The Grey Cities

Like a frayed coat named for its tarnished gold buttons, or like a map so paled by the time that the only name it carries is that of the weights used to pin it against the gathering wind, the land bears the Cities name. The cities, the land, and the culture of that land, all are referred to as-one:
The Grey Cities.
The final fortress of civilized humanity. The last spark of Esh, slumbering in Uud.
The continent, (or one half of the paired sub-continent of Blackwater), runs roughly two and half thousand miles from Declension to the western coast. From many-walled Yga to the cold, uncertain border with the north, it reaches two to three thousand miles. The Waste frets and ebbs, pressing in, then falling back, gnawing at the borders of the land. The Cities total area varies according to the age, and the fortunes of man.
The rivers run east-west, to an almost unnatural degree. This may be due to deliberate engineering in the distant past, or Diadem-age reality shifts. The greatest rivers run from the Realities, through the Blackriver plain, past the Cities, and seep into the sea of ash on the western coast. Some spill out into the Waste. A few loops back in watched, guarded and carefully patrolled. Their cold, black water gives the realm its name, and the soot-colored sediment carried from the Realities is claimed to contain some of the stern magic of the Mountains with it. Yggsrathaals Children find it vile.
There are hundreds, perhaps a thousand Grey Cities. Though before the Great Theistic war, there were many more. The oldest and the greatest are Galdor, Vocht, Declension, and Yga. Nearly as well-known are Eimyrja, Hulfr, Morewen, Cinerium, Sintel, Sceadweald, Kaal, Foign, Wraeth of the Ruins, and Glaem.
Each is unique, but a few things unify them all. All are based around a sacred megastructure, almost all are built on, or by rivers or some other fresh-water source, and almost all are centered in a pool of exploitable arable land. As well as this, many cities carry, somewhere close, or even surrounding them, a near-ungoverned borderland; the Zomia.
Though their climate and geography vary hugely, the power and influence of each city can be measured by its shadow. Like a weight pressing into a blanket, each carries with it a radius of power, spreading into its hinterland, centered on its secret core and the forgotten rituals performed there by the Emperors of Reality.
So, we measure from the outside in, coming closer to the center, and the secret of the city with each move.
But we begin at the point furthest from the city's core.

The Margins

At the height of its power, in the dark times before the Tolerance and the Treaty of Birch Falls, the Waste sent tendrils into Cities. Mists rose, even in the center, and a capillary of ash and cold grey cloud crept through the land, surrounding cities, and cutting them off. This was an age of isolation and war, the borders of reality crashed inward, Yga was nearly lost and Theistic violence nearly claimed all.
Since then, reality has reclaimed much. But far from all. Many cities fell, lost to the Waste, and carried away.
These are the Margins; any land that is not safe from the advancing Waste.
We could call all of Blackwater marginal since almost all of it is in danger, but in practice, the margins are places on the northern or southern borders, facing the Sea of Ashes to the West or some of the Blackriver Plain to the east.
Here, things are livable, for now.
Here the shadow of the cities casts the desperate, brave, or utterly mad. The losers of wars, criminals, despised cults and religious groups, deranged idealists, brave watchers of the Waste-bound paths, barbarians, wanderers, nomads, and, of course, heroes.
The margins lie on the borders of Blackwater itself, but a little closer, and within the body of the continent itself, are the Zomia

Mountains in the Grey Cities

While, in comparison, the vast sweep of the Grey Cities is popularly conceived of as a plain, nothing could be further from the truth. Nothing in the 'Cities' compares in size or insane majesty to the dominating peaks of the Realities, thousands of miles away.
But the cities do have their own smaller, more comprehensible ranges, many of which reach of the thousand feet height requirement to be dubbed 'mountains'. While in the Mountains of Reality, such places might be considered unusually productive and accessible land, here in the urban-minded governments of the Cities, they are often condemned as 'Zomia', unproductive and ungovernable spaces with limited capacity for development.
The average City-dweller regards nature as a savage thing, a source of lawlessness, wildness, and monsters. At present, the joys of climbing, exploring, painting, or writing poetry about such places belong only to a narrow band of aesthetes in the upper class, expounders on 'romance'. The common urbanite or the ordinary valley farmer often quails at the consideration of even a small, local mountain. Why would you go up there?
Partly as a result of this current culture of indifference, and partly due to the vast sweep of history in the Cites, many mountains do have singular monsters, strange ruins, ancient tombs, or buried palaces, beings of un-living thaumaturgy and hoboes on them.

Needle Towers

The needle-towers of the marginal lands have often been considered the eyries of Wizards. Most were certainly raised by magical craft, for their form and substance often show no sign of worked stone and they have endured long past the expected lifespan of most mundane advisements. The majority are empty now, and the familiar silhouette on the distance; a black strike like the straight cut of an ink-thick brush on the horizon usually denotes no more than a frustrating climb to a cold, empty and dust-scoured watch room. Yet, some are inhabited, often by Paladins undergoing testing, by Waste Walkers of various kinds who seek refuge, and indeed, they are favored by the more radical Thaumaturges. Every wizard wants a tower, really, and these are largely going free. The only cost is that of furnishing and securing the tower, and the only real rent is the unutterable and continual terrifying danger of Her children coming from the Waste. Or of an incursion from the Tetrarchies. Or of Barbarians or Orcs from the margins. Or just simple criminals and cultists.
Each of these towers has, perhaps, at some point in its existence, been the stage for lethal drama, and few's dust have never been washed away by fresh blood. Many are the tales of small groups resolutely defending their narrow stairways for hours, even weeks, or of Knights found dead, surrounded by the corpses of monsters, piled in the walkways and jamming the doors, or of Wizards murdered, or just missing via some arcane mistake.
Here the assumed Thaumaturge sends forth their puissance to blast some aggravating speck. Hopefully, they act in the cause of all and are not simply annihilating passers-by for fun.
Civilization breeds shadows in the hearts of men.
The canals and grey trails between the Cities hide a threat more dangerous than any monster.

