Black River

The Black River, known to the Zengarans as the Khalgann, "the black water," is the great river of Zengara in eastern Gallorea. It rises among the Black Mountains far to the south, runs north past Velanos and down the length of Zengara, passes the capital of Baal-Istra, and empties at last through the reed-fens of Ugbarra Marsh into the Ygarlsed Sea. It takes its name from its water, which runs dark with the silt it drags down out of the mountains and stains the coastal shallows brown for leagues beyond its mouth.

Name

The common name and the old Zengaran one say the same thing: the water is black. The Khalgann carries so heavy a burden of fine dark silt, ground from the stone of the Black Mountains at its source, that it never truly runs clear, not in the low water of high summer nor in the brown fury of the flood. In the giant-descended tongue of Zengara the river and the range that bears it share a root, and the Zengarans speak of them almost as one thing: the black mountains that bleed, and the black water that carries their darkness down to the sea.

Course

The Black River gathers in the high valleys of the Black Mountains and comes down out of them as a fast, cold, dark torrent, running north past the herds and holds of Velanos on the upper reaches. As it descends into the lowlands of Zengara it broadens and slows, growing heavy and silt-laden, until by the time it passes Baal-Istra it is a wide and sluggish flood, more silt than speed. Below the capital it loses itself entirely: it comes apart in the black fens of Ugbarra Marsh, dividing into a thousand shifting channels, and it is the silt it lays down there, over uncounted ages, that has built the bottomless floor of the marsh and given the coast its drowning maze of reeds.

Thus the whole watercourse is a single dark thread from mountain to sea: the Black Mountains in the south, the Black River between, and Ugbarra Marsh where it drowns at the last into the Ygarlsed Sea.

The Lifeblood of Zengara

For all its forbidding color, the Black River is the making of Zengara. It is the kingdom's spine and its highway, bearing the trade of the interior down to Baal-Istra and the sea, and the black silt it spreads across the lowlands in flood leaves behind the richest farmland in that part of Gallorea. The capital itself stands where the river meets the marsh, grown fat on the traffic that must pass its wharves, and the reed-folk of Ugbarra reckon the seasons by the river's rise and fall. A Zengaran will tell you, not wholly in jest, that his people are made of the same black water: that it runs in the fields, in the city, and in the blood.

Legends

• That the Black Mountains bleed, and the river is their slow dark blood, and that this is why no ritual has ever managed to make its water run clear.
• That the fishers of the lower river will not drink it unstrained, holding that to swallow the black silt is to swallow a little of the mountains' old grief, which settles in a man and never lifts.
• That in certain years the flood comes down blacker than black, thick as pitch and cold as the deep stone, and that these black flood-years are remembered long after in Zengara, for the harvests that follow them are said to be either the richest in living memory or nothing at all.

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