Mji Mkongwe, the only permanent settlement in the Shungwe Archipelago, with a permanent population of nearly 12,000 and a transient population numbering in the thousands on any given day, rises in layered defiance along the banks of the Mto wa Mifupa Iliyomezwa—The River of the Swallowed Bones. Perched on the jagged terraces of Sangwe’s coastal cliffs, the city straddles the liminal space between salt and sky—a convergence point for trade winds, tide currents, and contraband economics alike. Its skyline is a tangle of sun-bleached sails, canvas-strung walkways, and tide-slick stone, framed by the distant shimmer of the Kalij ul'Almach Lahr.
Though it is officially designated a free city, Mji Mkongwe wears its independence with the swagger of a Fangasi corsair and the shrewdness of a desert merchant. Founded in the aftermath of the Great Fall by outcasts and opportunists, the city has grown into a thriving, if volatile, hub of trade and conflict. It is at once a smuggler’s sanctuary, a cultural melting pot, and a city-state teetering on the edge of legitimacy.
Here, desert salt, jungle spices, reef poisons, and preserved alchemical beasts all converge—commodities from a dozen coasts and three continents washing together in the city’s chaotic tide. Garum barrels are rolled onto ships bound for Il-Wāāt ul'Ihāt Kathira and Lautara, and unmarked crates vanish into secret tunnels beneath the cliffside alleys. Pirate crews strike deals in open-air markets while Seaborn cutters load contraband under the watchful eyes of bribe-swollen dockmasters. Street oracles cast bones over steaming fish, and clan elders negotiate terms that can outlast lifetimes—or end with a single knife stroke.
Mji Mkongwe’s reputation as a haven for Fangasi is not entirely undeserved. Yet beneath the surface of lawlessness lies a complex, adaptive social fabric bound by tradition, loyalty, and an ancient sense of self-rule. It is a city born from the sea and shaped by survival, forever caught between isolation and influence, freedom and pressure, salt and sand.
Mji Mkongwe clings to the cliffside terraces of western Sangwe like a barnacle fortress, its buildings layered in tiers that rise above the river’s curve and plunge deep beneath the rock. The city's oldest sections were carved directly into the cliffs, creating a warren of tunnel-streets and vaulted chambers now buried under generations of rooftop expansion, scaffolding, and haphazard construction.
The city's architecture is a chaotic blend of necessity and improvisation. Bamboo scaffolds support second and third stories built atop adobe cores. Hulls of broken ships form walls, roofs, and storefronts. Whole taverns sit inside the stripped skeletons of retired Corsair vessels, lashed to stone with chains and still bearing their masts as watchtowers. Thatched rooftops lean into tarp-strung corridors where fishers hang their nets and children run barefoot across swinging bridges.
The harbor sits at the river’s mouth, protected by a tidal lock system of coralcrete and ancient basalt—an innovation designed to hold back both tide and predatory shoal fish. Its waters are crowded with vessels of every shape and lineage—corsair windcutters, converted merchantmen, floating forges, and patchwork skiffs tied bow-to-rudder in haphazard clusters. By day, the harbor is a riot of shouted commands and swinging cargo nets. By night, it becomes a glowing tapestry of lanterns and fires aboard moored ships, each one a floating home for crews from across the northern hemisphere. Languages mingle across gangplanks. Mbawa is passed between ships, and songs from distant shores echo across the tide. Dock platforms rise and fall with the tides, tethered to stone piers reinforced with scavenged steel and sunken wood. From above, the city appears like a cliff-bound reef, spreading in horizontal bands along the terraces and bleeding outward toward the floodplains below.
Further expansion has moved upward and outward: rooftop gardens now double as housing platforms, and new structures have been anchored into the rock face by elaborate pulley systems. Below ground, whole enclaves exist in the cliff’s shadow—shaded cave homes and storerooms reachable only by rope ladder or tunnel. These undercliff quarters are especially prized by smugglers and secretive clans.
Despite the apparent chaos, Mji Mkongwe is functionally zoned. Markets cluster along the Riverward slopes; the High Warrens cling to the upper terraces; dockside taverns sprawl along the Flooded Quays. Camps and temporary shelters fan out from the city’s edge, housing crews, traders, and fortune-seekers who come with the tide and leave with the wind.