Corruption.

Though, technically, most of the area of the Grey Cities falls under the governmental rule of one place or another. In practice, this influence extends tenuously along roadways and canalways, thickens into governmental blobs around villages and lesser settlements, and fades to absolutely nothing in the patches of wilderness and Zomia.
And the wilderness is not the most dangerous place. The great and powerful have little interest in the civilizational dark. If there were resources to be plundered, they would already be there. And perhaps were there and have gouged whatever they can from the black spots on the map.
No, it is in the fading penumbra of government that the greatest danger lies, far from the lantern, but not quite the dark. Here in the shadowlands of society, the great and powerful have an interest, and the means to execute it, and there is little law to restrain them.
People go missing, unrecorded, between one place and another. Cargoes disappear and reappear in a different guise. Names are forgotten, traces brushed away. One thing becomes another, and in the absence of witnesses, out here in the near-wild, who is to say what went down?
Bodies?
Well, monsters roam out here. The swamps can be deep. Even a mile from the path, when will anyone even check? There are no idle passers-by.
The most dangerous thing on the Grey Trails is an alliance in the City. It's near-impossible to carry out systematic violent crime, crime on a large scale, without some kind of cover, an informant or hidden ally in the cities governmental structure, one to give a warning and discreetly slow down or misguide an investigation.
And there are many situations in the hectic and dangerous political world of the Grey Cities where it would be... useful, to have friends who were able to do things outside the law, friends who could not be traced, friends with violent capacities, friends who do not exist. And if it can be useful to have such friends, it is usually simply suicidal to stand against them.
So, somewhere in a Tea House or gambling den, at a wedding or in a bordello, in a drug house of the cathedral, hands are shaken, and a deal is made.
Out on the margins, at the isolated canal-station or the lonely crossroads, at the strangely-silent inn or on the only open road through the storm-tossed forest, by the time your local contacts friendly smile fades away and leaves only a knife behind their eyes, by the time shadows step out of the tree line or weapons are drawn in the pub, it is already far too late. You were already betrayed a hundred miles away and many days ago.

The Zomia

The Zomia of the Grey Cities is defined not by their geography, (although that plays a role), but by their relation to state power.
A Zomia is a bubble of uncontrol within a city's sphere of power. They may rule in theory, their flag or blazon may fly, they may collect 'tribute', and other cities may consider it within their range of influence, but tax collectors don't leave their fortress at night, or at all, and soldiers patrol in groups, if they are even present. The Zomia is a kind of mirror to the city and anti-self that holds it in equipoise. On one side; order, hierarchy, power, and control, and on the other; wildness, anarchy, danger and, sometimes, terror. It is a place in which it is very, very hard for a Grey City Government to get what it wants.
A Zomia can take many forms. In almost every case, the land is sparsely populated, unsuited for agriculture, and very difficult to navigate.
In the very center of the Cities lie great forests of gnarled black wood, spreading for hundreds of miles over cracked and fractured land. Wreath of the Ruins is surrounded by the Kataferz, the Midnight Wood whose trees grow so densely they block out the sun and whose brambles, nettles, poisoned vines, and seeping willows press endlessly at the edges of Wreaths settled lands.
Vocht has The Vochtweald, a high plain of near-bare limestone Karst, visible even from the towers of the city itself, but never entirely subjected to its rule. Here sinkholes open beneath the traveler, the rocks form bizarre labyrinths. Caves and strange passages are everywhere, tiny villages eke out survival on small patches of rare fertile soil. The Maroons of the Vochtweald, made up of escaped members of Vochts servile and criminal classes, the rule here, if anyone does, from caves and fissures and secret adobe settlements high in the Weald.
Yga has the Swamps of the Moon; mile upon mile of reeds, waterways, buzzing flies, rotting ruins, and mad tribes. The pearly waters hum, even at night, with the spiraling flies and the croaking of the Ghoul Toads.
And swamps are common in the Grey Cities, where the Black Rivers slow and overrun lowlands.
Though all are different and each unique, the Zomia all play a similar role. They are refugees, places of rebellion, criminality, and escape. Whoever is unwelcome in the city can flee to a place where the laws of the city-run thin and power become a simple matter of the strength of your arm and the brightness of your smile. A harsh law, but less harsh for many than life in the city.
Though the Zomia, the Margins, and even the City itself can be thought of as a place for adventure, the same cannot be said for the next ring.
(Though it may be simply the kind of adventure that differs).

The Grey-Ghoul Toad!

Perhaps the world's worst form of frog This worthless, resentful, and contemptible creature is an image of the sleep of reason of the mute hostility of nature to man. While the extruded ooze of the lesser toad is incapacitating if ingested, that of the greater toad is lethal in all cases. However, if the ooze of the greater toad is applied carefully to the skin, it can result in an enervating tingling, a collapse in all social inhibitions, and the overwhelming urge to dance. Continual use can result in seeping blue-grey skin stains, the mark of a toad addict.
The ghoul toad receives its name, not only from its deathly pallor and unnerving glaucus dead-eyes stare but from its common habitation on or in the corpses of drowned humanoids. The toad's common call sounds not unlike a muffled screaming or a human being choking to death. An all too familiar tableaux in the swamps of the Grey Cities is a pair of corpses, or a drowned corpse and a frantic dancer. The first victim may have fallen to violence or mischance. The Grey-Ghoul Toad then chooses to inhabit the body and makes its awful call. A passer-by hears this, and seeing a body face down in the mire, and assuming they are in distress, attempts a rescue, (or perhaps robbery). Doing so they encounter only a corpse and, hopefully, only brush against the Toad, receiving its sweaty communion and becoming subject to its alchemical manipulations. Sometimes the dancing, the necrotizing bite of the toad, or nearby bandits ensure that a second corpse soon joins the first.
A fresh home, for yet another blankly-staring Grey-Ghoul Toad.

