KHAR-THUL-KHAR-SKAR

The Noble Levels  ·  The Upper Terraces  ·  Vel-Skar Household and Senior Scholars  ·  Karneth-Khar-Thul

“I was given rooms in the noble levels on my first evening. The guest suite maintained for Roman visitors has a sleeping platform slightly raised from the standard dwarven bench level and a table at human working height in the corner. Neither modification is recent. The stone of the platform has the same worn quality as everything else that has been in continuous use here. I am not the first Roman scholar to sleep in this room. I found this thought, on reflection, more affecting than I expected.”

— G.C.P.S.A., Descriptio Aethermarchae, 1197 A.P.

The noble levels at Karneth have the scholarly orientation of the hold as a whole, shaped by eight centuries of Bera's family's investment in external intellectual contact. The library collections visible through doorways Varro passed under escort extend along entire corridor walls. The gem-garden formations are warm rather than cold-blue -- the eastern range's crystal mineralogy produces formations of a different character from the north's blue-white -- and eight centuries of cultivation has developed them into designs whose full pattern Varro saw from the atrium floor below and wishes he had spent more time with from the terrace level.

Demographics

The Vel-Skar extended household and the hold's noble bloodlines inhabit the upper terraces in the standard configuration, but Karneth's noble level has an additional population category absent from the other holds: the small number of Academy scholars who have, over the past century, secured noble-level guest access through the eastern trade post's scholarly arrangement. There have been, since the arrangement was established, eleven Roman scholars who have slept in the guest suite. Varro is the most recent and the one who stayed longest. The suite's maintenance record, kept by the noble level steward, notes each visitor's dates and notes. The notes for Varro's visit run to six pages.

Points of interest

The Vel-Skar household library on the second noble terrace contains eight centuries of collected material on the eastern approaches, the hold's history, the Ancestor tradition, and the external world. The collection includes works Varro recognises from the Academy's own holdings and works he does not recognise at all -- the latter being the section he found most interesting and had the least time with. The library's archivist, a member of the noble household rather than Dunkar Vel-Sar's formal archivist caste, was willing to discuss the unrecognised works in general terms. She was not willing to remove them from the shelf for closer examination. Varro has been thinking about what they were since the third day of his visit.

The guest suite on the second terrace is the most visited location in the noble levels by non-Karnethii. Its sleeping platform, table, and widened doorframe constitute the most considered accommodation for a Roman visitor in the seven holds, developed over a century of iterative improvement by Bera's household based on feedback that successive Roman scholars were too polite to give directly and that Bera's household elicited through the particular method of watching what visitors actually used and adjusting accordingly.

DM ONLY

The unrecognised works in the Vel-Skar library include three stone tablet volumes in a script that the library archivist catalogued as 'pre-Karneth, origin uncertain.' They are not in any script Varro recognises from his knowledge of the primary continent's written traditions. They are not in the old pre-Permutatio Dwarven script that appears in the Thalgrimm archive references. They are in a script that predates both. Bera found them in the hold's founding-period storage sixteen years ago while overseeing a routine archive reorganisation. She has not shared their existence with the other Thanes. She has not shared it with Varro. They are one of the reasons she began the file connecting the four active threads -- the script in these tablets matches the script that appears in one specific passage of the Ruun-Velis geological anomaly description.

Architecture

Eight centuries of accumulated Vel-Skar household presence in the noble levels has produced a residential district with the quality of a scholarly family's home: books -- stone tablets -- visible in alcoves and on corridor shelving, the rune-wall record dense with intellectual as well as genealogical content, the communal spaces in the noble level arranged for conversation rather than ceremony. The guest suite's modifications -- the raised sleeping platform, the human-height table, the slightly wider doorframe -- are old enough that they have become standard features of the suite rather than accommodations, built into successive renovations without being removed.

Geography

The noble terraces occupy the first six tiers below the Thane's Tier, wider at this hold than at Varakh owing to the eastern range geology's different fault-line pattern. The guest accommodation suite on the second noble terrace is positioned to give visiting Roman scholars a view down the atrium that Bera's household considers appropriate for a first morning -- not the full depth available from the Thane's Tier, but enough of it to produce the effect it reliably produces: stillness.

Type

District

Population

~25,000 noble caste residents, household staff, and visiting diplomatic guests.

Owner/Ruler

BERA KHAR-THUL