Parthos Wiki: The City of Edges

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The City of Edges

The City of Edges stands on the treacherous, ever-shifting border between planes. It is the boundary between the Abyss and the Vale of Stars; it touches Ombrathond and all four elemental planes. It touches Bierilon as well, and for that reason is the most common destination when travelers from the Tumult arrive unexpectedly in the planes outside.

By most accounts, the City is a barely navigable sprawl of buildings arranged on several concentric rings surrounding the crazed, honeycombed clockwork tower of its central Hub. Grandiose palaces and needle-like towers jostle for space with swaying slumhouses and enormous open-air markets. The squares are crowded with merchants' tents in an impossible bewilderment of colors and materials, ranging from canopies of live fire and sheets of imprisoned water to lattices of horribly stretched, still-living imps with their hands and feet nailed together to make the canvas. Everything and anything from any of the planes can be found in the City of Edges: the only impossibility, often, is its price.

Chaos fills the City. Buildings, even entire blocks are constantly splintering off its outlying districts and tumbling into one or another of the planes. New lands attach themselves to it unexpectedly, sometimes at the command of a powerful wizard and sometimes simply due to the planar tumult. Extraordinary energies are constantly flowing through its streets, reshaping the City and its denizens in profound, peculiar ways.

And yet, for all this, an eccentric kind of order governs the City. Visitors and residents come from every one of the planes, often with diametrically opposed alignments and agendas. Something must keep them from each others' throats if the City is to function. That "something" is euphemistically called "the Understanding," a pragmatic peace by which it is understood that no one, ultimately, benefits from bringing the planar war into the City's streets. The Understanding is enforced, first, by the most powerful representatives of each domain and interest; thus it is that even nelchael angels might find themselves in the uncomfortable position of operating like underworld bosses in the City of Edges.

If the domain lords are unable or unwilling to control their underlings, law enforcement goes to the Incorruptibles, the same strange, emotionless beings who judge the petitioners of Feindorn. The judgment of the Incorruptibles is often perplexing -- they do not seem to share the same understanding of justice as most of those who deem themselves wronged -- and there is no appeal from their decisions, so the only thing that everyone in the City of Edges can agree upon is that it is better not to get them involved.

None of this, however, is to say or even suggest that the City of Edges is safe. It is not. Crimes from petty larceny to mass murder are as common as the Abyssal blowflies bloating corpses in its alleys. The Understanding protects the factions from being dragged into all-out war; it does almost nothing for the individual trying to survive on the street. If anything, by declaring unaffiliated citizens and clueless visitors to be the only fair game, it makes life that much harder, and that much shorter, for them.

Parthos Wiki : CityofEdges

The City of Edges