Editing Acrozatarim/Gazetteer (section)

==Pharam Sung==

'''Icons''': The Silver Warder, Khala (all Silver Warders taken this name)

Beyond the embrace of the White Bay, out amidst the cruel waves of the Marble Sea, Pharam Sung rises from the depths as defiant white walls upon rocky cliffs.  From here it dominates the nearest trade-lanes, eternally glaring at the surrounding sea from its fortified edges where panopticon-towers vigilantly watch with unnatural scrutiny.  Pharam Sung is a naval power and a slaver-state, a city of prisons and strictly delineated districts.  It is also the heart of Aasorian worship.

Pharam Sung is an uncompromising nation and this has won it no end of conflict with its neighbours; its depredations, and those of the Silver Warder herself, have earned it even more mistrust.  However, it remains a vital figure in diplomacy and negotiations because it serves as a jail for a great number of prisoners from around the world, whether political or due to their dangerous nature.  As well as the somewhat more conventional panopticon-prisons and prison-hulk ships, the Aasorian warders guard deep vaults that are heavily protected with eldritch defences against both intrusions and attempts to escape.  The city is also a major slave market, dealing with captives shipped from the Drakkath, the northern lands, Ara and Vekath; it is hence quite rich.

Of course, the oddity of Pharam Sung is that everyone in the city is a slave.  Every single person has some bond of slavery that ties them to another; lower castes are literally the slaves of higher castes, who are in turn slaves to ministers or generals or high priests, who are in turn slaves to councils or arms of state; even the Silver Warder herself is a slave.  Most Sungese wear signs of this in the forms of symbolic manacles or neck-clasps, increasingly ornate and non-functional as they rise in status, although there is nothing ornate about the chains that bind the Silver Warder to Aasor.  Some consider this institution of slavery to be only an affectation, but it is rigorously enforced by Sungese culture and the legal system.  No man or woman in Pharam Sung is free.  They are all, ultimately, enslaved to the great edifice that is Pharam Sung itself, in service to Aasor.  This is no affectation, for Pharam Sung is not a kind city or a place of mercy.  Silver-clad templars enforce order with brutal efficiency, and even the mightiest minister suffers the same as the lowest labourer should they transgress the duties and limits placed upon them by the Sungese code.

No-one is entirely sure of the full catalogue of just what the Sungese have hidden in their warded jails.  Innumerable slaves toil on the docks and in the thin soil of the island's farms, and hundreds of prisoners sent to the island by distant lands (along with significant payments) languish, forgotten and despairing.  But in the deep, where Elder-tech bore-cells are literally surrounded by solid rock until called up into secure containment bays, there are weird and dangerous things, including beings imprisoned in fields of true void, entities that must be starved of light to contain their power and insane magi held in arcane earthing engines.  Of course, no one believes the Sungese just wordlessly guard these beings; no, it is presumed that they glean all they can from them, and thus build new and stranger technologies and hoard startling revelations about reality.  The panopticons are just one aspect of Sungese power that is not fully understood by the other nations; the networks of thaumineered overseer-watchers are an example of thaumaturgical engineering rarely matched elsewhere.

Ultimately, as a naval power, Pharam Sung relies on its stout defences for the protection of the city rather than a vast army; it is the fleets of the state that are responsible for keeping foes away from those walls.  Pharam vessels follow a series of very tightly defined patterns and rarely deviate from these designs.  They are well-crafted and swift, largely built as boarders in order to take captives, but the grim island lacks much in the way of timber and so one of the state's major imports is wood from the Eastern Drakkath Plains and the Central Basin.

Pharam Sung is known to have developed relationships with all manner of far-away lands, often covert and secretive deals to accept prisoners and keep them far from the lands that have exiled them.  Not all prisoners in the city are treated with indifference; some nations pay a great deal for the relatives of monarchs or dangerous but brilliant individuals to be secreted away and kept in luxury.  Still, this network of quiet pacts lends the Sungese government an unparalleled understanding of world politics, even if the divine imperatives of the Silver Warder so often serve to prevent them making effective use of this knowledge.  They are also known to have pacts and agreements with a number of undersea polities; the local sahuagin septs are generally kept in line and other, weirder entities have also met with envoys.  It is believed that the Sungese have a number of pacts with beings of storm and wave that they use to attack the trade routes and maritime efforts of rival nations.