SOULHIRE
Capital city of Voulhire since the kingdom’s founding
Population: one million (as of CE:180)
One of three walled cities of the country (Yamon Soul and Cridaea being the others)
Hub of national finance
The fertile land which now lies in the shadow of Soulhire’s walls once belonged to a hive of sharecroppers. In those days, long before Voulhire, accommodations were built to house the sharecroppers and their workers and businesses rose to profit from this burgeoning community. Soon, a town materialized. They called the town confluence. This community joined a farmer’s guild for lands running all along the waterfront from the northern mountains to the southern shore, and soon became the seat of that guild’s administration. Now new, luxurious structures were erected to house and employ rich and powerful corn and barley barons and their staff.
The prosperous town had grown a little more by the time Saint Idus came and built his new kingdom, making confluence its capital. He did not spend much time deciding this, as confluence was already accustomed to regional administration, understood economics, and was well-positioned geographically. When the banners of Idus fell over its buildings, the name of the town was changed to Heart and Soul.
King Saint Idus saw to building Cathidien Palace, which took engineers and mages nearly ten years to construct. Heart and Soul was fast growing from a town to a metropolis.
When the first king was nearing death, he would pervasively slip his tongue and call the city Soulhire. When he passed away, it was submitted by his closest retainers and Eiodi Martin Emmiss, that the name be changed as a final memorial to Voulhire’s founding father.
Obviously, this submission was met with fast approval by the people of the city, even if those on the fringes of Voulhire would habitually refer to it as Heart and Soul for some years.
All of whom could ever be considered leaders of early Soulhire—kings, queens, royal staff, mayors, business owners—were focused on expanding Voulhire’s capital city, centralizing it in every possible way. A sewer system was constructed decades before it became necessary, and Voulhire’s first university, Lorcia, was built to accommodate more students than there were people in the city.
Such ambitions led to all manner of disorganized bureaucracy, and every conceivable problem associated therefrom. But all were striving to keep up with the scale they believed Soulhire would one day reach.
History, of course, would make visionaries out of these ambitious figureheads.
Today, with a population topping one million, Soulhire is not only the nation’s capital of two millennia, but also its center of commerce and education. Its most prominent feature, aside from Baellont’s wall, which runs completely around the city, including the rivers, is Cathidien Palace. Standing at 1,400 feet, the home of the king and chancellor, and the seat of the kingdom, is the tallest structure built by humans.
VIRKO
Population: 61,000
Most productive city in Voulhire
Ruled and owned by a sovereign lord
The youngest of Voulhire’s major cities, Virko is only 25 years old. Her story is just as much about her sovereign lord and founder.
It started with a Shinoan immigrant named Venden Hrelek (whose mother, ironically, had immigrated to Shino from Voulhire). With an entrepreneurial mind, he came to our land and studied Voulhire’s routes of travel. Most major roads were located within a hundred miles of the shore. Caravans that chose to travel across the country took longer, and had to prepare well, as there were scant few rest stops in the heartland.
After a year of research, Venden decided on the perfect spot to build such an accommodation for travelers: a spot in the center of a region where the soil was strangely red. At the time, this region was called the Auburn Plains. It just so happened that there was an old manor close to his ideal location, perched on the only hill for many miles on this flat, red land; it seemed to Venden as though the God of Destinism was guiding him.
Venden moved his family— his wife, Velonia, and their son, Hans— into this vacant manor, and went about building a small depot for the caravans. Within months, caravans were flocking to this spot to resupply, and sharing Vendens’s newly-renovated home to sleep. Caravans that did not ordinarily travel this way began to, despite the lack of roads. There was water, food, stables, and beds. There was even a bathhouse called Dragon’s Breath, which also served as a brothel. All were of high quality, and inexpensive to consume. After a few months, Venden built a workshop for wagons, and hired an expert to make repairs.
The spot was growing popular, but the profits were not outweighing the expenditures. All the same, Venden refused to raise his prices; the founding of a supply depot was not his endgame.
While Virko has no official founding date, the year was CE:155 when Venden Hrelek, then 32, asked King Wilhelm, who had been king for less than a year, for a massive loan in order to found “a city that will carry this nation.” He included in his request the funds to build roads leading to Virko from the Western Plains to the Eastern Grasslands
The young king was so impressed with the young immigrant’s ideas that he personally delivered the money on a lineup of carriages and told Venden to “consider it a Voulhirian investment.”
What an investment it would be.
The islands of Shino, where Venden was born, are thought to be a region of innovators in the field of science. It was they who invented the steam engine, and Venden who brought that knowledge to Voulhire.
He built a second workshop, another simple establishment: it produced hammers, nails, chisels, hinges. He produced them at a high quality and cost, but with access to a now established trade route— the only one that ran straight across the country. Everything he produced sold immediately.
This little test was all he needed.
Venden then invested in the construction of factory, and then another. He hired people from around the country to work these factories, providing them with free housing for five years. He hired people to manage these factories, effectively relinquishing his ownership of their product, but retaining the property and collecting a portion of the profit as rent. These lessees, some of them former day laborers, would become the richest lords and ladies in the kingdom in less than a decade.
Today, Virko stands as a monument to industry; her smokestacks can be seen for miles, and the ashes of the smoke even further. The city has a system in place where its factories are forced to reduce output based upon the direction of the wind. Currents tend to travel southerly upon the Virken Plains, and the south side of Virko is ordinarily overwhelmed with sheets of ash. The city has put this to the advantage of its people, however, providing affordable housing to those who occupy the south side of the industrial forest, and jobs to those who sweep the streets clean every day.
