Harkrest sits at the head of a bleak, rocky bluff on the Ymiri sea. It is a foreboding domain, swept with cold fogs, and battered by inclement weather. The city's massive walls are stained black with the soot of the many foundries and furnaces that fuel its bustling shipbuilding and weaponeering industries, all under the watchful eyes of the ruling Grey Sea Syndicates.
The walled city on the rocky promontory grew over time, further bolstered the development of the area's rich mines. As the region stabilized, it later developed into a mercantile port.
Despite its history, Harkrest has only really gained prominence within the last century. Its fortunes grew dramatically during the Tumult following the Clarion Regicide, when the city stepped back from feudal contests and focused instead on developing its weaponeering industry. With the nobles of the Hundred Thrones at each other's throats, and the War of the Phoenix in the south, Harkrest enjoyed a very lucrative decade.
Unlike the other metropoles of the Hundred Thrones, Harkrest was not built on the bones of Duathan ruins, nor does it carry the classical influences of the Old Empire to the south. Its walls and iron-capped towers instead evoke a brutal, modern simplicity, while the city interior is a dense but carefully executed grid, with districts segregated by inner walls.
The main arteries are straight cobbled streets large enough to pass two wagons. Most of the buildings are squat terraced stone blocks separated by pedestrian alleys, although the architecture varies by district. The most important nobles and guild officials keep urban palaces that offset their austere presence with ostentatious architectural features by celebrated masons or engineers as a means of showing off their status.
In every neighborhood of Harkrest, clocktowers are erected, temples to the tenets that the Syndicates holds most sacred; time, work, production, capital. These buildings are constructed and maintained by different guilds and city luminaries.
The design of each clocktower varies to reflect the aesthetics and portfolio of their patron or guild. Most of these sound at the mark of each quarter-hour. Those that fail to keep proper time are looked upon with much disfavour. 
It is never quiet in Harkrest. Those who live near to the factory districts have grown deaf to the cacophany of worksongs, the ringing of hammers, the belching of furnaces, and the hissing of steam boilers day and night. In addition to the local clocktowers, the bellowing of great horns echo over the city to mark the passing of each day's four shift-changes.
Even on days when the grey clouds break overhead and some sunlight cuts through the local fog, the air in and around the city is hazy, faintly sulphuric, and gritty with ash. For city-dwellers, the best days are those when stormwinds from offshore carry the smoke of Harkrest's industry further inland.
INDUSTRY and INFLUENCE
In the years since the fall of Clarion, Harkrest has grown more aggressive in protecting these routes, leading to naval altercations with neighboring Torvarian trade cities to the east. The ships of the Noorvelden League still control river passage deeper into the continent, travelling through Imperial lands south as far as the Helicosian. However, Grey Sea routes around the western coastlines of the Hundred Thrones remain contested.
Harkrest has quickly become the most significant banking hub of the Hundred Thrones. For now, it does not wield as much influence as the Noorvelden League, nor is it rich enough to rival the merchant Principalities of Capracia, but competition is fierce, and the Syndicates are ambitious.
Harkrest exports many specialized goods around the known world. Although ships and steel are the foundation of its economy, in recent years, the city has won renown for technological marvels - tools, steam devices, alchemical innovations, and new contraptions of every kind. Rather than being presented as art objects or frivolities for the very rich, these goods are exalted instead for simple purpose and functionality.
Harkrest has also developed into an important center for the humanist Advent movement in Clarion. The institutions here have strong ties to the Imperial universities of Torvaria, but have distanced themselves from the classicism inherent in the southern Capracian schools. Instead, they have fashioned Harkrest into a site for new thought that shirks the romanticism of the classical philosophers.
Compared with the Torvarian master-builders or the lofty polymaths of the Principalities, Harkrest engineers concern themselves less with virtuoso craftsmanship for its own sake. Their aesthetics are instead driven by the demands of industry.
While the individual inventors and artisans who work within the city constantly jockey for status, the face that Harkrest presents to the rest of the world is unified. Harkrest goods bear the stamps of Syndicate guild-houses, not the marks of individual creators.
The best Harkest goods are known for balancing quality materials, speed of production, and reliability. This reputation is due to new innovations in forging and production techniques - trade secrets that the guilds and governors of the city aggressively protect .
Harkrest manufactures items such as warships, siege engines, construction and artisan tools, cannon, handguns, as well as common armours and weapons produced in volume.
SOCIETY
The city administration is governed by a council of guild officials called the Tower Consortium, and by an overseer called the Highwarden, who is elected by the council every five years. Hereditary nobles still occupy elevated positions in society, but those who wish to have any real clout must also be stakeholders in the local industry - whether it be through land titles, investments, or material assets.
The city's geography is divided along similar lines, broken into gated districts (called precincts), each anchored to a class and the work they perform. Both physical and social mobility is limited. Passes are required to travel between precincts within the walls, and as much as possible, commoners and outsiders are kept outside the city center. Visitors are normally only permitted in the labour and mercantile precincts, unless they have special clearance.
