The road from Manda follows the Tugela River east, and for most of the journey there is nothing but red-earthed open country and the distant grey line of the Lesser Karoo range. Then the forest begins — dense hardwood stands that press close to the river's banks, alive with birdsong and the crash of something large moving through the undergrowth. It takes a moment to realize the crashing is the sound of workers.

Chigobo announces itself through sound before it becomes visible: the deep rhythmic bite of axes, the ringing clang of a forge, the low rumble of centaur voices carrying across the water. When the treeline breaks and the settlement comes into view, the first thing most visitors remark on is the scale of it. Everything in Chigobo is built for centaurs. The doorways are wide and low-beamed, the market lanes broad enough for a laden centaur to pass without turning sideways, the central fire pits surrounded by platforms at varying heights so that speakers can address a crowd that ranges from four feet to seven. Structures are stout, built from the same hardwood being harvested in the surrounding hills, with iron fittings from Jengo's Forge keeping the joints tight against the mountain winds.

The smell is wood smoke and pine resin and the sweet-dark scent of fermenting sorghum from the brewing shed near the river's edge. And beneath all of it, faintly, something floral — the apiary runs downwind of the town, and on warm days the air carries its product everywhere.

Chigobo sits at the confluence of the Tugela River and the Karoo Trace, a fast-running tributary that descends from the mineral-rich heights of the Lesser Karoo Mountains. The river provides fresh water, fish, and a natural border to the east. The mountains loom to the north and west, their slopes covered in dense hardwood forest in the lower elevations and open scrubland above the treeline, where the ore seams run.

The terrain immediately around the settlement is a narrow fertile strip — good soil between the river and the foothills that the centaurs have cultivated into fields of sorghum, millet, and garden vegetables. The forest begins a short walk from the outermost buildings and runs unbroken up into the mountain heights.

The elevation puts Chigobo in the cooler band of eastern Funta's climate. Summers are warm and wet, driving the hardwoods into fast growth. Winters are mild by mountain standards but cool enough at night that the forge never fully goes cold.

Chigobo is centaur country. Roughly three out of every four residents are centaur, and the town's layout, customs, and pace of life reflect that without apology. Humans came first as traders, then as workers willing to handle jobs centaurs found awkward — cramped mine shafts, detailed carpentry, bookkeeping. A small community of dwarves arrived two generations ago, drawn by the mining work and the quality of Jengo's forge, and they have stayed. Halflings pass through but rarely settle. Elves are rare and treated with polite reserve.

Outsiders who arrive with a skill and a willingness to work find Chigobo welcoming enough. Those who arrive with assumptions about who is in charge, or who show discomfort around the centaur majority, find the welcome wears thin quickly.

Chigobo runs on three pillars: what it cuts from the forest, what it pulls from the mountain, and what it shapes at the forge. Thabisa's Timber Co. is the largest employer in the settlement, supplying hardwood lumber across eastern Funta and as far as the coastal towns. Jengo's Forge turns the mountain ore into tools, weapons, and armor — with a particular reputation for mining equipment so well-made that it finds its way to buyers in Lahale and beyond. Karoo Harvest handles the agricultural side, running the fields, the kitchen gardens, and the apiary that produces Chigobo's most surprising export.

The settlement is not wealthy by the standards of the coastal cities, but it is stable. Almost everyone who wants work has it. The chieftain takes a modest tribute from the major enterprises and uses it to maintain the roads, the market, and the guard.

Chigobo eats like eastern Funta — sorghum porridge in the morning with goat milk and dried fruit, hearty stews at midday with whatever the river and the fields provide, and grilled meat over the fire pits in the evening when the work is done. Goat and guinea fowl are common. River fish are smoked and dried and eaten as a working snack throughout the day. The local flatbread, a heavy teff loaf baked in the forge's cooling chambers, is dense enough that one piece will keep a human satisfied for half a day.

The one luxury the settlement produces is its honey. Most of it gets sold, but what stays in Chigobo ends up stirred into fermented milk drinks, drizzled over fruit, or used to sweeten the dark sorghum ale that the brewing shed near the river turns out in reliable quantities. The ale is called Tugela Black. It is strong, slightly bitter, and exactly what a centaur wants after hauling logs for eight hours.

Centaur society in Chigobo is built on demonstrated competence. A leader who cannot outwork their people, or cannot at least outthink them, does not keep their position long. Thabisa has both qualities, which is why no one has seriously challenged her in twelve years. Respect is given readily to those who earn it and withheld from those who haven't, regardless of race or background.

Greetings between centaurs involve a brief lowering of the head — not a bow, more like an acknowledgment. Handshakes are adopted from human custom and used with outsiders. Hospitality is real but not effusive. A guest offered a seat by the fire has been welcomed; a guest offered food has been truly welcomed. Refusing food is considered a mild insult.

The town has a communal culture around the fire pits in the central clearing. Evenings, when the work shifts end, people gather — centaur, human, and dwarf alike — to eat, argue, play dice, and listen to whoever is in a mood to tell a story. Arguments are loud and common and rarely become violent; the understanding is that you say what you think, directly, and then let it go.

