Epenai
Epenai is the administrative seat of the Special Military Region that encompasses the former Barony of Vallakou, a walled city in the drier northern hills of Klopedia where the rock-strewn terrain gives way to river valleys of vineyards and olive groves and where the flat, open ground of the Aketes fields begins. It is the city where the Second Klopedian Uprising ended. It is the city where Baron Nothelis Vallakou was executed in his own town square. It is the city that Emperor Cynefrid the Protector's forces besieged and took within a week, and it is the city that the Emperor's son rode into personally to conduct a trial, deliver a verdict, and install a government that has not left since.
The city still carries all of this on its walls. Not in the commemorative sense that a victorious province might commission plaques or monuments, but in the literal physical sense. The walls show repair work where Imperial siege engines breached them, the new stone lighter in color than the old, the seams visible. The town square where the baron died is now an open plaza maintained by the military. The garrison buildings stand throughout the city, inserted into the urban fabric at the points where the military decided it needed to be present, which is to say everywhere.
Special Marshal Sofia Molakos administers the northern barony as a Special Military Region from her headquarters in Epenai, performing both the military command functions that the designation implies and the civil administrative functions that would, in any other province, fall to an Ealdorman and a baron. She governs with the competence and the irony that she brings to everything about her position; she is Klopedian-born, administering Klopedia by Imperial appointment, tolerated in the north and regarded with cautious warmth in the south. Trusted by the Emperor, and working at the center of a cycle of resentment and control that no single person's competence is sufficient to break.
The city still carries all of this on its walls. Not in the commemorative sense that a victorious province might commission plaques or monuments, but in the literal physical sense. The walls show repair work where Imperial siege engines breached them, the new stone lighter in color than the old, the seams visible. The town square where the baron died is now an open plaza maintained by the military. The garrison buildings stand throughout the city, inserted into the urban fabric at the points where the military decided it needed to be present, which is to say everywhere.
Special Marshal Sofia Molakos administers the northern barony as a Special Military Region from her headquarters in Epenai, performing both the military command functions that the designation implies and the civil administrative functions that would, in any other province, fall to an Ealdorman and a baron. She governs with the competence and the irony that she brings to everything about her position; she is Klopedian-born, administering Klopedia by Imperial appointment, tolerated in the north and regarded with cautious warmth in the south. Trusted by the Emperor, and working at the center of a cycle of resentment and control that no single person's competence is sufficient to break.
Government
The military occupation of Epenai is not violent in its daily expression. Imperial soldiers patrol the streets, but they do not abuse the population they patrol, because Molakos does not permit it and because she is effective enough that her prohibition holds. The checkpoints on the roads into and out of the city add time and cost and the particular humiliation of being required to account for one's movements to people who arrived three years ago and regard the place as a posting rather than a home. The schools operate. The markets function. The vineyards are tended. The wine is still made.
What the occupation produces is not fear but a particular quality of heaviness. The earth genasi of Epenai are a proud, passionate people who regard their connection to this soil as elemental and literal - their stone-touched features are a sign of belonging - and they are living under the governance of an authority that arrived to punish them and shows no inclination to leave. The heaviness is the weight of that arrangement, carried daily, not spoken about with strangers.
The most watched political question in the province is the fate of Theodora Vallakou. She completes her education at Brimorth - and becomes an adult - this year and will return to Klopedia, though to what role, no one yet knows. The genasi of the north would welcome her return as baroness. The Empire has not decided. Every person in Epenai, whether they say so or not, is waiting to see what the Emperor decides, because the decision will say something definitive about whether this is a punishment with an end or a condition without one.
Her headquarters in the garrison building is where the province's civil and military administration is conducted, correspondence with Vellakar handled, and the question of Theodora Vallakou's future discussed in terms that Molakos is carefully not committing to paper until the Emperor commits to a decision. She is a practical person who does practical work in a situation that has no clean resolution, and she is doing it because the alternative would be worse.