The Safe and Silent Lands

Not truly safe, but often silent. The City must feed, and here are fertile lands which satisfy that hunger. Each city sends out a spiderweb of farms, plantations, villages and cultivators, a halo of worked fields, managed growth, herding, and gathering. In the south and west, many cities occupy shallow river valleys crammed with intensive rice production. These huge concentrations of food are engines of cultural, economic, and military power.
During the fall of Esh, Blackwater was the destination for refugees from all the worlds and climes of the Diadem. They brought their crops with them and Blackwater has a diversity of food and useful animals greater than any biome of modern earth, a mad bricolage of plants and cultivation which has found a rough equilibrium over the millennia. As the altitude, soil, or climate shifts, every crop imaginable is brought to seed.
These are the true treasures of the Grey Cities, the cause, and prize of most of their wars. Food gets you, soldiers, soldiers get you land, the land gets you food. The Zomia and the Margins rarely face the threat of organized war, and few armies ever penetrate a Cities defenses to overthrow another’s government. It is these places that face the action and consequence of war. When armies march, they do so up and down rivers, through villages, over fields.
Even in peace, here in the weird arable lands, every village has a secret. Only a mile off the main road you might find an isolated place settled a thousand, or five thousand years ago. Some villages and market towns have griped under the cities as long as they have existed, some were even here before the cities before the great flood of the population the endless cultures of Esh swamped their lands and changed everything forever.
These places are caked in their strange rituals, fetishes, festivals, conspiracies, cults, bribes, banditry, inbred families, local ways, micro-cultures, social dramas, hidden structures of power, and brutal generational feuds over the placement of a garden wall.
The city sucks in talent, youth, beauty, craft, intelligence, and anyone who cannot fit in. What is left, in the safe and silent lands, is often the opposite, the husk of these qualities, and the more quiet, strange, changeless, and conservative such places get, the more so they wish to be.
But now we approach the true heart, the city itself. And rising in the distance we see something larger, and stranger than any city seen on earth, the Megastructure.

Crops

The crops of the Grey Cities are carefully controlled. The Bureaucrats, Tax-Collectors, and Hierarchs strongly prefer that only those crops which require intensive cultivation, are visible to the passing eye and that serve the needs of the City be planted. They intend to pin their farmers in place with rice or corn so they cannot simply leave without abandoning years, or a lifetimes worth of cultivation, to guarantee that they can see, and therefore tax, everything their peasant grow, and most of all, that the city is fed.
Of course, this leads to an agricultural underground in which farmers use all manner of cunning and deceit to evade the tax collectors. They cut deals with Zomia nomads to hide pasture animals like Cows and Goats but moving them around. They sew secret moonlight crops between rows, hide potatoes in the heights, spore mushrooms in the forests or hidden cellars, grow rare luxury cash crops in hidden greenhouses, cut deals with tax inspectors, bribe mappers to have whole areas reclassified, or even taken off the map entirely and ever grow illegal or banned substances. In the silent hinterlands of the Grey cities, every farmer is hiding a secret, and they do not want you poking around!

Field Workers

The field workers of the Grey Cities would react sharply to the word 'peasant'.
They are not subjecting, but Citizens, in their opinion something a rung above a peasant and a different quality of thing entirely. They owe no loyalty to a ridiculous hereditary monarchy or a crazed lady seeing visions in the night. Instead, they belong to a City, a Guild, a Village, a Party, and probably all of those at once. They even read the newspaper, once a week, when a copy finally gets out to the sticks.
They do have more freedom than the feudal masses of the Realities, they are not legally bound to any village, city, or field. At least not permanently. They are often 'under contract', set to produce a certain amount of work in exchange for the protection and legal recognition that citizenship provides. Depending on the justice or cruelty of the regime they live under, this may be a situation they might eventually work, or buy their way out of. Or it may be an ever-expanding vortex of debt and 'interest' payments which can have no reasonable end.
Still, even under a brutal regime, it is always possible for a miracle of some kind to take place. If someone from a village were, for instance, to discover a vast hidden treasure, or take that treasure from the body of a monster, or a nest of Her Children, they could buy out their contract. They might even be able to buy off their villages contract or at least shorten their repayments.
The Rural Citizens of the Cities may not be slavishly loyal to a Queen, but they do have a curious relationship with the City itself. It is difficult to delineate the complex mixture of identities produced by a simultaneous rebellion against, and aggressive identification with, The City. Every field hand and every villager grumbles and plots endlessly against The City. They hate its taxes, its governors, its oppression of the rural poor. They dislike their decadent and perverse culture. They hate its ingrained superiority, how its fancy bourgeoise seems to glide so lightly over the surface of a world which ties everybody else down to the earth. They hate being noticed by the city and they hate not being noticed by it.
However, in comparison to every other city, they are certain that their city is the best. While they may gather and complain in bars, teahouses, and local temples, that does not mean they want to hear you, an outsider, make any of the same comments. You do not belong. And if their city should go to war against another city, likely, conscription will not be required, (at least for the first year or so of a relatively short war). The same people who spit in the wheel-ruts as a gilded carriage rolls past will march out to volunteer when the trumpets blow, and the Glyphs of the Megastructure are raised. While every rural citizen hates the Government, they all know The Emperor, the Optimate, the Great Ritualist, or whomever it is that rules from the Forbidden City at the heart of the Megastructure, whoever it is that holds back the Waste, that person is on their side. To them, they are loyal, though they may never be much more than a face on a coin or a name on the wind.
In as far as the actual work is done in the 'Safe and Silent' lands of the Grey Cities, it is pretty much peasant work. The technology is a little better. The crops have more variety. Working conditions might be slightly superior, but in vast dehumanizing corporation-run plantations, they can be significantly worse. Efficiency can build whips as well as roads. There might not be the ever-present danger of 'Wild' Aeth or Monsters from the Treeline, but there are dangers none the less. Bandits, Maroons from the Zomia, Monsters that have crept in and found places to survive, a danger much rarer in the Queendoms than here, organized crime. And of course, Her Children always seem to find some way in, no matter what is done to keep them out.
The villages face not only the dangers of chaos but also those of order. There is only so much a Queen can reasonably take from her people, but a City, a City has an endless need, for food, for cash, for material, and flesh. It eats and eats and eats. The greatest monster of them all.