Mji Mkongwe was founded in the ash-swirled decades following the Great Fall, when storms and divine wrath rendered whole continents uninhabitable. According to local legend, the city began as a hidden anchorage used by a Fangasi flotilla—half-corsair, half-refugee—seeking shelter from both skyfire and pursuit. The location was ideal: a high-walled river mouth protected by violent tides, with fresh water inland and reefs full of meat, salt, and secrets. What began as a mooring grew into a commune of the stateless—smugglers, monster-hunters, tide prophets, and deserters from ruined empires.
For centuries, Mji Mkongwe remained an open secret. It was never conquered, nor was it ever fully hidden. It endured by its geography, its adaptability, and a fiercely defended ethos of communal independence. Trade came and went with the tide, and corsair fleets made their homes among the moorings and terraces, pledging fealty not to kings, but to clans, ship-crews, and the code of the tide.
Today, Mji Mkongwe functions as a hybrid polity—equal parts clannish oligarchy and ritualized anarchy. Power resides with a rotating council of House Elders, drawn from the oldest and most influential Fangasi lineages, along with seasonal representatives from allied Corsair fleets. A ceremonial figure known as the Kiongozi wa Mawimbi (Wavemaster) is chosen annually to act as a public face of governance—a role equal parts mayor, diplomat, and scapegoat. True decisions, however, are made in private, negotiated in smoke-filled caves, lantern-lit barges, and the hallows beneath family strongholds.
Relations with Il-Wāāt ul'Ihāt Kathira are fraught, though not entirely hostile. Kathiran officials maintain a bureaucratic presence in the city, tolerated so long as they pay the proper fees and leave their fleets at sea. Lautara, on the other hand, is both patron and shield. The floating city provides military deterrence, trade networks, and legitimacy in international matters, and in return, Mji Mkongwe acts as a discreet port-of-call and a buffer against Kathiran expansion. It is a precarious balance of allegiance and autonomy, and one that could tip at any moment—especially in a city where loyalty is salt-weathered and sealed more by rumor than by law.
Mji Mkongwe thrives on the friction between legitimacy and the black market. Its economy is as layered as its cityscape, with goods moving above and below the board—sometimes simultaneously. While the city’s independence limits large-scale industrialization, its location, culture, and informal networks make it a hub of exchange and extraction.
The city supports itself on a remarkably modest trade tax—just three percent on most transactions. This minimal levy is widely regarded as fair and rarely disputed, even by smugglers, who view it as the price of peace in a city that otherwise leaves them to their business.
The city produces Garum in vast quantities, made from the samaki ndoto caught in the glowing reefs of the Shungwe chain. Though production is robust, most of the local Garum never leaves the city—consumed daily in taverns, clan feasts, and salt-splashed breakfasts served beside the tide. The famous export comes instead from Il-Wāāt ul'Ihāt Kathira, whose Garum is more widely traded—sometimes through official channels, but often aboard pirate ships flying false flags.
Mji Mkongwe’s real wealth flows in through less regulated means. Smuggling remains a cornerstone of the economy: magical fauna and reef toxins harvested from the outer islands, relics from the pre-Fall ruins hidden in Nduya, and illicit arcane reagents purchased in hush from deep-sea traders. The docks teem with small craft arriving and departing under cover of darkness, laden with cargo that might include banned texts, cursed items, or ingredients too volatile for Kathiran ports. Shipwork is a major economic pillar: the city boasts a thriving industry dedicated to the repair, retrofit, and disguise of stolen vessels. Drydocks fashioned from coral platforms and tide-lifted scaffolds are in constant use, and the work of sailmakers, carpenters, and flag-crafters fuels entire neighborhoods. It is said a ship can enter the city one color and sail out another, with a new name, new flag, and half a dozen forged identities stored in its hold.
The city also serves as a distribution point for agricultural goods from the nearby Davai and Embe islands across the Bahari ya Chini. Bananas, cassava, peppers, and strange jungle fruits are brought in daily, along with salted reef fish, mollusks, and smoked shark. The most heavily imported crop is the embehazi, a spiny, sugar-rich fruit similar to a pineapple, grown in mass plantations on Embe Island and used in the city’s beloved distilled liquor, mbawa. Mbawa is cheaper than water in some neighborhoods and more common than Garum in city taverns—a sharp, fiery drink served in clay cups, coral bowls, or straight from a shared gourd on the quays. It’s considered a sailor’s birthright, a smuggler’s solace, and a clan elder’s negotiation tool.
