The Drains
Beneath Sarnath, old drainage chambers shelter people who can no longer live safely on its streets. Fugitives and ruined families share the dark with preachers, brewers and thieves, building a life below the city that cast them out. Now sickness and an infestation from the lower tunnels are putting that fragile refuge under strain.
A City Beneath the City
The settlement of Dregs fills a series of old cisterns, where rag shelters crowd the dry ledges and cookfires burn beneath vaulted ceilings. Water and refuse still arrive from the streets above, carrying the city's waste through the homes of people it has left behind. The maimed, the sick and the hunted have gathered here in numbers large enough to form a community of their own.
Neighbours share food and watch the passages, while newcomers must earn the trust of people with good reasons to be cautious. Traders and fugitives bring news from the surface, and disagreements spill between the alehouse and the Sanctuary. Even this far below the Black Keep, the city’s feuds follow people underground.
The Ratwash
Tabby Blisters built the Ratwash from what he could salvage after the Crimson Brotherhood burned his drinking den and nearly killed him. Scarred and slow to trust, he guards his second home fiercely. Beneath its low ceiling, drinkers bargain over rough ale, smugglers find quiet corners and Solage Squidguts entertains the room with songs and scandal. The troubadour has performed before royalty, but seems just as happy encouraging trouble among people with very little left to lose.
The ale matters more than its taste: with the water unsafe, much of Dregs depends on Tabby’s brewing. A recent poisoning has left his regulars sick and suspicious, and Tabby fears losing everything again. Accusations are spreading through the drinking room while the settlement’s preachers compete to explain who has brought this misery upon them.
Faith Among the Forgotten
In Dregs Sanctuary, rival sermons carry over the sound of falling water. Surgen Lickskint speaks to people whose suffering she knows well, offering them a place in the Storm’s promised reckoning. Her gentle manner gives way to fierce conviction before a crowd, turning the anger of the abandoned into devotion.
Across the chamber, Arlyn the Siren gathers listeners around the teachings of Reason and his claimed guidance from Saint Ringal. He promises understanding where Surgen calls for faith, and both see the troubles in Dregs as proof that people should follow them.
Sabetha tends the sick and seeks help from the surface while the arguments grow louder. Her kindness has earned its own following, though she has little interest in preaching. Those willing to help soon find themselves drawn into a struggle over whom the settlement trusts with its future.
The Infestation
Drainflies are pushing into the inhabited chambers from below. As large as gulls, they dart from wet stone towards exposed skin, drawn to blood and quick to attack anyone too weak to fend them off. Their wingbeats have become a familiar warning near the lower passages, where people are increasingly afraid to venture.
Further down, egg-sacs and shed larval shells cover the old runoff channels. The infestation is spreading faster than the residents can contain it, feeding arguments about punishment, neglect and what might be stirring beneath their homes. For the people sleeping nearest those tunnels, finding someone willing to go down and deal with it is becoming urgent.
The Wretched CisternInto the Wormways
The Wormways thread through cellars and foundations in a maze of flooded channels, narrow breaches and passages that force travellers onto their hands and knees. Thieves and smugglers use them to move beneath Sarnath’s guarded streets, relying on routes an outsider could easily miss.
Vermy, a wary young Goruk, knows these passages better than most. His knowledge has made him useful to the people arguing over Dregs, though he would rather guide someone towards danger than face it himself. Beyond the familiar routes, rough civic stone gives way to older, paler masonry. Copper fittings remain overhead, strange writing marks the walls, and sealed Dothloden doors have resisted generations of attempts to open them.
Goruks