Berethrî
Berethrî (/BEAR-reth-ray/) is the capitol city of the Fey. It exists both in Jirdarb'cytgord (JEER-dar-KIT-gord) (formerly the old Fey Pact-Land in Keldan, and in The FeyWild. As the capitol of the Fey, Berethrî is both the Fey seat of government and the hub of all major interaction (commercial, social, cultural, etc.) with non-Fey races and nations. To visit Berethrî is to experience a subtle and beautiful assault on one's senses; the architecture, construction and trappings of the city are simultaneously natural, functional, and a bit nonsensical.
Demographics
The Fey have not seen fit to conduct a proper census, and so the full distribution of Summer, Autumn, Winter and Spring Berethrîans is not well understood. A day's walk along any major thoroughfare, however, is likely to present a fairly even representation of all four seasons. Some seasons and even some species may congregate more densely in particular quarters, districts and neighborhoods, but none are known to be actively exclusive or segregated.
Government
Berethrî is governed as a mayorship. The term of office is 5 seasons, with each new mayor being a citizen of Berethrî and of the appropriate season. The current mayor is Umbodael of the Summer Fey. They started their term the previous Summer, and will hold the office until the end of the following Summer, when they will be replaced by a Berethrîan of the Autumn Fey. That individual will take the office at the start of Autumn and will hold it through the end of the following Autumn. And so on.
Infrastructure
Every burb ring that exists outside of Berethrî's phase boundary contains a number of permanent circus sites. These sites are not always occupied by the same circus, but they almost always in use. They are also the primary sites of revelry during two major weeks of celebration - one week before the phasing begins, and the week of the phasing itself. This celebrating occurs only at the location that Berethrî is leaving, and within Berethrî itself. These burb rings also house permanent regional Ministry offices in order to maintain year-round stability.
Guilds and Factions
The Order of the Green Knight maintains its headquarters in Berethrî, in a massive structure called The Stump. This is one of the few structures in the city that looks exactly like what it is: a massive tower fortress built on top of a giant tree stump. The origin of the tree itself, and how and when it became a stump, seems lost to antiquity.
A bards' college, The College of Seasons, also calls Berethrî home.
Architecture
Berethrîan architecture is comprised of odd, flowing, even weird shapes and lines. As with Nature, there are no straight lines, or very few anyway. Most every structure appears to either be grown from or built into the ground and/or flora. The presence of the structures is clear, they are not hidden or camouflaged, but it can occasionally be difficult to determine where one building ends and another starts. The architecture has been described by non-Fey visitors as "returning to nature". This is grossly inaccurate - Berethrî was never separate from Nature to begin with. It is more accurate to say the city is a collaboration between Nature and Fey sensibilities with only the very rare nod to function-over-form. When it is truly understood, which is to say when a non-Fey has been fully inculcated, Berethrî is as comforting as a summer breeze, bountiful as a never-ending harvest, dependable as frozen stone, and energizing as spring rains.
Geography
Berethrî is a particularly clever display of Fey caprice - the city proper magically phases its physical location through a sequence of four locations in Jirdarb'cytgord on a regular schedule timed to match the seasons of that island. Beginning the first second of the first full day of a season, a phasing portal begins to rotate on an axis level with Berethrî's main north-south thoroughfare, rising in the west and, a full seven days later, setting in the east. Imagine one's self inside the sphere of a jump rope, but the rope takes an entire week to make one full rotation. Now imagine also that the semicircular plane defined by the handles of the rope and the rope itself "eats" anything its path, teleporting whatever it was to another location, but healthy and whole. That is the process of teleportation that Berethrî experiences at the beginning of every season. The four locations are marked on the map of Jirdarb'cytgord, with the westernmost site being Berethrî's location in Spring. Moving on a relatively eastern course, the next three locations are Summer, Autumn and Winter sites. When Winter ends, Berethrî moves all the way back to its Spring location. And so it goes. As Berethrî phases out of one location, it immediately begins to phase into the next. At any of the three sites that are out of season, a perfect hemispherical crater exists, waiting for Berethrî's inevitable return. At every site, outer burbs exist and remain year-round, the populace and businesses operating normally, though at significantly reduced capacities when out of season.
Berethrî's existence in the Feywild is altogether a different story. The city behaves in an extraordinarily normal manner. It does not phase, teleport, or any other such thing. The only real oddity is that the Feywild Berethrî is an exact duplicate of the Prime Material Berethrî, regardless of season or current phasing status. Additionally, the Feywild Berethrî is the actual seat of the Fey Court. Supplicants from Keldan seeking an audience with the Fey Court must enter the Ministry Building in Berethrî's current location in the Prime Material and travel through a permanent fey portal in the Central Chamber, address the Fey Court, and return to the Prime Material through the portal. Other portals in Berethrî exist, though they seem to be as capricious as portals found in the wilds of Armea.
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