The people of Khur were likewise shaped by their desert home. Most were nomads of hard mien and severe law, devoted to clan, tribe, and gods. Living on their own in a harsh land, they knew no master but the desert. Each tribe was its own nation, and every nomad his own lord. Ungovernable, they nonetheless had a king, the Khan of Khur, who dwelt in the city of Khuri-Khan.

The city had grown up in the east, where sea and sand met. Looted and sacked many times in the past (the last time by followers of the dread wyrm Malystryx), Khuri-Khan was rising again. Newly restored, the squat round towers and square dwellings once more thrust up from the endless sand. Scaffolds enfolded the shattered facade of the Khuri yl Nor-“the Palace of the Setting Sun”-and the city’s outer wall was checkered with newly cut stone blocks, repairing the destruction wrought by the recent war. City dwellers had picked up the bricks and shattered timbers of their homes and set them in place. Noble and commoner alike had planted thousands of date palm seedlings throughout the city, alongside the towering ancients that still survived. Trade resumed and life went on in the noisy, contentious Khurish fashion.

New construction was not the only change in Khur. Outside the walls of Khuri-Khan sprawled a vast camp of multicolored tents. Miles across, the conglomeration of shelters clustered under the city wall like fungus clinging to a fallen log. Crowded into this makeshift metropolis were a hundred thousand elves, former residents of Qualinesti and Silvanesti. The camp of exiled elves was known to its inhabitants (not without irony) as “Khurinost,” and to the people of Khuri-Khan as Laddad-ihar, the Elves’ Anthill.

Laddad was an old word whose literal meaning-“those who walk on air”-was a reference to the griffon riders of ancient times. Now it meant simply “elves,” encompassing Qualinesti, Silvanesti, and Kagonesti, since the Khurs made no distinction among the groups.