From the memoirs of Dr. Leopold Tempes – Vitria, 286 A.T.S.
My first impression of Nusume was not especially favorable. Having visited some of the finest ports in the world during my journey aboard The Prince's White Sands, I was somewhat aghast at the state of Port Vilhel.
Originally a port for smugglers, privateers, and other ne'er-do-wells, Port Vilhel had seen an explosion in size, and in wealth, since the end of the Sequestered Century some seventeen years earlier. While the belligerent nations continued their embargo even after the Steelborn's self-imposed isolation had ended, the good people of Port Vilhel were all too happy to take the Steelborn's money. A vigorous trade in rare metals, art, and technology made their traders fabulously wealthy, and that wealth soon made them unassailable. Though the port is still ostensibly part of the Dominion, it has been functionally independent since the failed occupation in 237 A.T.S.
Owing to both its heritage and newfound wealth, Port Vilhel was a city of contrasts. Decades-old shacks sat alongside freshly built mansions, the latter housing up-jumped pirates who now fancied themselves as noblemen. The inequality of wealth was perhaps the greatest in the world, with exaggerated displays of largesse routinely seen alongside the most dreadful poverty.
The city's infrastructure, apart from the docks themselves, was likewise dismal. With an influx of population and no central authority to bring order to chaos, the city was a disjointed nightmare. The residents built structures wherever free land was available, with no regard to future planning or organization. Streets twisted and turned to avoid obstacles, leading to dead ends or unnavigable intersections.
I will not even speak of the sewage system. Or lack thereof.
Perhaps the only thing that I enjoyed about my brief time in Port Vilhel was the copious number of parlors, brothels, and gambling establishments. After the better part of a year aboard The Prince's White Sands, I was pleased to hear that we would have a six-day layover, though my purse and liver were somewhat less so.
The Crimson Clad in Iron was a ship that was neither crimson, nor clad in iron. Despite this, it was, perhaps, the most incredible ship I will ever see. Three hundred feet long, the vessel was a four-masted monstrosity that spat in the face of restraint. It loomed over every other ship in port, confined to a specially designed, extrawide berth at the docks. Festooned with cannons and crewed by Awakened, it was a floating fortress that would put the best of the Vitrian navy to shame.
And they were using it as a cargo ship.
Though their seclusion had ended, the Steelborn remained an isolationist people. Their borders were heavily guarded, and every port of entry required pre-authorization screenings. As Prince Duval's envoy, I was permitted passage aboard the Crimson Clad in Iron and fast-tracked through the check-in procedure. As such, it took a mere four hours for them to complete their search of my belongings, their heap of paperwork, and ask their litany of questions.
At the time, I was quite cross with the perceived insult by my host. With the benefit of hindsight, I now understand that no slight was intended.
As a functionally immortal people, the Steelborn have a different relationship with time than the other Descendents. Our lives are measured in decades, theirs in centuries, if not millennia. As I grow older, I find even a few minutes of waiting to be intolerable, especially when measured against the ever shrinking remainder of my life. Were that limit removed, I would hardly care.
In spellcraft, there is a three-axis trade-off. A spell can be fast and strong, but expensive. It can be strong and cheap, but not fast. The Steelborn are people with near-infinite time, and as such they are happy to trade it for cost and quality.
This is not to say that they cannot be quick, should the moment call for it. Indeed, anyone who has seen a Steelborn musician or athlete can attest to their speed and precision. The conflict is not one of ability, but priorities.
Priorities that I found terribly frustrating.
In all fairness, I had only myself to blame, given that a full two hours were spent explaining my desire to bring a pet along with me.
I could not tell you why I purchased Elakazir. The bastard mule refused every rider, and he was anything but fond of me. But somehow I had become quite fond of him, and the idea of leaving him in Port Vilhel of all places sat poorly with me.
It took two days by sea to reach Port Ayin. When we arrived, I felt quite vindicated at the sight of it.
One woman I had been carousing with during my stay at Port Vilhel had insisted, quite drunkenly, that the Steelborn homeland was like nothing else in the world. Given the relative youth of their nation, I was skeptical, and I said as much. A minor… altercation followed my outburst, and I was eager to be proven correct. Mostly out of spite.
Port Ayin was utterly unremarkable. A few hundred squat buildings that sat in neat, organized rows next to the sea. Perhaps cleaner than other cities; certainly cleaner than Port Vilhel, but far from the magical experience that I had been promised.
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The city bustled with activity, with hundreds of factory-made Steelborn loading and unloading shipments from vessels, each the size of the Crimson Clad in Iron. That sight, at least, entranced me.
Before visiting Aleph, I could have counted on one hand the number of Steelborn I had met in my life. All were Zephyr Industries models sold to the Celesian Empire and later emancipated after its fall. This lack of familiarity had slanted my opinion of what a Steelborn should look like. I had expected more life-like features, sculpted expressions, and human proportions, with each strictly unique from the others. When I saw instead was an ocean of odd siblings.
