Skarrholm

The northern edge of the Old World, a fjord cut so deep into the rock that a longship can come alongside a cliff and tie to it. The land behind the water is poor and everybody in Vuskar knows it. Thin soil over cold stone, black pine where anything grows at all, and a growing season short enough that a bad spring is a matter of arithmetic rather than of luck.

The harbour is larger than the town. That is not an accident of building and it is not a boast, it is the whole of the arrangement: a people who could not live off the ground they were standing on and went looking for a road instead. Everything Skarrholm has, it brought back.

This is also why the first crossing to Meridia went where it went. Vuskar is a northern people who sailed west along weather they already understood, made land in snow country that looked survivable, and did not sail a diagonal into a warmer sea they had no reason to trust. The far north of the New World is Vuskan for a reason that begins here, on a shore where the only flat ground is under water.