nestled into the foothills of the Red Mountain. The Mages' Guild's resident alchemist, Anarenen, told me the carapace is thousands of years old and that the last emperor crabs were hunted to extinction by the chimer when they first settled Vvardenfell. The carapace is bafflingly large, nearly the same size as the entirety of Ald'ruhn's upper or lower plazas. Several manors are dug into the hill from within the carapace, and several shops are carved from the ground beneath the carapace, the entrances in the reinforcing ridges along the bottom of the shell radiating from the main central mass, where the sensory organs would likely have attached in life. The rest of the
structures in Ald'ruhn follow suit, forming silhouettes of massive slumbering insects, or smaller fallen carapaces nestled into the ground around Skar. The other residential structures are formed of the same brown-grey adobe common in Vvardenfell, Balmora especially. The nearly monotone forms are adorned more subtly than with paint - which I suspect would wear off in the first ash storm that swept through the town from the slopes of the Red Mountain: the buildings' exteriors are given adornment via subtle carving, ridges and grooves accenting the edges of sloping planes of adobe, giving the houses a chitinous, armor-shod texture to match their form. The most humble