These goods are offloaded directly to buyers or repacked into shallow-draft trading vessels bound for smaller coastal towns too nervous to deal directly with Kathiran merchant houses.
Corsair commissions are another pillar of the economy. Mji Mkongwe issues Letters of Marque—or their local equivalent—legitimizing what would otherwise be piracy. This carefully managed ecosystem of privateering provides the city with income, protection, and a web of reciprocal relationships with other outlaw ports and rogue fleets.
While Kathira officially considers many of these activities illegal, its merchants are among the city’s most consistent customers. Illicit trade routes run parallel to diplomatic ones, and every crackdown is followed by a quiet return to business. Meanwhile, Mji Mkongwe’s informal alliance with Lautara ensures that any attempt to blockade or isolate the city risks backlash from one of the largest floating powers in the region.
In Mji Mkongwe, commerce is a game of shadows and smoke-signals, but one played in broad daylight. Markets are loud, ships offload openly, and bribes are tallied like taxes. It is a city where trade is not just tolerated—it is ritual, risk, and religion.
The culture of Mji Mkongwe is equal parts myth, menace, and maritime tradition—a city that doesn’t just tolerate its Fangasi legacy but builds with it like brick and rope. Honor among thieves is not a saying here—it’s a functioning ethic. Loyalties are tidal but deeply felt, and the code of the tide, an unwritten rulebook enforced by memory and knife, binds the clans more tightly than any written law.
Clans are the basic unit of civic life. Some are old, tracing their bloodlines back to the original flotilla that founded the city. Others were formed last week, sealed in mbawa-soaked vows and anchored by nothing more than mutual need and a ship that floats. Clans can own real estate, ships, and legal identities, and their banners—often nothing more than tattered cloth or bone-carved sigils—fly above dock gates, market stalls, and barroom altars.
Seaborn and Mchanga Pwanii traditions mix freely here. Toasts and tattoos, curses and wedding songs flow in Kawaida, Chumvi, and a dozen half-dialects shouted from ship rails. A clan funeral might involve a reef pyre or a wake that spans three taverns and ends with a knife-throwing contest at dawn. Children are raised communally. Some streets hold their own schools, others trust to apprenticeship, and still others hand education to the sea.
Religious belief is personal, tangled, and transactional. Shrines to storm spirits sit beside faded murals of drowned gods. Some clans keep salt-slick idols in their holds, others feed Garum to the waves at every tide turn. Prophets and drunkards preach side-by-side in the markets, and it’s not always easy to tell who’s who.
Festivals are frequent and unfixed—timed by moonrise, the arrival of fleet captains, or the death of an old rival. The Garum Season, marked by the first reef bloom of the samaki ndoto, is a time of riotous trade, clan games, and masked processions through the Flooded Quays. Then there’s Usiku wa Vyote Vilivyoibiwa—“The Night of All That Was Stolen”—when debts are forgiven, stories are traded like coin, and every lock in the city is rumored to be fair game.
In Mji Mkongwe, culture is not curated—it’s lived with grit, salt, and steel. It is a city that sings with its scars and names its children after storms.
The Docks and Flooded Quays form the pulsing artery of Mji Mkongwe’s commerce, culture, and chaos. Built on retractable piers and floating platforms lashed to tide-worn pylons, the Docks rise and fall with the breath of the sea. When the tide is high, the quays flood to the knees—drowned streets of lapping saltwater where lanterns sway on ropes overhead and canoes drift between shopfronts. When the tide retreats, the stone-and-timber walkways reveal barnacle-crusted steps, lost coins, and the remnants of last night’s deals.
This district never sleeps. Sailors offload barrels of mbawa and dried reeffish alongside contraband relics and iron-bound crates that no one opens in daylight. Steam and smoke pour from street kitchens and cauldron stalls, where squid is stewed beside kelp pies and hardbread dipped in fermented shark paste. Children run messages barefoot across the wet stone. Corsairs sharpen their knives at dockside tables. Clerics of unknown gods light driftwood fires beneath the docks and chant prayers into the tide.