What the occupation produces is not fear but a particular quality of heaviness. The earth genasi of Epenai are a proud, passionate people who regard their connection to this soil as elemental and literal - their stone-touched features are a sign of belonging - and they are living under the governance of an authority that arrived to punish them and shows no inclination to leave. The heaviness is the weight of that arrangement, carried daily, not spoken about with strangers.
The most watched political question in the province is the fate of Theodora Vallakou. She completes her education at Brimorth - and becomes an adult - this year and will return to Klopedia, though to what role, no one yet knows. The genasi of the north would welcome her return as baroness. The Empire has not decided. Every person in Epenai, whether they say so or not, is waiting to see what the Emperor decides, because the decision will say something definitive about whether this is a punishment with an end or a condition without one.
Sofia Molakos
The Special Marshal is the city's most important resident and its most complicated figure. She is a Klopedian-born genasi from the southern halfling country, educated at Brimorth, distinguished in military service, and personally appointed by her close friend the Emperor. She is governing her homeland under military occupation and has governed it with a competence that the province acknowledges even as it cannot forgive the appointment. In the north, she is tolerated. In the south, she is regarded with something closer to warmth, insofar as the south extends warmth toward anyone involved in the administration that followed the uprising.Her headquarters in the garrison building is where the province's civil and military administration is conducted, correspondence with Vellakar handled, and the question of Theodora Vallakou's future discussed in terms that Molakos is carefully not committing to paper until the Emperor commits to a decision. She is a practical person who does practical work in a situation that has no clean resolution, and she is doing it because the alternative would be worse.
Districts
Epenai was, before 1683, an unremarkable provincial city of the northern barony. Sun-baked stone, olive trees on the slopes, the river running through the lower town. The kind of place whose identity was its geography and its trade rather than its history. It has a history now. It has too much of it, and the city's residents have not yet developed the distance required to treat it as background rather than foreground.
The Execution Plaza at the city's center is the most difficult place in the province to be in. It is clean, well-maintained, surrounded by buildings that still show the use they were put to during the battle that preceded the trial. There is no marker. There does not need to be one. Every person in the city knows what happened here, knows the date, knows that a man was brought out and killed in front of the people he had governed. The plaza is used for military formations. It is used for market days when the regular market cannot accommodate the volume. It is used for the ordinary business of a city, because life continues, and because using it for the ordinary business of a city is, in the absence of any formal acknowledgment of what happened here, the only response available.
The Garrison Headquarters occupies what was formerly the baronial administration complex, an arrangement of commandeered buildings that gives the military's presence in Epenai a quality of permanence that occupation usually tries to avoid projecting. It does not avoid projecting it here - it is deliberate. Epenai is meant to look permanently occupied, and everyone involved understands that the visibility is the point.
The Aketes fields lie north of the city, a broad expanse of flat agricultural land where the battle was fought and where Emperor Cynefrid died on the final day, shielding a retreating platoon from a Vallakou counter-charge, earning his epithet. The fields are still farmed, but they are also an Imperial memorial site, with a stone monument at the approximate location where the Emperor fell and a patrol route that keeps the monument maintained and visible.
The monument is the most contested public object in Klopedia. The Empire erected it to commemorate its dead Emperor. The genasi who farm the surrounding land regard it with a complicated mixture of grief for all the lives lost on the fields, regardless of which side they fought on, and a defiance at the memorial's implicit claim that only the Imperial dead are worth commemorating. They say nothing about this publicly, because there is no mechanism through which they could safely say it publicly, and because the patrol is present. They say it to each other, in the vineyards and at the farmstead tables, in the conversations that the occupation has not reached.
