Arkenta

Stone, Metal and Position

Shrubland surrounds Arkenta on all sides, low thorny scrub over thin soil with long views across it, and none of that country would support a great city on its own. The rock beneath does. Mining built the place and still funds it, and the ore has drawn everything else in behind it: workshops, roads, warehouses, and the standing weight of soldiers that a mineral city inevitably attracts. Arkenta is reckoned a strategic holding first and a market second. A good share of its wealth also moves through its religious houses, which own ground, employ hands and take their portion of the traffic passing the gates.

A Seat Held by Other Hands

It grew into the largest class of city the southern Lohanar build, a product of the first wave of expansion that followed the original foundations. Arkenta gives its name to an allegiance that other cities swear to, and yet the hand that governs it comes from Venesta, and in the wider alignment of the south the Arkentans stand inside the bloc gathered at Bareshum. Lohanar politics accommodates such an arrangement without strain: sovereignty here is a set of agreements, each with its own terms, rather than a single crown.