Mushroom Hunters

The Mushroom Hunter is a common figure of folklore and myth in the wilds of the Grey Cities, for the mushrooms of this land hold many secrets. Long have they loomed large in the proletarian undermined. Even before the fall, the lands that became Blackwater were famous for the range and strangeness of their mycological treasury. Since the great jangling together of alien ecospheres that took place in the first millennia of Blackwater, a meta-stasis has been reached. Many crossbreeds and unusual combinations have been discovered. So great is the depth of Mushroom life here that full exploration of their range and capacities is incomplete, even now. For the Mycological Sophont, this is still an age of wonder and a new frontier.
Mushrooms in the Grey Cities have a range of culinary uses. Many produce complex and unusual compounds and chemicals. Mushrooms can be poisons, healing drugs, mind-expanding hallucinogens, aids to prophecy, objects of philosophical contemplation, or dangerous hand-to-hand weapons. The most valued Mushrooms, delivered into the right hands, can raise a Hunter out of poverty for but a single well-preserved growth. A few do indeed become 'mushroom millionaires'. And of course, as the potential wealth attainable becomes evident, the dark hydra of crime and jealousy rears its manifold heads. The Mushroom is sought far from civilization, in the dank gloom of the margins or the Zomia. Its search is a dangerous entrail.
Here we see an idealized image of a simple peasant whose pet pig has revealed to him a life-changing discovery. A pleasing and common subject for song and story. If only it were that simple.
Even the hire or raising of a pig, dog, or another beast keenly sensed and mentally sufficient for mushroom hunting can itself be a huge sink of resources and a source of complex drama. Hiring such a pig might cost a man his wife.

The Megastructure

Every Grey City is built on, in, under and around, a sacred Megastructure. These are cyclopean, half-buried in the earth, taller than any tower, their geometry labyrinthine, non-Euclidian. Each is unique. No two megastructures are the same. The Grey Cities are like termite hives on top of modern art.
Citizens cling to the Megastructure. They pile palaces, fortifications, hospitals, schools, apartments, and tenements upon it, they ring it with ghettos, weave highways, and plazas under, over and around it. They climb it, hang from it, string bridges like necklaces and cable cars like pendants. Ropeways runways ratways, houses facing near-vertical stairs.
The Megastructures *are* the Grey Cities in some ways. Many have an abstract of their megastructure as their emblem.
But they have forgotten things. Not because they are not obvious, but because they have always been there; stained with millennia of wear and alteration, built on, covered over, (but never broken into), marked, adapted, and ignored. Sacred and inviolate yes, (reach out to touch one for luck or swear 'by the structure' to confirm an oath), but also irrelevant. They are changeless, eternal, they never directly affect anyone’s life, any more than the sky or a distant mountain might do so. They never do anything. And so, they fade into the background of culture and lifelike the statues of the heroes of another age.
And at the center of each structure, even more, hidden in plain view, even more, forgotten through remembering, is its secret heart, the Forbidden City.

The Secret Heart

"The Palace of the Emperor", "The Temple of Reality", "The Castle of the Hierophant", "The Labyrinth of Truth".
Always at the center, always hidden. Near-forgotten sensed but not seen. Vast, sprawling, as old as memory, melted in the soup of time, caked over with ritual, a City within the City.
The Grey Cities are governed by various Councils, Tyrants, Bureaucracies, Parliaments, Senates, Stewards, and Seneschals. But though they govern, they do not Rule. Theirs is not the face upon the coins. Each city has an Emperor, a High Priest, one of the Ancient Lines of Aeth, the Holy Few, the Pure, the Saviors, the Optimates of Esh.
It is their face upon the coins, their symbol worked into the flag. Sometimes their name *is* the cities name or one much like it. The ruler of Yga is simply called "Yga", the city was named for their family line. The city is governed in its name. The council bears its seal. Their title has faded into the bubbling froth of time for so long it has become an imprecation or the emphasis to a curse.
These lines, these families, are older than a memory. They reach into myth. They built the city, or designed it, or ordered it designed. They brought Humanity here.
The stories differ. Myths and legends, history and fact, merge into one another.
At one point there may have been more, but plague has ravaged the Aeth population of Blackwater in the past, and those few who remain descend from its survivors. It seemed then that the lines of some Hierophants might go extinct. And some did, sacred clerics, broke their way into silent apartments to find nothing but bodies and flies. And those cities quickly died.
None have been seen for millennia. They are too pure, too sacred, too holy, and too vulnerable to be allowed contact with the dangerous and sickening air and the low corrupted people of Uud.
Every few centuries a great artist is allowed to see the silhouette of the Protector cast against the finest silk, or see their face in the reflection of a reflection, (and even getting this close requires years of testing, fasting, checking, meditation and prayer). They draw the Sacred Profile, and this is used to update the coinage and official seals, regalia, and state propaganda.
This is as close as anyone from the outside gets.
Those in the Grey Cities rarely see the stars but they would recognize the feeling of the stars. Something distant, cold, eternal, unchangeable. So constant and immutable that it fades from active memory. Symbolic of 'the way things are'. Not the picture, but the frame.
These are the Emperors of Reality, the Saviors of Humanity.
The palaces have grown over time, like everything in the Cities. Wings, walls, complexes, sub-palaces, theatres, hidden towers, and ritual mazes. Thaumaturgic observatories and memorial tombs. Frozen planar gates, kitchens, servant-caste micro-towns, lost oubliettes, armories, empty training halls, chapels, and cathedrals. Secret ways, menageries, aviaries, libraries, swimming baths, aquariums, dancing halls, orchestral pits, surgical theatres, libraries, waiting rooms, ontological generators, meta-cybernetic psycho-conductive control spaces, entropic dampers, and toilets. All empty, or nearly empty now. Traversed at fixed intervals by masked paladins, cleaned and maintained or quietly mothballed, shuttered off, and left to molder.
The palaces have eaten their rulers and the lines of the Hierarchs have shrunk inside them like a desiccated nut shrinking in its shell. They are sealed off from the world they struggle to preserve - they know little of it and it knows little of them. Caked over with ritual, bands of process, laws - layers of rentier Brahmins; whole families and sub-castes whose only purpose is to be slightly purer than the next ring out, and to transmit a message or communique to the slightly more-pure ring closer in.
Here at the forgotten center the High Aeth, the Sustainers of Reality, perform their sacred rituals of control, holding back entropy, energizing the great machine to force back the Waste, to keep reality Real.
By their Great Working is Yggsrathaal frustrated and Humanity preserved.