The Execution Plaza at the city's center is the most difficult place in the province to be in. It is clean, well-maintained, surrounded by buildings that still show the use they were put to during the battle that preceded the trial. There is no marker. There does not need to be one. Every person in the city knows what happened here, knows the date, knows that a man was brought out and killed in front of the people he had governed. The plaza is used for military formations. It is used for market days when the regular market cannot accommodate the volume. It is used for the ordinary business of a city, because life continues, and because using it for the ordinary business of a city is, in the absence of any formal acknowledgment of what happened here, the only response available.
The Garrison Headquarters occupies what was formerly the baronial administration complex, an arrangement of commandeered buildings that gives the military's presence in Epenai a quality of permanence that occupation usually tries to avoid projecting. It does not avoid projecting it here - it is deliberate. Epenai is meant to look permanently occupied, and everyone involved understands that the visibility is the point.
The Aketes fields lie north of the city, a broad expanse of flat agricultural land where the battle was fought and where Emperor Cynefrid died on the final day, shielding a retreating platoon from a Vallakou counter-charge, earning his epithet. The fields are still farmed, but they are also an Imperial memorial site, with a stone monument at the approximate location where the Emperor fell and a patrol route that keeps the monument maintained and visible.
The monument is the most contested public object in Klopedia. The Empire erected it to commemorate its dead Emperor. The genasi who farm the surrounding land regard it with a complicated mixture of grief for all the lives lost on the fields, regardless of which side they fought on, and a defiance at the memorial's implicit claim that only the Imperial dead are worth commemorating. They say nothing about this publicly, because there is no mechanism through which they could safely say it publicly, and because the patrol is present. They say it to each other, in the vineyards and at the farmstead tables, in the conversations that the occupation has not reached.
Points of interest
The Public Plaza is unavoidable in Epenai. It is the city's center. It is passed on the way to the market, to the temple, to the administrative offices. It serves its commemorative purpose through its very blankness, because blankness is what remains when an event is too recent and too raw to be integrated into the ordinary surface of civic life.
The Breached Wall Section on the city's northern face is the most visible physical evidence of the siege. The repair work is professional but not disguised, the lighter stone of the patch stands out against the darker original material clearly enough that visitors know exactly what they are looking at, which is exactly what it was intended to communicate.
The Aketes Fields Memorial north of the city, maintained by the Imperial garrison, marks the death of Cynefrid the Protector. It draws occasional pilgrims from the Imperial Standing Army - veterans, officers, people who served under Cynefrid - who make the journey to stand in the field and reckon with what happened here. The genasi farmers who work the surrounding land acknowledge these visitors but do not generally speak to them.
The Vintner's District in the city's south, where Epenai's vineyards feed into the small-scale wine production that is the northern barony's principal civilian economy, is the most normal-feeling part of the city. The work is the same work it was before 1683. The wine is still good. The people making it are largely the same people who made it before, and they are making it the same way, and this continuity is both a form of resistance and a form of endurance, and the distinction between the two is, in Epenai, mostly academic.
The Breached Wall Section on the city's northern face is the most visible physical evidence of the siege. The repair work is professional but not disguised, the lighter stone of the patch stands out against the darker original material clearly enough that visitors know exactly what they are looking at, which is exactly what it was intended to communicate.
The Aketes Fields Memorial north of the city, maintained by the Imperial garrison, marks the death of Cynefrid the Protector. It draws occasional pilgrims from the Imperial Standing Army - veterans, officers, people who served under Cynefrid - who make the journey to stand in the field and reckon with what happened here. The genasi farmers who work the surrounding land acknowledge these visitors but do not generally speak to them.
The Vintner's District in the city's south, where Epenai's vineyards feed into the small-scale wine production that is the northern barony's principal civilian economy, is the most normal-feeling part of the city. The work is the same work it was before 1683. The wine is still good. The people making it are largely the same people who made it before, and they are making it the same way, and this continuity is both a form of resistance and a form of endurance, and the distinction between the two is, in Epenai, mostly academic.
Type
City
Population
16,000
Owner/Ruler
Ruling/Owning Rank
Owning Organization
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