The capital, carved into the heart of the central Thunderdark range. Levke is less a city than a mountain made habitable: halls cut deep into living rock, forges burning year-round in the depths, defensive positions that have never been breached.
The Hall of Glorious Ends dominates the city's center, a vast chamber where the names and deeds of honored dead are carved into the walls. A Strømgodden aspires to have their death recorded here, not their life, because how one dies is held to define what one was worth. The most sacrificial endings get the most elaborate carvings. There is a second roll most outsiders never see, kept at a quieter fire deeper in: the long-table recitation to Grømnuul, where the ancestors of the living clans are spoken aloud on the night the year turns. The two registers say a great deal about the Strømgodden. One honors the spectacular death; the other refuses to let any name drop out of the line. The slow grief over the enslaved Drasnians lives in the second.
The High Forge produces the finest spiked armor in Trømgar, fitted to its wearer over years and counted a sacred object as much as a weapon. A suit of Levke plate is worn into the Nashua war and, ideally, never comes home clean.
The Warcouncil
The Warcouncil meets in Levke's deepest chambers, where the most battle-proven leaders decide matters that bind all Trømgar. For generations its only real business was the Nashua front. Now the chamber is split, and the split is over a question its creed gives it no good way to answer: what Trømgar owes the Drasnian dwarves Gorath has held in bondage for three hundred years.
One faction wants the obvious thing. Brynja Vornmar speaks for the hawks, who hold that the answer to enslaved kin is a host marched south to free them or die gloriously in the attempt, and who find anything less a betrayal of the dead. The trouble is that the road south runs through Nashua, where Trømgar has bled for generations without breaking the Ix'Vasyla, so the war the hawks demand is one the mountains will not let them fight.
The other faction fights the war Levke can actually reach. Out of a counting-room below the council chambers, the handler Grøndar Kaldmar runs a covert program of gold: he funds the Moon Road, the Drasnian escape network that walks slaves out of Gorath through the Moon Wilds, and he keeps an operative named Sigvar Dnyhak planted in Tamadrez to move the coin. The Warcouncil does not admit this work aloud, and many on it despise it. It is also the only thing Trømgar does for the Drasnians that has ever freed one. What the whole chamber is waiting for is the same thing: Emperor Veramus is old and has no clean heir, and a Gorathi succession crisis is the opening both factions mean to seize, one with a ledger and one with a charge.