Yga

Many-Walled Yga, Gateway to the Waste - Where Monsters Walk as Men
Huge, ancient, dusty, and sweltering, Yga is pinioned between the Sea of Ash and the Southern Waste. Its ruined docks are thick with mud or parched with dry, fluid shifting dust, its southernmost gate gives directly onto the murderous salt flats of the True Waste. The Wyrm is right outside the door, as they say in Yga. But still, the city thrives.
Yga, and the confederacy of which it is the prime member, are reviled and abjured for their toleration of what they call 'Greater Humanity'. But as disliked as it is, Yga cannot be ignored. It is one of the largest and oldest of the Grey Cities. No matter what changes in the world threaten to loosen its supremacy, Yga somehow always finds a way to survive, the city seems unkillable.

Inside

Shade, cool, water, and cold flowing air are the chief social currencies of Yga. Its narrow streets are shaded by high buildings on either side. Behind unmarked doors and black iron, grills are uncarpeted rooms with cool blue ceramic walls, tiles showing forgotten oceans, cerulean skies, or the vastness of mythical realms, shadowed by exquisite chiaroscuro across windows and doors. In more reputable places fountains bubble in the center, their chuckling bubbling flow just loud enough to block out the panting of the Fan Dogs in the corner.
The Fan Dog, a species common to many southern cities, originates from and is associated with, Yga. (Yga's unofficial sports team flag is a Fan-Dog, Rampant).
It is certainly ugly enough. The creature is either bald or pie-bald, low, squat and snaggle-toothed, it is depressingly bow-legged. Its exceedingly, even impractically long tongue protrudes continually from its mouth and its huge, limp tissue-like ears, so pale and fine the traces of veins and arteries can be seen through the skin, flop and bounce around its vaguely stupid snaggle-toothed face. The Fan Dog was bred to one single purpose; it occupies a huge wooden or metal wheelset against the wall. The dog trots inside the wheel, moving continually forwards, but going nowhere. The spinning of this wheel is linked via chains or ropes to a large fan on the ceiling. The dogs are utterly tireless and serve in shifts of four hours, usually in pairs. Thusly are the parlors of Yga cooled, without, its citizens might add, dangerous and expensive magic or the use of "unfree labor". And if the Fan Dog is somewhat hideous, what of it? Other than its looks, its terrible gait, and its mild stupidity, there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the Fan Dog. It does its duty well enough. And so, it is an apt unofficial symbol for the city. Yga is an exceptionally strange and ugly place. (In the opinion of other cities at least.)

The History of Yga

In the past, when Blackwater was larger, the cities to the south of Yga were considered radical. At that time, Yga itself was a comparative bastion of conservatism. Out in the margins and the borderlands smaller cities sent many expeditions out into the Waste. They are rumored to have had contact with 'other' places, Tetrarchies and Waste-dwelling tribes. Here, the first mingling began the first alliances against Yggsrathaal. (Though one line of historical thought suggests that these alliances may have been, in fact, relics of ancient Esh, not new relationships, but old ones sustained in the shadow of power).
During the Great Theistic War, the Waste expanded as never before. Armies of Her children overran the cities to the south of Yga. The ash pressed against its gates, as it still does today. Yga was left, as it has been many times, with economic ruination, streets packed with refugees, and an army of Her children outside its walls. Many of the refugees carried some Waste affliction, many were barely human, or completely inhuman, many seemed touched by Her. When Yga called for help, the Cities were silent. Every border city was dealing with its own freshly advancing threat from the Waste and those more comfortable places in the center of Blackwater were engaged in brutal and irresolvable theistic war. Her mists flowed past the walls and filled the country. Each city seemed trapped, alone. Those were dark times.
Given the tacit choice; "adapt or die", Yga did what it always had. It found a way to stay alive.
This chaotic era is the origin of the Council of the Afflicted and the Monstrous Regiments, both of which still exist today. A deal was offered to the refugees and offered without qualification to any sentient being service for citizenship. Mixed battalions were created from untrained troops made up of every accepted race of Humanity as well as "Orcs", mutated refugees, the Undead, Trolls, talking beasts, and other things. Casualties were massive and the Megastructure and Imperial City were both breached at least once. City legend says that "The Yga", the great Optimate and Emperor who empowers the Megastructure themselves joined in the fighting, directly alongside the Monstrous Regiments.
Ultimately, Yga did survive and was much changed.
The re-defining of citizenship to be based almost entirely apparent sentience and behavior, rather than any degree of innate nature, stuck. While large-scale changes were slow in coming, (centuries slow), since that time, creatures usually abjured as "Orcs" or "Monsters" have been seen walking the streets of Yga. People too mutated or damaged by the Waste to be seen outside, or to even be allowed into many cities, walk around quite freely in Yga. Even stranger beings are sometimes seen; the Undead, the constructed or half-living. The difference between Humanity, Yga's 'Greater Humanity', and the children of Yggsrathaal is decided almost entirely on what the person in question does, not what they are.
This is less pleasant than it may sound. Yga is effectively a police state and a surveillance state. Its citizens watch each other's behavior very, very closely. Since citizenship is not afforded to or assumed by any particular group, it must be earnt, meaning Yga has an underclass of 'un-citizens' and it can be taken away, meaning the most effective way to damage a rival is to have them unmade as a citizen of Yga. This can happen to anyone, and Yga is a place of intense fervid politics, factionalism, intrigue, and sometimes political violence. Ruling overall this is the Council of the Afflicted - Voice of the Optimate.
Every member of the ruling council of Yga is infected, deliberately, with a form of crystallizing, deforming Waste-generated leprosy. To get the job, you must be willing to sign your death warrant.
This has several useful effects; for some reason, those afflicted with this disease are immune to the touch of Yggsrathaal. It also ensures that politicking arseholes never, ever try to join the executive council Even though Yga is often a very divided city, the dictates of the Afflicted are obeyed without question, not only out of fear for the consequences but from simple respect, the Afflicted have signed away their lives to protect Yga.
When a space becomes available, different groups and factions volunteer individuals to fill the place. Before any application is accepted there are challenging intellectual and magical tests that must be passed before a candidate is considered. On some occasions, all things being equal, if multiple candidates are eligible, the Afflicted may allow a public vote, but the candidates are not allowed to describe or speak for themselves, the Afflicted do that for them, then the people are allowed to choose.
This extremely ruthless form of government has proved surprisingly effective. Even those who despise Yga cannot deny that its government is unusually swift, decisive, intelligent, ruthless, dedicated, and loyal. The penetration and subtlety of Yga's diplomats and the depth, complexity, and effectiveness of its policy are well known. This pattern of governance is also suspected to be descended from an old Eshian method. An extremely small and quite distant ruling class with overwhelming legislative power, but with tests so difficult to pass and material, and _personal_ costs so high that those normally power-hungry people who usually swamp governments in other cities, rarely wish to join. Instead, they content themselves with mere financial or cultural power in the cities thriving civil society.
So, lives Yga, its many-layered walls patrolled by its Monstrous Regiments, ruled over by its Afflicted council and, while often politically insane, broadly tolerant.

