Nashramae

Nashramae is a port city on the northern coast of Shurima, its name sometimes rendered as Nashrame. The city is known for its silk trade, its replica of the Sun Disc, and a yearly festival honoring Rammus, during which disciples of the cult devoted to the Armordillo somersault through the streets in droves, imitating his famous roll. Its enormous marketplace, constructed by an elderly mason after a brief but profound conversation with Rammus, became the bustling heart of the city. Nashramae entered imperial history by conquest. At the Siege of Nashramae, the campaign that finally brought the city under Shuriman rule, the Ascended warleader Renekton razed the grand library and massacred all who stood against him. His brother Nasus confronted him in the rubble with weapons drawn, the closest the two ever came to bloodshed, and Renekton turned away in shame under Nasus' stern, disappointed gaze. The wound never fully closed. When Renekton later wrestled the traitor Xerath into the Tomb of the Emperors, he was perhaps seeking to atone for Nashramae, and among the surviving Ascended it was said that Nasus killed the god-warrior Moneerah for delving the charred ruins of the city's great library. The city endured and prospered. Merchants in its Grand Marketplace haggle over Ascended-age relics, quiet flagstone plazas sit off its library district, and the carved frontage of Magyett Sadja's silk palace bears the work of the Arch-Mason Nouria, whose carvings also adorn the Sun Temple of Bel'zhun. As a northern port, Nashramae serves as a gateway into the desert interior; the young explorer Ezreal snuck aboard a supply ship bound for Nashramae before crossing the Great Sai with merchant caravans on his search for the tomb of Ne'Zuk. Nashramae's reach extends into older memory as well. Soraka keeps a stone dog from the old days of Nashramae among the keepsakes in her yurt on Mount Targon, and though she has not returned in centuries, she retains a fondness for the city's people. Even its size is proverbial: a fugitive watching a growing pit beneath the Shuriman sands judged that the entire state of Nashramae, ports and all, would barely graze its sides.