Cape Sorrow

Making up the far northeast corner of Raziya, Cape Sorrow is a grassy headland that lies between Treachery Bay and the Gulf of Adwa. The area is regularly swept by wind and storm, creating a landscape that is lush with waving grasses but which otherwise supports only low clumps of salt-tolerant shrubbery and isolated mottes of sorrow oak that are scarcely any taller. The most notable feature of the landscape is the ruin of an ancient city whose crumbled pillars, walls, and arches rise brokenly from the grass near the center of the plain. Its name lost to the ages, it is simply called by locals the City of Sorrows.

Although the land is excellent for the grazing of sheep it is thinly populated even by herders, whose rustic stone huts provide only rude shelter from the difficult climate. These people of Tessouare heritage consider themselves distinct from others of their kind, seeing themselves as people of the seacoast prairie and regarding the true desert lands of their kin a foreign environment. Reserved and mistrustful of outsiders, the Cape Sorrow Tessouare are chiefly devoted to their thick-wooled arezki sheep, which the herders can call to them with a special kind of singing that they call cloudsong. The sheep are sheared every spring before lambing and brought to Omrazir at the start of Pavana, just in time for the New Year's celebrations there. Because of this, and also on account of the wool's receptivity to dye and its colorfastness, this type of wool is known (perhaps somewhat confusingly) as peacock wool.