Sintel

Sintel, a city cruelly famed for its mediocrities and its extremely dull art, faces the Sea of Ash in the relatively dull and reasonably safe center of the Cities.
"Greyest of the Grey. I went there once but I can barely remember what happened." - Vosis Fail excommunicated Sophont of Yga.
The people of Sintel are extremely sensitive and resentful about what they consider to be misapprehensions of their minimalist aesthetic in music and art and a complete failure on the part of others to comprehend the multiple layers of irony in which their courtly conversations take part.
The preferred musical form in Sintel is that of a single note, played purely and continually, without wavering, for a very long time. The greatest masters of this form can introduce nearly imperceptible variations into this note to describe different meanings and emotions. The audiences of Sintel listen in utterly silent rapt attention until one of these variations takes place, then signal their approval by looking around, smiling vaguely, and softly snapping the fingers of one hand. A special kind of butter is provided to facilitate this finger-snapping and a special kind of bread on which the buttery fingers can be wiped. The bread is then eaten, quietly, and the amount of bread consumed is used to denote the quality of the music listened to.
Their preferred painting form is a hyper-abstract style showing single pure blocks of color. The texture of the paint and the context of the piece provide most of the meaning and interest. The greater and more accomplished the artist, the more muted and washed out the central color becomes.
Conversation in Sintel is whispered and repetitive. It is customary to re-phrase the same essential statement at least two (at a minimum) to five times, in different words, with only the slightest difference in inferred meaning. Skill at this art allows one to dub oneself a 'rapporteur' and gains access to some of the city's highest circles of power and influence.
Every few days a visitor to Sintel has quietly dragged off its streets, screaming with insane frustration. Running through its silent lanes hearing only the endless whining monotone drones coming from windows, bursting into rooms full of buttery-fingered softly smiling people and matte grey paintings and being unable to have a sane conversation with anyone of consequence rapidly reduces even the most cosmopolitan mind to a state of wild infirmity.
It is noted by its leaders that the walls of Sintel have never been breached and that it is one of the safest of the Grey Cities. Almost everyone else alive thinks they probably should have been, at least it might have provoked the Sintel's to do something even mildly interesting.

Glaem

Not the birthplace of The Tolerance, but now the chief center of that centerless Order, power in Glaem is shared awkwardly between its Lottery Lords; randomly chosen disposable Tyrants, and the Pater Patient, Lord of the Priests of Tolerance.
Glaem draws a degree of dark charisma and reflected importance from his position as the home of the Tower of Infinite Calm, where the Pater Patientia keeps their court. Since the Tolerance is a primary actor in the preservation of Humanity and since Glaem is both of significant size, and close to directly centered in the Grey Cities, it makes a good case (in the opinion of Glaem) that it should be considered the first city of humanity.
Glaem certainly cannot be ignored. Its representatives and ambassadors are consulted on all major matters and its policy is noted in courts from Yga to the Beothoborg. In some ways, it is the most emblematic, the most typical of the Grey Cities. And certainly, if the Tolerance objects to something, that has a huge effect on the plans of all.
However, nobody seems to be interested in Glaem. They are included because you cannot kick them out and spoken of in the list of other great Grey Cities, because, well because you cannot leave Gleam out. Glaem is Glaem.
But if you were to ask anyone exactly what they are thinking about Glaem and why they regard it as important, they would have a tough time telling you.
The Lottery Lords of Glaem, chosen at random from its population, and the common culture of the city, could not care less about this. They have their hands full with the endless politicking of nearby confederations. While being central is nice and being a long way from the Waste is better, this also means Glaem is surrounded by Grey Cities and confederations and alliances of Grey Cities. Yggsrathaal may be dangerous but Human beings can be almost as bad.
The fact that any citizen could theoretically become Glaems Tyrant has resulted in a surprising and quite granular interest in the complexities of foreign policy amongst Glaems working and laboring classes. The trashy tabloid news sheets carry surprisingly in-depth analysis of the balance of power in the Grey Cities, the shifting obligations of treaties, and the complex economic interplay between the different powers.
It is quite possible to start a fight in a bar in Glaem with your opinions on whether states can be considered 'rational actors' or not and gang fights and riots have taken place over differing theories of international relations. Those between the north-side realists and the idealists of the docks are a long-running wound in the cities body politic.
Through all of this, the Priests of Tolerance drift in and out of the Tower of Infinite Calm, going about their strange duties all over Blackwater. It is popularly supposed throughout the city that the Tolerance effectively 'runs' Glaem though some complex network of conspiracy, but its hectic and often deranged twists in policy and position would seem to belie that notion. (Unless you are an Ultra-Conspiracist and the apparent randomness only confirms your suspicions.)

