Editing Acrozatarim/Gazetteer (section)

==Qyashun==

'''Icons''': The Vault-Keeper Tyanlun Hamei

South of the Basin, taiga stretches towards the Storm mountain foothills.  It is here, nestled amidst wild and tangled valleys, that the nation of Qyashun is to be found.  Once, Qyashun Prefecture was the site of the Emperor's Summer Palace, and the city at the nation's heart still echoes much of that faded grandeur and luxury.  Despite a long and tumultuous history, Qyashun is still known in this age as holding the greatest repository of Drakkath-era lore in the entire region.

The libraries of Qyashun are grand structures, lovingly tended to by archivist sect adherents who train as much in the martial protection of their tomes as they do in cataloguing and appreciating their content.  The actual few Drakkath texts are kept within the Great Vault itself, a subterranean complex beneath the Grand Qyashun Library.  Defended by a complex array of Elder technology wards and defences, the Vault was once an armoury of arcane devices owned by the Imperial Family; now its rooms contain an unknown amount of ancient lore, valuable and rare tomes, pieces of Elder artefacts and other items of great value or knowledge.  Embarrassingly, this veritable fortress has been broken into once, by the enigmatic being known as the Solitary Flame.

Most of the nation is made up of terrace-farming villages amidst steep valleys, a few market towns and a number of hill-clans who pay mostly theoretical respect to the central council's authority.  However, the landscape here is extremely rich in minerals and timbers, something that has long brought Qyashun more than its fair share of wealth; more than that, though are the veins of materials that are left-overs from the Dawn Era, raw and unrefined elemental substances that escaped notice by the Elder Gods as they forged a new world into being from the elemental but barren creation of the Great Elementals.  These are incredibly hard to work but also incredibly valuable and are, along with knowledge, Qyashun's most treasured resource.

The government of Qyashun is a council of nobles and citizens of import from the nation's sole city; they serve for life, but elect the holders of other positions from amidst the scholarly institutions of the nation.  These positions are also held for life, making the seat of the Vault-Keeper subject to some often genuinely murderous power struggles amongst the scribe-halls.  For all its pretences to learning and truth, however, Qyashun seeks to serve itself more than it does others - objects of power or valuable knowledge are to be hoarded under lock and key, brought out to be used to benefit the nation or to trade with miserly negotiation for as much as can be gained.  The scholar-towers encourage a conservative, static culture rather than one of seeking truth for the sake of knowledge.  Still, anyone who would wish to wrest their treasures away from Qyashun faces a difficult proposition; the city, built up around the grand old summer palace, has a number of Empire-era defensive mechanisms tied into the cycle of the celestial heavens, harnessing the power of the turning seasons to provide arcane fuel to arcanomechanical guardians and strange energy-manipulating devices that stud the palace grounds.

The palace itself is a wonder, even with the damage that the passing centuries have done to it and with so many of its treasures lost and looted in the Empire's fall.  The great Herbarium is of particular note due to its size and the exotic collection of plants within it.

Qyashun remains a dangerous land beyond the city walls.  All sorts of creatures roam the valleys, including some quite human bandit gangs and marauders from the southern tribes of the deeper taiga.  Most of Qyashun's military capability is focused on maintaining the routes from the nation into the Basin that it sits on the edge of; beyond that, however, the council has made quite enough money from the trade of valuable resources that it often dips into its coffers to hire mercenaries whenever additional muscle is needed.

An immense statue stands in the northern valleys of Qyashun.  This colossal edifice depicts an inhuman, almost reptilian figure.  As far as anyone can tell, the vast, weathered figure is far older than even the Drakkath Empire, presumably one of the last artefacts of a civilisation from the earliest days of the Dawn Age.  Popular tradition has it that chips off the statue are worthwhile offerings to ancestors, since it reminds them that even the truly ancient are still remembered in this world; touching the statue where it emerges from the rocky ground is also supposed to help combat many a disease.  Arcane adepts have confirmed that the statue is still possessed of residual energies infused within it, though what this truly ancient enchantment was supposed to do is not clear.