Evar stretched contentedly across a massive bed stuffed with goose down, yawning deeply as his arms and feet sprawled across the disheveled sheets and pressed against the backs of the two unclothed women sharing the bed with him. The younger of the two - a girl of maybe fifteen winters - groaned groggily as Evar pressed his outstretched elbow into her shoulderblade. The other dozed silently as he pressed against her. An Azurei exile with arabesque ojih painted down her sharp cheeks, Shari was Evar's favored concubine. He reached down and ran his hand along the nubile contours of her hips and buttocks before giving the Azurei a hard squeeze on the asscheek. Shari remained silent, but in the dim moonlight of the boudoir, Evar could make out a thin smile on her face.
He launched himself up off the bed, drew off a pair of leather trousers folded over the back of a long wicker chaise, and pulled them up over his thick legs. The thick reindeer hide leggings were more appropriate for the fjords and snowy forests of the Maw than the humid warmth of Aepiranth. Though he had spent a full half of his life in these lands, Evar had never accustomed himself to the chafing breeches so common and fashionable here in the south. They were one of the few trappings of his former homeland that Evar Varvudda had elected to keep. Clad only in the rude leggings, he left the sleeping women and proceeded upon an evening stroll through his sprawling compound.
Evar strolled down the corridor and, as he so often did, admired his surroundings. He strolled barefoot down the corridor, appreciating the vaulted ceiling carved from Aepiranth's namesake white stone and the recessed alcoves hewn into the corridor at regular intervals, each decorated with a potted bromeliad. Evar walked past rooms and parlors he scarcely ever occupied, most of which were devoted entirely to housing furnishing and decorations for which he had no real need. Evar knew that in more depauperate and barbarous lands, even kings and lords were not afforded such luxury. For the first half of his life in the frigid Maw, Evar had lived in squalid huts dug into the dirt built from cobbles adhered with mortar fashioned from mud and wolf dung. Such opulence and comfort was unimaginable in that freezing hell. He had left that land a thrall, and only eighteen winters later Evar had acquired more wealth than was to be found in the entirety of the Maw. Coming from such rude beginnings, Evar could truly appreciate the luxuries he had amassed.
He had first come to this land as a thrall, sold in the markets of the Sunset City as a deckhand servant. Slavery was ill tolerated in the surrounding lands, but Aepiranth was one of the few cities in the region that tolerated the sale and possession of slaves. Evar was able to purchase freedom from his master, and then bought a vessel of his own after years of saving. He sailed back to the Maw, buying seal pelts and walrus ivory for a pittance before returning to the south and selling these wares for a fortune. After ten years, Evar had acquired a small fleet of merchant ships that conducted trade throughout the known world.
He found himself now in the main parlor - a lavish, sprawling space with a tall ceiling held up by white stone colonnades surrounding a sunken entertaining area with low tables, chaises, and potted palms. Carafes of wine in various stages of consumption were laid about the tables, and one of the wicker chaises had been knocked over - certainly during the drinking and merrymaking with the women before they had retreated to the bedchambers. Another girl had remained here and fallen into an inebriated sleep on a long chaise - her gown stained with Versconese dessert wine. The northerner strode past her and brushed through billowing curtains of breeze-blown silk onto the balcony of his expansive compound.
Evar's home was situated on the headland side of the Sunset City, near the top of the cliffs facing out to the Pillar. A nearly-full moon provided ample illumination for the northerner as he surveyed his surroundings, and a cool ocean breeze blew across the barrel-chested norseman as it set tall, brushy cypresses swaying. Other wealthy merchants had built similar villas for themselves in the heights above the city on tiers carved out from the white rock that looked like crude, uneven stairs in the distance. Further down the slope, the middle-class burghers had carved more modest homes directly into the walls of the cliffs, and below them still the impoverished multitudes lived and toiled in the vicinity of Aepiranth's enormous harbors. Even in the early hours of the night, orange lamplight illuminated through the mazelike alleyways and marketplaces near the harbors, providing light to the stevedores and porters unloading vessels in preparation for the market rush that would begin with the dawn in just a few short hours.
A large canal separated the headland side of Aepiranth with the Pillar, allowing vessels to sail between the city's two harbors under a great elevated bridge. Across the Span, the moonlit Pillar dominated the city - glowing ivory white against the dark black sea and moonlit sky. A huge promontory of white stone that, in ages past, had been carved into a sprawling citadel crowned with spires and a massive dome. A series of arching buttresses had been built into the Pillar to accommodate the structural changes wrought by such extensive carving; arches of white stone curving down into the lower levels of the city. The palace carved into the Pillar had once been the seat of a mighty empire of men, ruling from the fringe of Azurei to the septentrional lands now known as Novigrad. Now it was the home of the Duego Anselmo, a feeble dotard too senile to reign in the influential merchants and their internecine foreign projects.
Pathetic southerners, Evar thought to himself, could not appreciate what they had. The seat of such a grand empire, such wealth at their fingertips, and with these they squandered them on proxy conflicts with the Flowering Republic and propped up the pitiful nancies of Treblea. Why did these southerners settle for riches when empire was within their grasp?
Gazing up upon the dome and spires of the Pillar on this moonlit night, Evar felt the way he might have felt upon seeing his future villa compound as a young thrall fresh off the longship from Kronzborg: unimaginable opportunity laying right before his very eyes.
The opulent villa in which he stood suddenly felt much like the crude huts of the North. His wealth and comfort felt strangely akin to the crushing poverty and hardship of the North.
What Evar Varvudda wanted now was power, and he recognized he was in an opportune position to seize it.
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