Old Town has been scoured by fire and repopulated with the burned and trembling masses time and time again. When numbers fall below where the alchemists want them, they make trade with Ysyri slavers or take their barges up the coast to seduce ignorant villagers into a “better life” for themselves. The poor and the alchemists in Dir’Jal no longer even look the same, two separate tribes. The predators and their well stocked abattoir.

Broken and crippled mothers and fathers sit on worn boxes as lesser alchemists come to collect their blood, their children running errands and sometimes never coming home. Barriers are put up at their end of their streets and shutters closed over windows, boards hammered into place to hold them shut. People are taken in the night, bloody howls make their muffled way through the walls, and in the end there is only silence in the ghetto. Only the dripping blood from the blades of the Desanguinare and the scribbling of quills in the alchemists journals.

Eventually, such a sick body dies, or it rebels. Those oppressed look upon the pained cries of the plagues beast as a brother and perhaps even a savior. Man and god bound together by the chains of the the alchemists. Man and beast each suffering under their ministrations. Yet the alchemists know well to cut off the hand that offends you, how to excise a tumor or drain ill humors. Most of all, the alchemists know that while fire will cleanse away such rebellious spirits, it will not sweep away their beast…or it’s chains.

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