At its heart, the Docks are also where vessels are reborn. Flag shops sew false colors above forgeries of false ledgers. Whole identities are fabricated in the span of a tide shift, and more than one notorious raider has left these piers with a new name, a new ship profile, and a wink from a bribed dock warden.
There are no gates here, only open thresholds and guarded looks. To step onto the Flooded Quays is to enter the mouth of the city itself—a place where salt runs thicker than blood, and everything, even your name, is for sale.
Perched high on the upper terraces, the High Warrens are a woven maze of old clan strongholds, steep switchback streets, rooftop gardens, and angular stone towers. From here, one can look out over the entire city and the vast shimmer of the Kalij ul'Almach Lahr beyond. This is where lineage means something, where deals are struck not in shouted barroom boasts but in low murmurs across terrace balconies.
The architecture is dense but more deliberate than the chaotic docks below. Houses here are older, often carved into the cliff itself, their facades shaped from basalt and coralcrete and decorated with clan mosaics, sea-glass windows, and bonework talismans. Rooftop gathering spaces are common, shaded with sailcloth and hung with wind-chimes, where elders hold court beneath the sway of tide-flag banners.
This district is where the power of Mji Mkongwe lives behind closed doors. Many of the city’s most influential families keep their ancestral halls here, surrounded by apprentices, enforcers, scribes, and secret-keepers. The winding alleys conceal countless passages to the undercliff vaults where fortunes, relics, and secrets are stored. The House Elders convene here under the painted ceiling of the Tidehold Hall—a semi-public chamber built like an inverted hull and guarded at all times.
But the Warrens are not without life. Children race fish in the rain gutters. Couriers sprint barefoot across sling bridges. Mbawa vendors pass through singing ballads of family honor and shipwreck curses. In the High Warrens, wealth is measured not in coin alone, but in memory, name, and the number of loyal hands willing to take a blade on your behalf.
Where the tide meets trade and the scent of brine mixes with spice, the Riverward Market unfolds across the sloping terraces just above the docks. This is the beating mercantile heart of Mji Mkongwe, a place where shouted prices and whispered deals blur into the same breath. It is here that trade becomes theater—stalls built from sailcloth and rope line the steps, while shopkeepers chant wares like sea-shanties, promising everything from relic fragments to reef-washed sandals.
The market shifts with the tides. Morning is for fishmongers and fruit caravans. Midday belongs to cloth traders and charm-sellers, while dusk brings the smoke-hagglers—those who trade in information, dreams, and forbidden scrolls from before the Fall. The scent of smoked meats—reef fish, venison, and stranger beasts—hangs heavy in the air, drawing wanderers and whisperers alike to shadowed alcoves and ember-lit corners. Embehazi fruit, bundled jungle herbs, pickled octopus, alchemical fetishes, and illegal relic shards all change hands under awnings embroidered with clan sigils and weathered family curses.
The market also hosts several permanent stone-fronted halls owned by major clans and syndicates—half-warehouse, half-embassy. These strongholds act as both marketplaces and neutral zones, where negotiations are brokered and truces observed. The central courtyard, known as Paza sa Pwani, or “the Open Shore,” serves as the city’s unofficial public square, where trials by witness, open challenges, and bardic duels are held.
The Riverward Market is rowdy, poetic, and dangerous. It is a place where the scent of mbawa mingles with grilled octopus and sweat, where names are made and lost, and where every corner might hide a relic, a secret, or a blade.
Ringed around the landward edge of the city like barnacles on stone, the Outer Camps are where the transients live, the crews wait, and the fires never quite go out. These are the salt-stitched tent towns, ramshackle lean-tos, and drifting flotilla moorings that house the unclaimed, the unbothered, and the untraceable. At any time, several thousand souls call the Outer Camps home, though few would claim to live there—they're simply passing through, always.
Here you'll find a Seaborn family making landfall for the first time in a year, a mercenary crew sharpening blades and waiting on a clan charter, or a pair of artifact smugglers arguing over the price of a pre-Fall shard by torchlight. Markets spring up on cloth and driftwood, then vanish with the dawn. Cookfires burn in half-barrels, and mbawa flows in chipped cups and sea-carved horns. No one's in charge, but everyone knows who to avoid.