Sceadweald

Sceadweald must count as one of the safest and most livable of the Grey Cities. Yet it feels empty. Its population is sparse, and the dark streets echo with the steps of single passers-by. The reason is not hard to discover, above the city, held in place and generated as a side effect of Sceadwealds sinuous lenticular Megastructure, is a deep black cloud. This huge Cumulo-Nimbus sits on the city like a hat. Nothing, not wind or rain, not seasons or war, not magic or prayer, will move this eternal cloud from its perch above the town.
Storms, tornadoes, ash-tsunamis from the sea, hurricanes, and all manner of weather simply do not affect Sceadweald, they break apart around the covering cloud as if it were a stone hovering in the air. Lightning flashes down outside the city limits. Rains deluge the hills beyond. Within the city, under the cloud, all is stable, all is cool. And dark. With the occasional patter of rain.
Something in the cloud is watching you.
Few people in Sceadweald would say this outright, but that is what it feels like and almost everyone is aware of it almost all the time. Especially outdoors. Few people live there year-round. The wealthy come in for business or the action of government, but keep homes in the country outside, where their families live and return to them when they can. The poor shift into work for months or seasons in its forges and manufactories, but even they leave when they can, escaping back outside the cloud for holidays or agricultural work. Everyone is either arriving or leaving Sceadweald, almost no-one lives there permanently.
Sceadweald is a lonely city.
And a beautiful one. The Gentry of Sceadweald, the servants of its unusually-broad oligarchy, are great believers in the municipal good. They invest heavily in the organs and institutions of city life. They have planted many exquisitely designed and carefully-maintained parks. Flor inside the city is of a kind more well suited to a higher latitude, the city's eternal gloom means conifers and silver birch predominate, though outside the environment is more equivalent to northern Florida.
Sceadweald has one of the most well-funded public libraries in any of the Grey Cities, and unlike most, all its books are available, for free to citizens, and for the low cost of a library card to everyone else. It has the largest public baths, a temple in marble and blue tile which visitors often assume is a temple to some Sleeping Oceanic God. It has the most well-funded dancing companies, a wide range of subsidized theatres, and a very professionally run opera. Its Universities, both Material and Thaumaturgical, are both well regarded.
Still, Sceadweald doesn't excel at any of these things, despite investing in them, which seems to be fine with the Gentry who are happy to have their name on a building and don't seem overly bothered with excellence so long as its contents are of reasonable quality.
The love of quality (and conservatism) in design, along with ornamentation, means that even Sceadwealds smaller buildings are graced with special attention. Every shop and place of business has figures enacting its trade or activity molded, carved in stone, or painted on the tile of its facade.
Sceadwealds beautiful streets loop and writhe with the flow of its megastructure which twists and disappears beneath the ground like a worm, or like a ribbon trailing from a wildly-waved wand. The streets feel sparse and the huge nature of Sceadwealds institutional buildings contrasts with its under-populated nature to make everything feel massive and curiously empty. How long could you wander without seeing another person? Minutes? Hours? At times, in Sceadweald, it might seem as if you were the only person left alive. You and the cloud.
Sceadweald is ruled by a civil and unoppressive, if patriarchal and conservative, aristocracy. Landowners from outside the city intermarried with a range of trading, banking, and artistic families. These are the Gentry of Sceadweald. There are many Gentry, Sceadweald has one of the largest upper-to-middle-ruling classes in all the Grey Cities. Few cities are more scrupulously polite, or more judgmental. This quiet, but intensely held civility has worked its way into most of the city's population. In no place in Uud is it easier to push a man of the pavement. And in no place in Uud will you be more scrupulously and silently judged by the precise arrangement of your hat, tie, shoes, or accent.

Kaal of the Riders, Kaal of the Cage.

In the cage of Kaal, between its twin towers, in its forest of thought rides a ring of wild horses, carved from the stone of mountains lost to time. Here meditate the poets of Kaal, its rulers, and guides.
So, say the ballads, and they are not entirely wrong. Kaal is rare among the Grey Cities in that it is built largely within the bars and skeleton of its great Megastructure, the "cage" of Kaal. It truly does have a forest at its heart, between its twin great towers, and there can be found the ring of wild horses.
The poets of Kaal do rule there, at least in the name.
It has been a long time though since the rulers of Kaal had an actual horse-archer in their family. No doubt at one time they did, but centuries of intermarriage and economic development mean that the wealth of the city, and the substance of its ruling class, comes from trade, finance, manufacturing, and land ownership. Beneath their robes and ceremonial haircuts, the poets of Kaal look quite like any group of politicians from any Grey City.
They do still have to be at least a reasonable poet to be chosen.
Still, the habits, mien, and demeanor, of Kaals upper class are those of steppe horse archers (though not many people in Blackwater even know what a steppe is). Though its origins are lost in time (and quietly disputed in other cities), Kaal fetishizes the pseudo-barbarian honor culture they take to be the cities origin.
In Kaal, natural forms predominate everywhere, columns are carved as trees, windows and lintels become branching vines. The only music is produced by the voice or by natural processes. Wind chimes, wind harps, and water-flutes, created by the steady dripping or falling of water into hollow tubes, predominate everywhere. Songbirds are adored and the possession and trading of rare, unique, or especially skilled songbirds is a primary leisure pursuit of the aristocracy, as are hunting, riding, archery, poetry, and war.
Kaal truly does love war. Historically one of the most belligerent of the Grey Cities, in recent centuries social, economic, and political changes have led to Kaal making accidental peace with most of its immediate neighbors. Now, instead of exporting conquering armies, it exports mercenaries, of which it boasts that it supplies the best in the Grey Cities.
Kaal has adapted militarily (to some extent) and its horse-archer cavalry wings are now supported by infantry, siege equipment, and well-organized logistics. But the cities culture simply cannot accept gunpowder weapons, or even crossbows, no matter their utility. These 'humorless' mass-firing low-skill weapons are regarded with pained disdain and are banned outright within the city itself.
Kaal's political position is defined by its low-level resentment of the North and by its strange relationship with Yga. The cities have been allied for millennia. Kaal's ruling culture is relatively conservative and its people regard Yga's toleration (and encouragement) of 'Greater Humanity' deeply alienating. Yet Kaal regards itself as having a 'special relationship' with Yga. Much energy and discourse are expended in Kaal on exactly what this means and if the alliance with Yga is worth the cost.
Yga genuinely does not give much of a damn either way. Its rulers and diplomats barely remember the alliance with Kaal most of the time. But they recognize its occasional utility and are happy to play along on the occasional official visit.

