the deep forest is the sort that swallows a boot in spring. A branch of the river runs fast enough through that swamp-edge to drive a millrace year-round, which is the reason there is a town here at all rather than a ford and a memory.
What Stands There¶
The Town Hall anchors the first block, with houses and an Inn beside it — the inn doing the work that inns do on a frontier, which is to be the room where everyone ends up.
The Mill turned its first stones in the same season as the mill on the Thorn, driven by that fast branch of the river, and it is the reason Wyrmwatch feeds itself without asking.
The Pier came later. The settlement had waited long enough for proper waterfront infrastructure, and it was built to instruction drawn from hard experience — Elroy Jenkins had crossed enough rivers armed to the teeth to have opinions about how one ought to approach the water, and Grotdor applied them with his usual methodical thoroughness.
The third block is mostly open ground. Wyrmwatch has room to grow and has not yet needed to.
The Rubble¶
There is one lot in the second block that the settlers of Wyrmwatch will point out to you, and the story is not flattering.
A building project was mishandled. The frame collapsed. What was left was a heap of broken timber that proved impossible to dignify in any report, and around it there accumulated a dump-heap that bothered the townsfolk considerably more than the failure itself had — a low grumbling current that the Pentarchy could feel in the room whenever Wyrmwatch came up.
It was raised again. Houses now climb the waterfront where the rubble had been, whole blocks of timber-frame dwellings with smoke threading up from new chimneys, and the lot that had been the town's humiliation is the part of it people are proudest of. Nobody has suggested taking the story down.
The Garrison¶
The Wyrmwatch Stalkers are based here — a skirmisher company, fast and light, raised deliberately as the kind of force the capital's heavier regiment could not be spared to provide. A wetland settlement on the edge of a forest full of trolls needs soldiers who can move through it, not soldiers who can hold a line in a field.
The Neighbours¶
Wyrmwatch is the closest Athanoran settlement to two protected places: Tiressia's Refuge, the dryad's grove, and Melianse's Refuge, the nixie's stretch of water. Both lie under the Pentarchy's protection, and the town is, in practice, the border guard for that arrangement.