The Hilt

The Hilt

Where the haft of the greatclub rises thick into the earth, @The Hilt stands as Odrun Fell’s edge against the dark. This is the district of delvers, mercenaries, and @The Cudgel patrols—where armor clinks in time with forge hammers, and mission boards groan under the weight of postings. Here, the gates to the tunnels yawn wide, their reinforced jaws ready to swallow another crew into the depths.
The Hilt moves with urgency; aristocracy has no foothold here. Supplies are packed, maps are inked, and beasts bred for hauling wait in their pens, armored and restless. It is said that to know the city’s true heart, one must stand at the Hilt at dawn and hear the roll of boots heading into the earth.

The Gate of Tines

The @Gate of Tines is the city’s southern threshold, a fortress-mouth where the @Road to Odrun ends and @The Hilt begins. Its gates are no mere timber and iron—they are armored plates bolted from the ribbed shells of giant beetles, etched with the scars of sieges and storms alike. Caravan bells chime as they approach, their wagons grinding to a halt under the watchful eyes of @The Cudgel sentries and @The Promissory scribes. Here, hopeful delvers stand in line beside weary traders, each awaiting their turn beneath the shadow of the wall. Some are waved through with a nod, others are stopped with a hand on the hilt, and a few find their ventures ended before they begin. To the wise, the Gate is more than an entrance—it is the city’s first measure of worth.

The Burrowlight Hearth

@The Burrowlight Hearth is a place of quiet light and slower breaths. Bioluminescent larvae, set into glass panes along the walls, bathe the common room in a soft green glow that soothes the nerves after weeks in the dark. @Tennel Joa, the half-orc innkeep, moves with the steady grace of a man who’s learned to work without his legs, gliding from hearth to cot with a ladle or a poultice in hand. His soups are rich with marrow and root, his beds reinforced for armor-clad rest, and his silences are as warm as his greetings. Delvers come here to stitch the rents in their minds as much as the ones in their gear. In a district that runs on clang and call, the Hearth is where you can still hear your own thoughts.

The Emberhook Hall

A dome of stone blackened by decades of torch smoke, the @Emberhook Hall is where delves begin and end. The air smells of pitch, iron, and anticipation. Mission boards crowd the entry, plastered with postings scrawled in charcoal and ink—some stamped with guild crests, others written in a desperate hand. In the center, the Wall of Names waits, each letter cut deep into brass and chitin. Delvers touch the great hooks bolted to the wall before leaving, a ritual as old as @The Cudgel itself. @Captain Orin Vellak's hand is the only one that carves new names here, and when he does, the Hall falls silent.

Eurven’s Forge

The hiss of quenching oil mingles with the rhythmic strike of hammer on chitin at @Eurven’s Forge. Here, armor glints like the shells it was born from, and blades are honed to a whisper-thin edge. Eurven Brel, a retired member of @The Ashcoats with arms like wrought iron, fuels her forge with coal laced with an alchemical insect oil that burns hotter and cleaner than anything in the city. Apprentices swarm around her in shifts, shaping breastplates, repairing helms, and fitting gauntlets for Cudgel crews set to leave by dawn. From Promissory coin-lords to Barley tenders, they all line up at Eurven’s stall when they need steel they can trust to come home with them.

The Hookline Gantry

@The Hookline Gantry is a forest of beams, tracks, and swinging hooks, alive with the groan of winches and the hiss of hauling lines. Raw chitin slabs are hoisted from beetle carts to armor pens, swinging over the heads of workers who move with the easy instinct of those who’ve lived their whole lives under falling weight. Fire pits flare as @The Ashcoats shapers cut, mold, and rivet the materials into gear destined for @The Cudgel's ranks. Beetle teams clatter through the elevated maze, unshaken by the screech and clank of industry around them. Here, armor is born in the air before it ever hits the forge.

The Dregvault

Aboveground, @The Dregvault is a squat, stone building with a single reinforced door. Belowground, it is a descending gauntlet of locks, wards, and reinforced chambers. Each level grows colder, darker, and quieter—until the only sounds are the pulse of containment wards and the faint scratch of something alive behind a wall. The vaults hold things that breathe venom into dreams, creatures whose shells hum with latent magic, and larvae that could devour a grown man in an hour. Cudgel mages, Ashcoat engineers, and Barley breeders tend the cells in strict rotations, for the work is as dangerous as any delve. Down here, mistakes don’t echo—they hatch.

The Varlas Breeder’s Archive

At the southern edge of the Hilt, the @Varlas Breeder’s Archive rises like a hive made solid—tiered galleries lined with silk-wrapped cases, glass tanks, and amber-lit pens. @Jezabel Varlas herself keeps the keys, and her tenders work in near silence, their silk gloves never bare against the creatures in their care. Scrolls and ledgers record centuries of breeding lines: the strengths, the flaws, the accidents. In adjoining chambers, experimental breeds pace behind acid-sealed hatches, their limbs twitching with restless instinct. The Archive is a vault of life itself, catalogued and tended with the same precision one might give a crown jewel—or a weapon.

The Threadspire Archive

Light filters through high, silk-draped windows onto the heart of the @Threadspire Archive—the Living Loom. Suspended like a great spider’s web, its rods and tensioned threads shift constantly, charting the Handle’s tunnels in real time. Collapses ripple through the structure as threads go slack, while new paths tug themselves taut under unseen pulleys. Cartographers, guides, and wayfinders move through the building with measured precision, updating scroll maps and briefing delvers on routes and hazards. To the untrained, the Loom is a wonder; to those who navigate by it, it is the city’s beating compass, pointing the way into the depths and—gods willing—the way back.