Three main models were working the docks that day. One was inhumanly tall, one frighteningly thin, and a third had too many legs and not enough arms. The Steelborn I was familiar with could have easily been mistaken for humans, especially at a distance. These could not. At the same time, however, the different machines struck me as more unique than their Zephyr counterparts, despite being copies of one another.
One wore a flamboyant cloak of green, violet, and orange. Another had inscribed every visible inch of metallic skin with unfamiliar golden characters. Some machines had replaced their original limbs, and others wore gaudy jewelry or elegant dresses. In the city where everyone was built to look the same, the Steelborn did whatever they could to stand out.
We did not linger long in Port Ayin, though to my surprise, our escort was fairly minimal. Traveling overland through the continent could be a dangerous affair ever since the fall of Celesia. Not so in Aleph. The machines were not a hive mind, but the battle for independence had unified them in purpose. With most needs met by the state, there was little cause for banditry. Some still went rogue, of course, but those that did rarely lingered inside the borders of the Commonwealth.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of the journey was the open countryside. The road from Port Ayin to the capital city of Null was straight as an arrow, diverging only where natural barriers forced it to do so. This did not seem odd to me at first, but as the days passed, I made the connection. Most continental roads that I had travelled were iterative, first laid down by the Celesians or their predecessors, only to be replaced, repaired, or expanded upon over time. Most weaved in and out of chaotic property lines of the surrounding farms, which were themselves the result of generations of inheritance. They branched out to reach new towns and crumbled when they were no longer used.
The Steelborn road carried none of these inefficiencies. It was first generation, new, like so much of their nation. It was the road of a modern society, built not on the bones of those left behind, but on the dreams of those who built it.
I found it at once aspirational and terrifying. It spoke to the long view the Steelborn took of the world, and again to my mortality. They were building a road they intended to use long after I was dead, after my children and their children were dead. Looking back, I find it more admirable than frightening, but at the time, it made me fear for the future of the Empire. To say nothing of the existential crisis it provoked.
The city of Null was far more intimidating, in both respects.
Slightly more than a century earlier, the Etrusians had ceded their northernmost province to the Steelborn, as part of the Gilded Resolution. Far from the core of the Etrusian Dominion, the land that would become Aleph was land the Dominion was almost happy to lose. Its population numbered less than 100,000, most of whom lived in the only notable trade city along the coast. With poor rain, worse soil, and terrible winters, few made any attempt to cultivate the land. This left large swaths of open territory, the perfect breeding ground for fiendish infestations.
They considered it worthless, a small price to pay for so grave a crime as enslaving an entire species.
Their creations proved their folly in less than a century.
Null was, as I had been told, a city like no other. The beating heart of Aleph, Null was home to more than two million Steelborn. It dwarfed Vitri in both size and scale, with elegant glass towers that reached for the clouds and other grand structures visible from miles away.
I had expected Port Ayin, only writ large. Boxy buildings with a utilitarian layout, what I found was a city with beauty as one of its core design principles.
Like the road leading to it, Null was a city built to last. In some places, this took the form of enduring construction. Steel was used where others might have used iron. Concrete was poured, then reinforced by magic. No placement was haphazard, no corners were cut. They built right, or they did not build at all.
Elsewhere, I saw signs of fungibility. If something could not be made durable, it was made replaceable. Roofing tiles were uniform hexagons, identical from one building to the next. The Steelborn made them by the millions, and each tile was easily interchangeable. What might take hours or days for a Vitrian artisan to replace could take minutes for the Steelborn.
Their city was built with both utility and beauty in mind. Each neighborhood, or 'holon' as they called them was designed, to be self-sufficient for the majority of its needs. Shops were located near houses, with industry on the outskirts to minimize the disruption. Moreover, each holon left substantial free space for communal gathering, for nature, art ,and expression. They would live here for centuries, and they would have an ever rotating series of wonders at their fingertips.
Just as impressive as what they built, was what they did not.
In all my years of travel, I have seen only two cities without walls. Vitri and Null.
It takes a special sort of arrogance, a Vitrian arrogance, to live in such a dangerous world without walls to protect you. Vitri, at least, has the ocean as a first line of defense, though like Null, our true strength lies in our people. Almost every Steelborn living in Null is Awakened. Even with their incredibly low Aptitudes, the sheer quantity of experience gathered throughout their long lives proved more than enough. They are weak individually, but they are masters of collective strength.
In some ways, I feel Vitrians are the other side of the Steelborn coin. We both suffered generations of abuse and depredation. We both broke free of our oppressors and bent the world to our will. The difference, I think, lies in their nature. I was never enslaved, nor was my father. The horrors of the Celesians are naught but stories to me. But almost every living Steelborn started life as an object. A possession.
Some have posited that the motivation behind the Sequestered Century was fear, a desire to bury their heads in the sand and act as if the rest of the world had vanished. Having seen Null, I reject this. The point, in my opinion, was awe.
They built this masterpiece in only a century. What will they do with the next?
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