Zheros sits low and glistening beside the Craterian Sea, a stretch of harbor whose air tastes of salt, wine, and sweat. It is not ashamed of itself. It is proud. It was never built for virtue or restraint; its founding charter was written in lust and sealed with coin. The place exists because sailors need to spend, because mercenaries need to forget, and because females here learned long ago that flesh can be a kingdom if it is sold with cunning and laughter.
The streets slope downward toward the docks like veins leading to a heart that beats on rum and rut. Every window is an invitation, every balcony a stage. The city doesn’t whisper what it offers; it screams it to the gulls. From the terraces overlooking the water, one can see the tangle of bodies in motion—deckhands taking their pleasure with painted females, thrusting with the same rhythm they use to row or hoist sail. The sound carries over the water, a chorus of wet slaps and gasps that echo against the stone, turning the whole harbor into a single breathing, moaning beast.
It is a place of endurance rather than tenderness. Here, the act is a trade, a rite, a game of survival. The males come to spill themselves and leave their wages behind. The females, sharper than daggers and twice as dangerous, spend what they earn to stay beautiful, protected, and drunk enough to face the next tide. Many arrive as travelers and never leave. Some vanish into the brothels that line the canal districts, where the curtains never close and the laughter never stops.
The city’s other trade—slaves, debts, narcotics, and contraband—moves beneath the pleasure. The same ships that bring grain and amber also carry chains and powder. Beneath the paved upper tiers runs the under-level known as the Canes, a labyrinth of tunnels where the air stinks of pitch and old blood. There, deals are made in whispers, and some of the most expensive bodies in the world are broken down for resale. Zheros doesn’t pretend otherwise. It smiles with painted lips, bites down on the coin, and keeps counting.
By dawn, the gutters run with washwater, cheap wine, and the traces of night’s commerce. The taverns open again before noon, and the cycle renews. Those who survive long enough to grow old here either own a brothel or command a ship. Everyone else serves them—or serves under them, quite literally.
Zheros is not a city that forgives affection. It does not believe in romance, only appetite. It’s said that males who come here leave lighter—of coin, of seed, of pride—and that females who stay too long forget how to feel anything but the next thrust or the next drink. And yet, for all its cruelty, there is a kind of honesty in its depravity. No one lies about what they want in Zheros. The city has no masks, only faces slick with salt and sweat beneath the red lanterns that never go dark.
To the traveler, it offers pleasure, drunkenness, and ruin. To the world, it stands as a monument to the oldest trade still practiced without shame—a city that never sleeps, because lust never dies.