Nerimazeth

Nerimazeth is a ruined city in western Shurima, raised in the valley where the empire both began and first turned toward its end. It started as a settlement of the ancient nation Faraj and became the original capital of Shurima, the site of the empire's first Sun Disc, which failed. Here the first Ascended were created to defend Shurima, and here those who outlived the empire, driven mad by centuries of conflict, became the Darkin who ravaged the world before they were contained. As one traveler observed among its buried towers, Shurima was born and died here. The city fell in the wake of Emperor Xerath's betrayal. A child taken from Nerimazeth as a slave, Xerath grew into the magus whose act destroyed the empire and sundered the brotherhood of the Ascended. In answer, the god-warriors put its remaining citizens to the sword, burned Nerimazeth and its people to ash, and hacked its name from every stele and obelisk, until ash and bone could no longer be told from sand. Only the tallest towers still rise above the dunes, broken spires that sing when winds blow from the realms beyond the mountain, over a shattered statue of two trunkless legs and a half-buried avian head. The Ascended scholar Ta'anari kept a hall of records among the ruins and gathered the last of the Sunborn in the old marketplace, which his magic had vitrified into an amphitheater of black glass. Nasus dwelled there too, haunted by the memory of his brother Renekton; when Xerath's mercenaries came to name the ruins his new capital, Nasus refused them and warned that the false emperor's cycle neared its end. The ruins still draw those who sense the power stirring within them. The Ra'Horak, Solari warriors from Mount Targon, once marched weeks into the desert to confront a shattered Ascended that had claimed the fallen city, and the Aspect of War fought it there beside a warrior named Asose, who gave her life there. Even so, the city's silk-merchants still ran caravans across the sands toward Kenethet.