Despite these strictures, the inner world of Harkrest is one of intense competition. The various guilds, banks, and other institutions are in constant conflict, both with their outside Noorvelden rivals, and amongst themselves. Financial and administrative entanglements weave intricate webs that transcend the boundaries enforced by the city's internal walls.
Intrigues are common, as all players within the city vie for more standing and influence - whether intituions, or the individuals within them, from nobility, guild officials, and financiers, all the way down to foremen, laborers, and apprentices. 
The PRECINCTS
The Perch (government precinct - nobility ) The Chains (banking & upper class residential district) Blackshutters (special precinct for artificers and scholars) Palterley (public mercantile precinct ) Hammerside (labour precinct - factories and workhouses). The Saltwards (warehouse and shipbuilding precinct ) The Shingles - (*not an official precinct, outside the walls, for lowest classes)
The BALEFIRE & The PERCH
The Perch sits at at the highest point of the Harkrest promontory, and surrounds the castle fort, named Balefire Tower after the old holdfast that first marked this spot.
In fact, the original tower stands there still, now reinforced and nestled in a bailey behind newer, stronger castle walls. Balefire serves as the seat of government for the realm, and the Harkrest Consortium is convened regularly in a chamber in the old tower.
The Balefire is also known for the beacon that historically burned at its summit, but today it is only on the clearest, most windswept days that can one discern the flames against the ashen skies.
Sharing space on the Perch are several manors belonging to Harkrest's most powerful residents; aristocrats, guild grandmasters, Highwardens past and present, and any others rich enough to have once held seats at the Tower.
Sharing space on the Perch are several manors belonging to Harkrest's most powerful residents; aristocrats, guild grandmasters, Highwardens past and present, and any others rich enough to have once held seats at the Tower.
The CHAINS
As the chief banking quarter of Harkrest, this precinct takes its name from the distinctive silver chains worn by officers of the financial houses and merchant organizations that make up the Grey Sea Syndicates.
The Chains is also home to much of Harkrest's upper class, their townhouses pressed together closely alongside various guild headquarters and lending institutions. 
BLACKSHUTTERS
A unique precinct, the Blackshutters contain the studios and workshops where Harkrest's engineers are educated, and where their most specialized goods and production methodologies are conceived and executed. Here, those artisans with the highest credentials work, study their crafts, and compete with one another.
Often these activities are conducted behind closed doors to protect proprietary guild secrets. Access to the studios is usually restricted, and visitors from outside the city are generally not permitted in this precinct at all. Much conjecture surrounds the type of work that goes on in Blackshutters, but when rumours come too close to the truth, the guild agents may come calling...
.jpg)
PALTERLY
This is Harkrest's commercial district, where merchants and companies have their public storefronts and offices. For those who come to Harkrest looking to buy, Palterley is the first stop. Whether purchasing a set of quality artisans' tools on a day pass, arranging shipping of goods, having tracts printed for distribution, or contracting enough siege engines to fight a war, here is where deals both large and small are made.
Palterley is also Harkrest's main cultural district, with a respectable number of inns, beer houses, music halls, and social clubs - venues that play host to as many transactions and negotiations as the offices and council chambers.
HAMMERSIDE
The labour precinct occupies a large section around the base of the promontory, and is by far the noisest and most polluted part of the city. Here, the smoke of a thousand fires hangs overhead, and the waterways are choked with slag and waste flowing out into the bay.
In spite of these unpleasant surroundings, this is where most of Harkrest's working class live their lives, usually in cramped rooming houses or tenements attached to specific factories.
Even so, this means that Hammerside also features basic amenities - eating and drinking establishments, and many shops and services for those too lowly to bother climbing the hill and paying their way into Palterley.
The SALTWARDS
On the sea face of Harkrest is the Saltwards, a large waterfront area devoted to supply warehouses, shipyards, and commercial docks. Here, in addition to the ever-present worksites, one also finds shops and hostels to serve the various merchant crews who stop-over here.
The harbour itself is protected by a fortified breakwater and watchtowers, though it has been a long time indeed since any Ymiri raiders felt bold enough to challenge the stone walls and seaward cannons that guard Harkrest.
BEYOND the WALLS
Within its great walls, Harkrest's size is constrained by its geography and rigid design. The authorities have coped with the rapid urban growth by constructing satellite forts and worksites in the surrounding region to keep the lowest classes and undesirables outside of the city proper.
The SHINGLES
The immediate outskirts beyond the walls are home to an assortment of clapboard buildings, mostly drinking establishments, trading posts, fish markets, and flophouses for itinerant sailors. Here one also finds junkyards and workshops operated by artisans otherwise not permitted to do accredited work inside the city.
The HARKMOOR
Rather than cultivated farmland, the rough, hilly Harkmoor is mostly given to the mining operations and work camps that support the industry inside the city, each under the authority of one of the Syndicates. These outer communities include:
- Fort Morgan
- Slagford
- Rockfall
- Carnage Hill
- Vanderveld
- Camp Blediston.
 |
| Carnage Hill on the Harkmoor |
* * * *
