Guild Wars_ Ghosts of Ascalon - Matt Forbeck [27]
Riona ignored them, passing Killeen and leading them down the steps into the Great Bazaar, following the other travelers.
The Lion’s Arch of long ago was gone, its only remaining memory consisting of the battlements that survived the great waves from the Rising of Orr. When Zhaitan, the undead Elder Dragon, brought long-sunken Orr back to the surface, all lands surrounding the Sea of Sorrows were awash in great waves. Lion’s Arch was almost utterly destroyed, and in its place was left a swamp of broken ships, snapped trees, and dead creatures.
Out of that morass, the new Lion’s Arch arose over the past hundred years. The town was re-established by pirates and corsairs looking for a safe haven, and salvage crews reclaiming the flotsam and jetsam that had washed ashore. It soon blossomed into a cosmopolitan trading center.
The city showed its recent origin. Some of the newer buildings were stone, but most of the city was of wood. The original structures were built from the remains of wrecked ships tossed up on the beach, and that architecture so defined the city that even new construction was built along the lines of hulls and keels as opposed to walls and roofs. It was a scratch-built city, a lash-up made permanent, a temporary site that might yet outshine Divinity’s Reach or the Black Citadel or even the asuran city of Rata Sum.
The people of Lion’s Arch were as motley as its buildings. Before the Rising of Orr, it was a human city, a Krytan city. After the floods uprooted the houses and replaced them with shipwrecks, a transient population took hold, a brotherhood of the coast seeking nothing more than survival in an overturned world. The crews of the surviving pirate ships colonized the wreckage that was Lion’s Arch, and their captains became the first leaders. As a result, Lion’s Arch was ruled by a council of captains, and its morals and legality were always more flexible than in other great cities.
The new population was also more diverse than anything else seen in Tyria. Here you found humans but also equal or greater numbers of norn, asura, and sylvari. The occasional bloated, amphibian hylek or hunched, bucktoothed dredge stalked through the streets. The castoffs of a half-dozen nations and a plethora of societies all gathered here.
And charr. That was the part that concerned Dougal the most. The humans and charr were still at war in Ebonhawke, yet in Lion’s Arch charr and humans lived, if not in harmony, at least within sight of each other without open hostilities. That was something Dougal, who had spent much of his youth hating and fighting the charr, had a hard time understanding.
The term most people used when describing charr was “feline,” but beyond a few basic attributes, they were no kin to any cat Dougal had ever seen. They were huge, half again as tall as a man, not as massive as a norn but still towering opponents against a single human. Their faces were elongated muzzles, and their jaws were those of carnivores, filled with long teeth. Both males and females had four horns jutting from the sides of their skulls, the males boasting an impressive set and the females a smaller pair on each side, just behind the jawline. Beneath the horns hung two pairs of sensitive ears. The males had huge hunchbacked and maned shoulders, and while the females were more lithe and swift, they were no less deadly.
When Dougal first came to Lion’s Arch, he was stunned by the presence of the charr, including charr dealing with humans and other races. He had a hard time looking at them without thinking of the implacable foes who drove the humans from most of Ascalon and besieged them in Ebonhawke—the creatures responsible for the Searing and the Foefire.
He never dealt with them, preferring a norn or human merchant to a charr one when he could. Even when forced