Archenveil

Archenveil is the largest and most prominent of the Mage-Council city-states and the one that other nations mean when they speak of "the Mage-Councils" with wariness. It sits at the crossroads of the central Settled Lands, where it has spent several centuries making itself indispensable to regional commerce while making itself very difficult to govern from outside. The city is orderly in the way that only places with significant magical enforcement capacity tend to be. The streets are clean. Contracts are kept. Public disputes are rare, partly because the social consequences of a public dispute in a city where agreements can be magically verified are much steeper than elsewhere. Visitors from less regulated cities often describe Archenveil as pleasant and unsettling in equal measure. Long-term residents tend to find the description baffling -- the unsettling part simply becomes the background. The presence of a Tower of Wizardry within the city does not make Archenveil special among Order-aligned cities, but the depth of Order integration here does. Three of the four wizard seats on the Conclave Council are held by active Order members. The fourth is traditionally held by an Order retiree who insists on calling themselves "independent." Nobody finds this claim credible.