Eataine

Eataine is the richest of Ulthuan's ten kingdoms and the beating heart of asur sea-power, and its capital, Lothern, is the greatest harbour the world has ever seen. Guarding the sole sea-gate into the Inner Sea stands the Emerald Gate, a fortress of impossible scale through which pass the war-fleets that police ten thousand miles of ocean and the merchant argosies that make the kingdom fat. Within Lothern's marble halls sits the Phoenix King himself, and upon its quays the trade of a hundred distant shores is unloaded amid a dozen tongues heard before the morning is out.

Here the golden age of the asur still burns at its brightest, or seems to. The towers gleam, the fleets ride at anchor mast beyond mast, and the merchant princes of Eataine will tell any who ask, and many who do not, that talk of the elves' long decline is merely the muttering of dour northern kingdoms with no head for commerce. Perhaps they even believe it. But every crowded berth and glittering court rests upon the same cruel arithmetic that thins all the asur: a people too few and too slow to breed, holding too long a wall. Eataine's answer is to shine so brilliantly that no one, itself least of all, need look too closely at the dark that gathers beyond the reach of the lamplight.