Not a festival so much as a tradition — on the morning of the first major lumber harvest of the season, the entire Thabisa's Timber Co. crew gathers at the forest edge and the eldest worker present leads the camp in a call-and-response song asking the forest's permission to take what they need. The song is in the old tribal language and few of the younger workers know all the words, but everyone knows the refrain. It lasts about twenty minutes and then the axes come out. Outsiders who've witnessed it tend to describe it as one of the stranger and more moving things they've seen in Funta.

Once a year, on the spring solstice, Jengo opens the forge to anyone in the settlement who wants to try their hand at shaping metal. Children line up first. The products are rarely useful. The point is the fire and the participation and the reminder that making things is something any person can do. Jengo judges the best piece made by a first-timer and the winner gets a small blade shaped by Jengo himself.

Music in Chigobo runs to percussion — hide drums and the hollow-log instruments common across Funta, played fast and layered in ways that can build into something almost overwhelming at full volume. There are also string players, usually human, who learned their craft on the coast and brought it inland. The combination has produced a local style: heavy drum foundations with melodic strings weaving over the top. It sounds unlike anything you'd hear in the coastal towns or in Lahale.

Carving is the visual art tradition here. Centaurs carve in the hardwood offcuts from the mill — not furniture or tools, but figures. Animals, mostly. Ancestors, sometimes. The style is stylized rather than realistic, built from bold shapes and deep cuts. Good pieces turn up in the market and fetch real coin from traveling merchants who know what they're looking at.

Bethsia, goddess of order and nature, is the presiding spirit of Chigobo. Her shrine sits at the western edge of town where the forest begins — not a temple exactly, more a cleared space among old trees with a carved stone marker and a permanently burning oil lamp. The centaurs regard Bethsia as the force that keeps the forest in balance and the mountain generous. Before major logging runs, offerings are left at the shrine. After a mine opens a new vein, the first ore goes to Bethsia's altar before it goes to the forge. The human and dwarf residents participate in these observances, more out of community solidarity than personal piety, though some have come to mean it.

Caminus, God of the Forge, is the secondary devotion and Jengo's personal patron. His symbol — a hammer — is marked in iron above the forge entrance. Jengo holds a quiet observance every month at the forge, no ceremony, just work done with intention. A small but dedicated group of the forge workers observe with him.

The dwarven community maintains private devotions to ancestors and to Thulgard, the Hearth Guardian, particularly through the long mountain winters. They don't proselytize and the centaurs respect the privacy of it.

A pair of human traders who pass through regularly are suspected by Nia of carrying devotional items tied to Oshala. Nothing has been confirmed. Thabisa has asked Nia to watch and wait rather than act without proof.

Chigobo is not a new settlement — centaur communities have lived along the Tugela River for at least four hundred years, long before Irna explorers made contact with Funta. The original settlement was a seasonal hunting camp that became permanent when the first centaur families recognized the forest's lumber potential and the mountains' ore. For most of its history, Chigobo was a modest community that traded with neighboring tribes and kept largely to itself.

A dwarven prospector named Halsin Graystone arrived in Chigobo after being driven out of a failed mine operation to the south. He struck a deal with the chieftain of the time: Halsin would teach the settlement's strongest smiths advanced metalworking techniques in exchange for a share of the ore and a place to live. The Forge Compact, as it became known, transformed Chigobo from a lumber town into a smithing center. Jengo's lineage descends directly from Halsin's first Chigobo-born students.

Mosi's grandmother, establishing the first intentional apiary on the mountain scrubland above town, discovered that bees foraging on the high-altitude Karoo flowers produced honey with unusual properties — mildly restorative when taken as part of a medicinal preparation, notably effective for treating wound infections. A healer from Lahale happened through Chigobo, tasted the honey, and within a year was sending buyers. The apiary has been Chigobo's most profitable operation per unit of output ever since.

An unusually wet winter broke the Karoo Trace banks and sent floodwater through the lower quarter of Chigobo. Significant buildings were lost and two people drowned. Thabisa, who had been chieftain for only three years at the time, organized the entire settlement in rebuilding. The rebuilt lower quarter sits on raised platforms now, and Thabisa's response to the flood is still pointed to as the moment she proved herself. The community vote to confirm her leadership, held afterward, was nearly unanimous.

Chigobo is prosperous and stable, though not without tensions. The mines are beginning to show signs of thinning ore in the primary shaft, and Brek Ashvein has been pushing Thabisa to authorize a deeper exploratory dig that would be expensive and disruptive. The logging operation is also running up against the sustainable limits of the nearby forest — Thabisa is aware that they are taking more than the forest replaces and has begun requiring replanting, which slows production and annoys the timber buyers who want more, faster. Neither problem is a crisis yet. Both will need a decision in the next few years.

