Ruinglast

There is no mortal alive today who remembers what Ruinglast looked like before the Unification. Some histories exist that mention it as a glowing city, where the mountains glittered like magic in the sun and the air was clean and the soil fertile and full. In those days, the residents of Ruinglast, mostly Dragonborn, made their living off of craftmanship, magical studies, and farming. It was a bastion of the arts and the Dragonborn who lived there made many advances in the arcane sciences.

The Dragonborn, however, did not tolerate the forward march of the Dalynn Empire as it spread across Hilan, and demanded to remain independent. The Empire agreed, but not long after, a blight spread across the Dragonborn lands. For several decades, the Dragonborn attempted to hold their own against it, but their numbers soon dwindled from poor clutch numbers and falling resources. Eventually, they all retreated to Ruinglast in an attempt to combine their resources, but decades later they had no choice but to turn to the Empire for aid. Hilan agreed, so long as Ruinglast and the rest of the Dragonborn officially became citizens, and so Ruinglast was absorbed into the Empire, and has been a part of it for nearly 8000 years.

For thousands of years, Ruinglast has struggled to remain afloat. They have been able to cultivate a single steady crop from the soil around the mountain: Ash beet, a fairly sweet but hardly unique root vegetable. Even when sales of it are poor, at least the people of the city do not starve. Also, recently the Dragonborn had to make the difficult decision to start mining the rock under their own home, one that may eventually lead to an entire collapse of the city and breaks a millennia old belief that the mountain should not be disturbed.

Legend has it that the Dragonborn who live there were all descended from the ancient dragons of millennia past. In fact, it is believed that the mountain that Ruinglast was built into lays over the Great Spring, an oasis and home for dragons that have long since died. The belief is more myth and legend than fact, and servers as a creation origin for the Dragonborn who still live in Hilan.