Hulfr - The Grinding City

Once Hulfr drew its power and means of survival from its Magicians, and in some sense, it still does, but the nature of that magic has changed a great deal over time.
In a great battle on the borders of remembered history, Hulfr's magicians subdued the North Wind and won its service for 10,000 years.
The North Wind is currently about halfway through its contract. Its service keeps Hulfr safe from many of the hardest effects of Winter, allowing it to retain its northerly position in a subdued (but still cold) microclimate of its own. This wind also turns the Windmills of Hulfr, which spin continually.
Hulfr pulls as much free energy from the wind as it can. Over time this has provided much of its industrial capacity. Factories, forges, and manufactories are tall in Hulfr, each sending up huge windmills, or whole farms of windmills, to catch the Northwind, which blows endlessly night and day. The grinding and heaving in the upper air never end.
Hulfr is a city of tall brick windmills and smokestacks Big riveted metal bridges cross its ashy docks. Its cobblestoned streets are lit by the glow of forges. Much of the iron pulled from the Realities ends up here. They echo with the endless pounding of hammers, and the thudding of heavy Deoth boots. There are many Deoth here, and they pound around, dressed in thick furs against the wind, stamping about like miniature Henry the Eighths.

The Magicians Of Hulfr

The wizards of Hulfr do not like to be called such. They dug themselves 'Thaumaturgists' and consider their work a science, and a craft, rather than a strange interpretive art. They despise un-reason and interpretation. Here a magician dresses like anyone else, like a clerk, shopkeeper, or bank manager. They are denoted only by the ring of living mercury which shines upon their hand which they are required to wear by law. And this is against their desire for they see the ring, not as a badge of status, but as a chain around them.

The Parliament, Acts, And Amendment Of Hulfr

Hulfr is on the bleeding edge of the 'science' of golems and the creation of artificial life. Which means it is also on the bleeding edge of controlling such beings and processes. Nowhere else is the science (if it is a science) of golems so advanced and nowhere else is it so tightly controlled. Only those who bear a license may even attempt the creation of an autonomous entity, and licenses are hard to get. From that point on, every increase in complexity and requires specific legal permissions of an ever-greater challenge to acquire. In Hulfr, a Golemist must, perforce, also be a politician, and a political agent.
The creation of a self-aware entity requires a specific Act in Hulfr's Parliament. Only such an act can de-criminalize the creator of such a being and only such an act can imbue that being with a legal and moral, as well as physical, existence Without such an Act both the creator and creation must be hunted down and, if possible, permanently contained. If not, destroyed.
So, the Golems, Automata, or 'Acts' of Hulfr are exceedingly rare and each carries a copy of the Act of Parliament which permitted it, somewhere on its body. Sometimes as a huge book strapped to its chest or back. Sometimes engraved in minute letters all over its body. Sometimes written into a very small bible-sized text and then attached to the head or face. As a scroll kept within a show-case on the chest or body, sometimes permanently rolling for continual display on clockwork rollers. Or simply held as a large passport.
Each 'Act' must always have its Act with it and be prepared to display, explain, and illustrate it on inquiry. And an Act must be within 'Human' capacities. As part of its approval process, it is subjected to exhaustive analysis and testing so that through no combination of physical and mental power might it be considered fundamentally superior to Humanity. Acts can specialize, but even in their specialism, they are limited to near the human maximum for any ability or grouping of abilities. And they must have a commensurate or equal disability in other areas, be that intellectual, being reduced to s sub-human intelligence physical- being made of delicate glass or porcelain or an inability to communicate, being made mute, blind, deaf, or unable to read.
Hulfr's parliament has allowed, in its history, one exception to this rule: the creation of a self-aware intelligence with powers superior to those of humanity. This is the Amendment of Hulfr,
The Amendment is made of the finest and most fragile crystal glass and is weighed down with pendulous lead weights into which the Amendment of the Constitution which allowed its creation has been carved. It was built carefully and precisely so that its only primary desire is to ensure the safety of Hulfr and the welfare of Humanity for the rest of the time.
The Council of the Amendment is made up exclusively of Hulfrs most extremely intelligent and adept thinkers, no voting or politicking is allowed in its makeup and any member can be removed at any time for failing any one of a series of challenging intellectual tests and questions which can be administered, by surprise, in any situation i.e., at a dinner party, on the toilet or in bed with their spouse.
This council of the finest minds exists for one reason, to counterbalance, check on, observe, and in essence, to intellectually imprison in a palace of thought the Amendment, who is also on the council and in intellectual ability, makes up one half of it.
All of this is to make sure that the Amendment is not engaging in a long-term plan to take over Hulfr and the world.