The Scars

The northern end of the city of Moru Kel, from the low-lying jungle to the highest tiers of the city, is pocked with grey-beige areas of waste. From the outside, these Scars appear at first perhaps to be poorly-built adobe or earthen structures. Upon closer examination they are actually a hardened, concrete-like material formed of rocks, mud, plant fibers, and wasp spittle, and left to dry in the sun.

The Scars are a remnant of the city’s most unwelcome visitors in recent years: in 501 K.S., a swarm of giant wasps descended upon the region. Nearly a foot in length, their bite was potentially lethal: thousands were driven from their homes, and the wasps becan crafting their multi-celled hives in the city’s north end. Long-standing buildings were gutted by swarms of malevolent insects, and scores of lives were lost to their painful stings.

Within a year, though, the city’s prayers were answered and the foul insects fled. 

The reasons for their appearance and disappearance are hotly debated: showing just over a year after the disappearance of the Maelstrom, some sages attribute them to a climactic disturbance caused by that event. Perhaps shifting weather patterns caused them to migrate through the region. Others claim that they were a result of — or divine retribution for — the rose stone craze that happened just a couple of years earlier. Whatever the case, Pashan has smiled on the city: they have not been seen again in the intervening decades.

The Scars Today

The pocks that mar the city’s façade are of a tough material, very difficult to remove. Some of them have been torn apart in preparation for the Symposium of Wonders. They appear to be formed of large, hexagonal cells, a few of which were so tightly sealed that golden honey poured forth when they were demolished: a handful of entrerprising entrepreneurs gathered this nectar for use in making a novel mead that makes up in marketing what it loses in pungency.

Some of the surviving hive structures were turned into temporary housing for construction workers in the run-up to the Symposium. Unfortunately, as those converted facilities are vacated, various vagrants have been turning many of them into ramshackle roosts. Clearly the Marghoz has another problem to tackle in the near future.