Vaurmont

The seat of the Aethras Kingdom sits sixty miles up a slow brown river on ground that has been farmed continuously for longer than any Meridian people has had a reason to count years. There is no wilderness left in Vaurmont. The woods are managed, the marshes were drained by someone's great-grandfather, and the only stone that breaks the surface was put there by a mason.

What the region grows is grain and what it exports is paper. Every charter that ever sent an Aethrassian overseas was sealed in the chancery here, which means every colonial governor in the New World owes his office to a building he has probably never entered, standing on a street he could not find, in a city he was sold the idea of before he was sold the title.

Meridians who reach Vaurmont expecting a fortress capital are always disappointed and never say so out loud. The walls are ceremonial and half of them are leased to merchants. The kingdom has not been invaded in four centuries and has arranged its capital accordingly, which the Sahid regard as the single most damning fact about it.