Tentus is the open mouth of Drael, a city squatting in the bowl of an ancient impact scar where stone was once turned to vapor and sky burned white. It is not among the four great thrones of the north, nor does it pretend to rival the hidden citadels beneath ash and serpent-ruin, yet it endures because it performs a function none of the greater powers care to soil themselves with: exchange. Trade, vice, spectacle, execution. If Drael is a wound, Tentus is the clot that never quite seals, thick with caravans and carrion both. Drael itself is described in the old tablets as inverted—surface ruin masking subterranean dominion.
Tentus is surface made permanent.
The crater’s rim forms a natural amphitheater, jagged stone rising in broken arcs like teeth around a tongue of dust. At its center yawns the Pit, a vast arena carved deeper into the impact basin, ringed by terraces of basalt and bleached bone. From above, the city appears circular and organic, streets spiraling down toward the Pit in widening coils, each ring a district of trade, degradation, and ambition.
The Deinonychus lords claim Tentus as neutral ground. Whether they truly rule it is debatable. The scaled barbarian tribes of Drael’s surface—raptor packs, Spinosaur flotillas from the marshes, feather-crested velocian assassins—send emissaries and enforcers, but none sit a permanent throne there. That absence is deliberate. Tentus thrives because no single warlord dares claim it entirely. To do so would disrupt the delicate machinery of vice and barter that feeds all sides.
