Hartholm

Hartholm is the seat of the Kingdom of the Hart and the largest city in the northern Settled Lands -- a city that looks, from a distance, like it was built by people who expected to be attacked and intended to make it not worth the effort. The walls are exceptional. Every generation of Hart rulers since the kingdom's founding has added to, reinforced, or improved the city's defenses, and the cumulative result is a fortification that military architects from across Dracomere come to study. The city is also beautiful, in the particular way that places are beautiful when the people who built them believed deeply in doing their work well. Vorathem's patronage is not merely ceremonial here -- the craftsman's ethic pervades the architecture, the institutions, and the culture in ways that outsiders notice but find difficult to articulate. Hartholm is not hostile to magic. It is independent of the structures that govern magic everywhere else in the Settled Lands, and it intends to remain so.