Virko boasts a population of nearly 61,000, all leading Voulhire into an industrial revolution.
YAMON SOUL
Population: 400,000
Holy city of Voulhire
Highest land value overall
Buildings rarely taller than 5 stories
“Yamonesque” is an old colloquialism unique to Voulhire; it is used to describe something that is of high quality by virtue of being old. In M:427, Eiodi Sanctus Magnus passed an ordinance that made altering the infrastructure of Yamon Soul virtually impossible, as he considered his city to be perfect. In the 866 years since, very few buildings have been demolished or built. The only caveat are the neighborhoods of small houses that began to sprout along curving roads, like vines, around the city’s outer wall.
Yamon Soul has long been called the “holy city” of Voulhire, as it is the seat of Destinism, the country’s most popular religion.
Similar to Soulhire, Yamon Soul is circular, surrounded by a 400-foot-high wall of white stone. The stone is engraved with gold depictions of saints and prophets. These depictions span from top to bottom of the wall.
Between the outer wall and inner wall lies the mantle of Yamon Soul, the “main” layer of the city. The mantle is divided, by shorter walls, into four quadrants. Naturally, these shorter walls, like spokes on a wagon wheel, connect to the city’s outer wall and to the inner wall.
The inner wall of Yamon Soul protects the district of Val Eve, which is elevated above the rest of the city by 100 steps. The homes and businesses of Val Eve are situated much further apart than those of the metropolitan quadrants; the yards and community gardens lay more sprawling and numerous. The district itself almost resembles an arboretum.
In the center of Val Eve stands the 1200-foot tower of steel and stone, the mother church of all Destinism, and the palace of the eiodi. He holds mass there, each Sunday, in the great chantry on the lower level. The holy tower is topped with a glass structure shaped like a diamond. There are rumors that this glass is specially treated, so that the eiodi can look through it, out upon Voulhire, and see things that others cannot see.
Yamon Soul is popular among tourists and retirees, particularly retirees of the Voulhirian Navy.
The Construction of Yamon Soul
The peace that King Saint Idus was able to achieve upon the unification and founding of Voulhire was so effective that he was able to get a great deal of planning done. It has been falsely interpreted that his focus was on Soulhire. But aside from Cathidien Palace, proper city planning for the capital did not begin to blossom until King Baellont, Saint Idus’s great grandson. The first Idus had another lifelong labor of love, and that was the construction of the city of Yamon Soul.
While Soulhire was located in the breadbasket of the kingdom— and would expend quickly on its own— Yamon Soul would be, in Idus’s own words, a “handshake city.” It would be the first thing most foreigners, especially foreign officials, would see upon their arrival to this new country. Therefore, Idus chose a spot on the coast, but also on the shores of the River Nubere, with river access straight to the capital.
“On this perfect spot,” said Idus, “there will rise a city such as to stun the eyes of every beholder.
To spearhead this undertaking, Idus chose one of his greatest warriors, the cosmite Alios Vlilendria. With initial reluctance, the famed warrior of Voulhire’s unity became a builder and an architect.
The first completed piece of construction to Yamon Soul was its outer wall in the year I:5. Today, the wall is colloquially described as marble. Indeed, marble was Idus’s initial desire, but Alios insisted this to be impractical; not so many reserves of marble had been unearthed in those days, and the architect wanted the walls to have some effectiveness against a theoretical attack. Granite became the chosen medium.
The wall started as a deep trench that circled a diameter of 3.2 miles. The granite trickled in from several quarries throughout the kingdom. To expedite, Alios told the miners not to carve the rocks into bricks, but to just send them in chunks. Not only could Alios craft the rocks to bricks himself, and faster than the tools of that time, but he could then fuse the bricks together, forming a solid structure without the need for mortar. It would be as if the rock was made in the earth to the shape that Alios desired.
The architect built a tiny hut for himself as the granite continued to flow, and began to adopt Idus’s dream of an urban jewel, imagining and planning how he might continue the construction of this holy city.
Three years later, the solid white wall was 400 feet high in its circle of more than three miles. The land within had been leveled, but was nothing save for a sprawling, well-protected plot of dirt. The gold engravings on its outer face would be added over time. Today, the wall is considered to be a wonder in its own right, in part because it is the only piece of Voulhirian architecture built by the hands of a cosmite.
Two granite quarries had been made dry as a result of this project; Alios gave employment to their workers in the construction of the rest of the city, which proceeded with the elevation of Val Eve.
The one-circle-mile section, centered in the three-circle-mile radius of Yamon Soul, is an area elevated above the rest of the city by fifty feet. Idus had the workers achieve this elevation by constructing a stone basin and filling it with dirt. This plateau was then crowned with a wall of its own, though this wall was made of the same common stone that formed the base.
The space reserved for what would become the mantle of the city— the layer between the outer wall and the inner, elevated wall— was quartered by four walls, evenly distributed around the circle. These four walls did not reach the top of either the inner or outer wall, but there were doorways at the end of each, so that the top of every wall in the city could be accessed by its guards.
Then the roadways were paved; the mantle’s web ran organized but dense, while Val Eve enjoyed a more spacious arrangement as to worthily accommodate the seat of Heaven’s representative.
Val Eve was a site of lush gardens and rich houses long before the mantle’s first building even had a foundation.
Finally, and on his very own, Alios raised the glorious Diadem, into which the first Eiodi, Martin Emiss, would move, and from which he would reign.