The camps are both refuge and risk. Many make their first deals in Mji Mkongwe on its outskirts. Some die here too, their bones claimed by the tide or the jungle beyond. But for all its danger, the Outer Camps are also the city’s pressure valve—a place where its contradictions breathe, and its stories begin.
Mji Mkongwe endures not through strength, but through the tension of its oppositions. The city stands in a constant state of negotiation—between rival powers, shifting allegiances, and the weight of its own unruly past.
Kathiran pressure remains ever-present. Though Il-Wāāt ul'Ihāt Kathira cannot openly claim the city without provoking Lautara or sparking rebellion, it exerts control through bureaucracy, naval intimidation, and economic manipulation. Patrol ships linger at the horizon. Officials with polite smiles and too-sharp ledgers walk the Riverward Market, watching and recording. Their presence is tolerated but resented, their influence felt in shipping delays, fishing disputes, and targeted “crackdowns” on smuggling that rarely touch the city’s true power brokers.
That power lies, in no small part, with Lautara. The floating city’s protection shields Mji Mkongwe from outright colonization, but the relationship is not without strain. Lautara expects trade exclusives, dock access, and diplomatic concessions in exchange for its fleet's shadow on the tide. Some clans whisper that the protection is too high a price, while others argue it's the only thing standing between them and the fate of other free ports lost to Kathira’s slow tightening.
Internally, Mji Mkongwe is fracturing along philosophical lines. The Traditionalists—staunch defenders of Fangasi legacy—argue for autonomy at any cost. The Reformers—many with ties to Lautaran academia or trade houses—advocate for codified law, softer diplomacy, and infrastructure. Then there are the Raiders, those who see any nod to diplomacy as weakness and believe the city's survival lies in bold strikes, bribes, and the blade.
Layered atop these factions are the city’s quieter influences: smuggler barons, oracle cults, dock unions, and the so-called “Ghost Council”, an alleged group of long-lived pirates and exiled prophets said to meet in the flooded tunnels beneath the harbor.
To walk the streets of Mji Mkongwe today is to feel the coil of tension behind every exchange. Every feast is a parley. Every silence is strategic. The city thrives not in spite of its contradictions—but because of them. It is a place in motion, tide-fed and tide-bound, whose future shifts with each gust of wind and whispered deal beneath the salt-slick stone.
Mbawa – A potent local spirit distilled from the embehazi fruit. Sharper than salt air and more common than water in many taverns. Considered sacred, social, and slightly suspect by outsiders.
Embehazi – A sugar-rich fruit similar to pineapple, grown in mass on Embe Island. Used primarily to make mbawa.
Fangasi – A Kawaida word with a double meaning: both "pirate" and "fungus." Used affectionately and insultingly, sometimes in the same sentence.
Kiongozi wa Mawimbi – "Wavemaster." The ceremonial leader of Mji Mkongwe, appointed annually. Has the honor of speaking publicly and taking the blame.
Tidehold Hall – The vaulted council chamber in the High Warrens where House Elders meet. Shaped like an inverted ship hull.
Paza sa Pwani – "The Open Shore." A public square in the Riverward Market where bardic duels, street justice, and announcements take place.
Usiku wa Vyote Vilivyoibiwa – "The Night of All That Was Stolen." A festive chaos holiday of debt forgiveness, storytelling, and legally ambiguous lockpicking.
Ghost Council – An alleged hidden authority composed of aged pirates, retired prophets, and figures that may or may not still be alive. Referenced with reverence and sarcasm.
Smoke-hagglers – Dusk-market traders who deal in smoked meats, secrets, illicit scrolls, and high-stakes whispers.
Cliff-born – Term for a native of Mji Mkongwe, especially one whose family holds land above the flood line. Sometimes used derogatorily by dockside clans.
Deckname – A pseudonym or temporary alias used for smuggling, sailing under false flags, or ducking the consequences of one's last great idea.
Code of the Tide – The unwritten cultural law followed by most Fangasi clans. Passed down in curses, stories, and scars.
Sea-letter – Local term for a corsair commission or Letter of Marque.
Tide-slick – Slang for anything suspicious, newly arrived, or "too clean." Can also refer to new arrivals who have yet to earn their place.
Moorname – A ship’s second or hidden name, used for illicit dealings or alternate identities.
Wave-masked – Slang for those who operate with political immunity or Lautaran protection, often invoked with both admiration and resentment.