Canyon Town

Canyon Town is a mid-sized village home to the offspring of several Zyleria families who had become the first Followers of Zylensia in the early 4th Century of the 5th Era Zyleria. The town was carved out beginning with a large crater at the top of a mountain near the northeast reaches of the deadland Zanyras. Over time, the families built their homes into this canyon they carved, built roads, and built a very popular rest spot known as the Sleepy Inn. Over two lifetimes have passed since the first wooden plank had been laid down in Canyon Town and the families have grown only gently in numbers, the majority of the family becoming artisan travelers producing paintings across all of Zyleria. If you see a painting in any town, it was likely painted in Canyon Town. It is unknown just how much of a hold Zylensia has on the current heads of the families, but Canyon Town is understood to be firmly within Kingdom control, a Zyleria Guard Outpost having its home right in the very town itself.

Founding of Canyon Town
In the early 4th Century of the 5th Era Zyleria, two small families of settlers from Zyleria visited the Valley Temple on pilgrimage together. Routed by the demonic skeletons of night, the families ended up lost, eventually finding their way to the foot of the Sky Temple. Astonished by this sighting, the families prayed to Zylensia on that day; it was said Zylensia visited those pilgrims, huddled together in Her freezing temple in the sky, and provided them with food and warmth -- the basic act of justice, as the story goes. To this day, the families of Canyon Town still hold this belief of justice to be true, having based their entire town around being welcoming to travelers, offering food and shelter to any who may pass.

The story goes that the two families, the Mayors and the Towners, worked together for years to carve out their little town in a mountain. The two families brought in outside help from time to time, and tragedies such as falling from heights or being crushed under falling rocks were certain and common. By the time the mountain had been hollowed properly, only a few people had remained from this small pilgrimage. This brought the two families even closer together into a team of architects, miners, artists, and friends. Throughout the two-hundred years since that date, the size of Canyon Town hasn't much grown, population-wise or land-wise. The town's largest project, the Sleepy Inn, was completed almost a hundred years ago.

Canyon Town in recent times
Today, Canyon Town's camaraderie is mostly in shatters. The two families feud more often than not, over trivial things. The town, which has no formal government and never has had a formal government, has been more or less run by a citizen named Aron Mayor and his wife, a Sky Town farmer's daughter named Nora Mayor. The couple runs the town's lodge, the Sleepy Inn, and has done so since Mayor's father officially took the duty of the position exclusively when the head of the Towner household decided to build a wool and artisan operation near a more central part of the town. Though that event was entirely mutually-beneficial and operated functionally at the time, when the two sons of these men, Aron Mayor and Seville Towner, took over the whole picture changed. The two never played well together as boys, and even as men the two continue to not play well together. Their spat has more or less split the town down the middle, the Mayor family staying mostly on one side of the town by the Sleepy Inn, and the Towners staying on the other side of the town by the Wool shop and artisan post.

Even though the town is officially operated entirely by Followers of Zylensia, given the feuding going on, it's unsure how religious the families currently living there are. It is assumed the only thing keeping the location civil at all is due to the presence of a Zyleria Guard Outpost in the area.