Lyn Tirian, the City of Lights, is in northern Lirith Kai, inside the eaves of the Red Forest that spills down from the Khriatrin Mountains. The city lies between the Whitewater River and the River of Fires where they come together to form the An-Kiu River; the junction of the two rivers forms the head of navigation for riverboats--upstream, it is strictly a matter of canoes and frequent portages.

In central Lirith Kai, they speak of Lyn Tirian as a city of elves, but the elvish and part-elvish population is small and unobtrusive. Most of the people are Adantri--the dominant race of Lirith Kai: tall, graceful, and dark-haired. (Some old tales say that all Adantri are part elvish, but if this is true, the crossbreeding happened so long ago that no one now knows the truth--unless the elves do.) There are elves--the Golden Leaf is an elvish warrior clan, and the members are as strongly linked by kinship as by their warrior philosophy; they are as tall as the Adantri, but more slender, and darker. There is also a strong, if small, nation of dwarves in the mountains: the dwarves of the Hall of Khra, a stout-hearted, red-bearded folk, and the Horoukha, a tribe of grim, black-browed people called orcs or goblins by some.

Lyn Tirian crowns a hill between the two leaping young rivers; it is walled with dark stone in which is inlaid a web of metal and crystal that catches the sunlight so that the city seems to float on a band of flame; the wall glitters like an earth-bound Milky Way in the moonlight. The Thousand Towers of Lyn Tirian are pierced with uncountable windows of colored glass; lights burn behind them all night, making the city a shining glory to crown the trees, a beacon visible for miles above the dark boughs of the Red Forest.

The business of the city comes from the forest--timber and woodwork, the fruits and nuts of the forest, venison, strange furs and stranger feathers from creatures most people never see, and the craftworks that come out of the Hall of Khra. Snow falls gently on Lyn Tirian, but it grips the peaks of the Khriatrins in winter, and when it melts, the surging rivers bring down rafts of logs--redpine for which the forest is named, strong hornwood of which bows are made, stark white treebone and black tranhdo, and the rare and colorful woods the elves grow, striped, or speckled, or with a grain that swirls like smoke. Woods pass through Lyn Tirian to travel beyond the borders of the known world. Downstream, where the forest thins out to fingers and isolated groves, are the farmlands--not the richest in Lirith Kai, but they feed the city.

As with all the cities of Lirith Kai, Lyn Tirian rejoices in fairs and festivals--the spring Snowmelt Fair, when the elves and foresters bring down their timber and the dwarves of Khra their crafts; the Highsummer Festival, when the redpines bloom and everyone gets drunk on redpine wine; the Hunt Festivals of autumn; and, at midwinter, the Festival of Lights, when the city blazes for a week with lamps and torches and fireworks, and the people of the mountain and forest send floating lamps down the rivers on the darkest night of the year.

Of course, the city is not without its problems--for the Red Forest has not been a part of Lirith Kai for more than five hundred years, and thus it has become a refuge for bandits and outlaws, and dealings with the elves of the Golden Leaf and the dwarves of the Hall of Khra are not always peaceful... At times, the city has been menaced by flood, and forest fire is always a peril. Here, too, is whispered to be the House of Wind--a legendary clan of which the infamous Clawmoon is said to be but a feeble offshoot--of course, any competent historian can tell you that the House of Wind was utterly destroyed some six hundred years ago by a joint action of the Spirit Hound and the Unicorn clans, an effort which nearly destroyed them as well.

Into this colorful, enthusiastic city, Lord Governor Nendiskan tel Haralasa chose to introduce an arena... It is said that his sister, Semrian, wife of the governor of Simtakka, suggested it. In the hopes of weakening the violence of the forest people, the Lord Governor offers amnesty to any bandit or outlaw who chooses to join an arena team--free passage back into the Empire, and a chance to re-establish honor.