Chigobo operates under the authority of an Induna — a chieftain who rules the settlement and the farmlands surrounding it by the customs of Funta. The chieftain is not elected but earns and holds the position through demonstrated leadership. Challenges to a chieftain can be made formally, but Thabisa has not faced a serious one. She holds authority over law, tribute, and major decisions for the settlement. The nearest major Kgosi is three days' travel west, and Chigobo's distance from that power means Thabisa has significant practical autonomy.

Centaur, Female — mid-fifties

Thabisa is a large centaur, heavy-shouldered even by centaur standards, with a dark chestnut coat and a silver-streaked mane she keeps braided back while working — which is most of the time. Her face is broad and carries the weathered look of someone who has spent decades outdoors in the mountain wind. She does not look like what someone raised on stories of elegant rulers might expect. She looks like a chief forester who happens to run a town.

She is direct to the point of bluntness, dislikes flattery, and has no patience for people who talk around a problem instead of naming it. She is also a careful thinker — she tends to ask more questions than she answers in a first conversation, listening with an attention that some visitors mistake for disinterest. It is not. When she finally offers a judgment, it is usually worth waiting for.

She is respected by virtually everyone in Chigobo. The human workers trust her because she has never shown favoritism toward centaurs in disputes. The dwarves trust her because she kept Brek Ashvein's mine crew whole through two dangerous cave-ins and paid for the injured workers' recovery herself. She is not beloved in the warm, story-song sense. She is trusted, which in Chigobo is worth considerably more.

Centaur, Male — late fifties

Jengo is lean where Thabisa is broad, with a copper-brown coat and hands — all four of them — marked by decades of forge work. He is quieter than his wife, more comfortable in the forge than at council, and famously uninterested in politics. He does not advise Thabisa on governance and she does not tell him how to run the forge. Their arrangement works.

His skill at smithing is genuine and beyond dispute. He could charge three times his current rates and buyers would pay. He doesn't, partly because he doesn't care about wealth and partly because he believes overcharging creates resentment. He is as close to a philosopher as Chigobo produces.

Centaur — young adults / adolescents

Thabisa and Jengo's three children are at various stages of figuring out who they are in a town where their mother is the most important person and their father is the second most respected. Lindiwe, the eldest, works alongside Thabisa and is being groomed for leadership whether she fully wants it or not. Jabulani apprentices at the forge with his father and shows the most natural talent of the three at smithing. Sizwe, the youngest, is still in the years of testing limits, and Nia spends more time managing the trouble Sizwe gets into than she would prefer.

The Chigobo guard is a militia of twelve, centaur and human mixed, under the command of Kwame. They are not soldiers — they are trained for dealing with banditry on the roads, disputes in the market, and the occasional creature that wanders down from the mountain heights. Kwame runs them hard and they are competent at what they do, though they would be overmatched by a determined organized force. There has not been one.

Kwame himself is a large, scarred centaur who fought as a mercenary in the west before returning to Chigobo a decade ago. He says little about those years. He and Thabisa have known each other since childhood and his loyalty to her is not transactional.

Chigobo follows the general customs of tribal Funta — the chieftain's word is law, disputes are settled in public hearing, and punishments favor labor and restitution over confinement. There is no jail as such; a wrongdoer who can't pay restitution works it off in the lumber operation or the mines. Serious offenses — violence against a community member, theft from the forge — result in exile. It has happened twice in Thabisa's time.

Centaur, Female — early fifties — usually found at the market or the Chieftain's Lodge
Nia is Thabisa's oldest friend and her most important advisor. She is lighter-framed than most centaurs in Chigobo, with a grey dappled coat and a habit of watching a room rather than participating in it. She handles all trade negotiations with outside buyers, manages the tax ledgers, and keeps the peace with the merchants who pass through. She is the most politically shrewd person in Chigobo and quietly the one most outside powers try to cultivate. She has not been cultivated successfully yet.

Centaur, Female — late forties — at the fields or the apiary most mornings
Mosi is small for a centaur and seems perpetually covered in something — soil, pollen, or whatever the bees have been into. She is the settlement's foremost expert on the medicinal properties of the Karoo honey and has an ongoing correspondence with healers in Lahale who want more product than she can produce. She is good-natured, extremely knowledgeable about plants and creatures, and fiercely protective of the apiary against anyone who wants to expand it faster than she thinks is safe.

Dwarf, Male — age uncertain, probably sixties — lives near the mine entrance
Brek has been in Chigobo for thirty years. He came for the ore and never found a reason to leave. He is stocky even by dwarf standards, with an ash-grey beard he keeps braided out of the way and a voice that carries through solid rock. He believes the thinning ore in the main shaft is not the end of the vein but the beginning of a richer one deeper in, and he has been trying to convince Thabisa to fund the deeper dig for two years. He is probably right about the ore. Thabisa is worried about what else might be down there.

Human, Female — mid-thirties — the brewing shed by the river
Dela arrived in Chigobo six years ago from the coast and stayed because Thabisa offered her the use of the brewing shed and asked no tribute for the first three years. She makes Tugela Black and two other varieties that she hasn't named yet. She is sociable, knows everyone's business, and is the informal clearinghouse for settlement gossip. She is also quietly saving everything she earns and no one knows why or for what.