Since I just wrote an omake for
From A Single Ember and this idea won't leave me
alone...
Lords of the Old City
On the Dwellings, Customs and Beliefs of the Rulers of Vale
The Tenement Lords:
Dwelling in the squat, cramped quarters of Vale's ancient residential buildings, these Carrion Lords have reshaped the structures to suit more modern purposes. Grand windows and balconies have been bricked up into firing slits and transformed into defensive pillboxes, individual apartment walls knocked down to form larger communal dwellings, and the winding staircases and central lift shafts that provide ingress and egress carefully sown with traps and sighted from every angle. The rooftops of these structures are home to gardens, rain-catchers, observation posts, courtyards and parade grounds, and bridges to connect two or more tenements where they are closely allied or under the sway of a single leader.
The defensive architecture and limited space of these territories has also informed the traditions, organization and military techniques of those who live in them. One's social position and relative favor in the eyes of the nobility can be roughly correlated to the height and space they occupy within the building. The lower floors, and the long, noisy, smoke-filled living halls within them are mainly occupied by the peasantry of the stronghold, such as it is; populations of these places are, by necessity, small. The middle layers, the third and fourth floors, are generally home to skilled craftsmen and minor clerks, as well as the Lord or Lady's personal retinue. The Stronghold's ruler, along with their family, court and captain of the guard occupy the upper floor, where each still possesses a private room of their own-a great luxury in the cramped quarters they live in. The cellars and basements are generally set aside as dungeons and dwelling-places for the Priests of the Nameless One.
This lack of space and the fact that every building is its own citadel also informs their way of war. In the rest of Remnant, wars are short, sharp and brutal. Among the tenements, wars are either very short indeed or very long and extremely brutal. Where most Carrion Lords make use of swords, pikes and a variety of other long-bladed weapons, the weapons of the Tenement Lords are far more practical for their surroundings. Levies are generally armed with a dirk or similar long dagger, and perhaps a small, round buckler, with a handgun of some sort folded into the hilt. More elite troops may have shotguns, still more elite ones automatic weapons, grenades, or even that great terror, flamethrowers, though the effects of their use in a confined space where civilian occupants are caught up among the combatants and generally unable to escape makes those who use them into cruel and ruthless villains at best and monsters at worst in the eyes of their peers.
Among the Tenement Lords, as they are called, personal weapons are similarly brutal. Much remark has often been made among their people about particularly well-crafted ancestral trench spikes, cudgels or similar stabbing or clubbing weapons, as well as larger hammers or axes used to carve firing holes and openings into walls to allow attackers to circumvent defenses. The lack of space and territorial nature of the surroundings pushes the Lords into conflict often, and bitter wars have been fought over generations to seize a single block as they have gradually carved out counties and even petty kingdoms of their own. When battle is conducted out on the streets it is generally done on foot, with armored fighting vehicles used to ferry larger numbers of soldiers about and provide cover and suppressive fire for the attackers when they choose to take a tenement by storm.
A structure will either be conquered after swift forced entry or, more rarely, cut off and starved of supplies if it is possible for the besieger to surround the structure. Small explosives are often used to blow open walls and fortified doorways, but larger ones are seldom seen. Every square foot is valuable, after all, and capturing a building intact is a hefty boost in territory and prestige. Taking a tenement generally devolves into a slaughter as frenzied and exhausted attackers take out their aggression on the occupants, loot, or simply kill them in the crossfire. If a war gets particularly nasty or runs down the generations it is generally seen as good strategy to kill or banish all who remain once the occupants have been driven out. Survivors represent a security risk, and every new hallway presents more opportunities for population growth and social advancement for worthy individuals as they quite literally rise to the top.
The Tenements are a bloody place, and those who grow up their swiftly become accustomed to the thunder of explosives, the screams of the dying and the patter of gunfire as neighbors perpetually war over petty squabbles. Unsurprisingly, many seek to escape, and the most successful tend to be those who use the skills of their home as mercenaries. When storming a fortified keep, there is perhaps no greater font of expertise than a veteran soldier of the Tenements.
When they are not busied with endless wars, the people of these districts survive by cultivating food from their gardens, collecting rainwater and trading the goods they craft with merchants from the Underlords, the Riverside, or the Walled Plains. They are stern, fatalistic and proud of what they have made for themselves, perhaps overly so; an oft-repeated tale is that when Artemis Gatelyn, self-styled King of the Tenements, grudgingly yielded to the First Queen of Vale, he refused to kneel before her, and although he called her "my lady", for the rest of his days he clung to his title of "Lord of the Narrow Ways and High Places."
Masters of the Tunnels:
The Tenement Lords' hostility to each other is matched only by their lust for territory, yet in all their years, and among all other feuding fiefdoms of Vale, there is one place most are fearful to expand; downwards, into the web of transportation tunnels and ancient sewers beneath their feet. The inhabitants of these places go by many names, with varying pejorative overtones; the most gracious being "Masters of the Tunnels" or "Underlords", the cruelest being "Rat-kin" or "Shit-dwellers". Made pale and spindly from their time underground, the tunnel-dwellers persist by the flickering, artificial light of the ancient lanterns set down by their forbears, battling against the grimm that swarm into the underground via the numerous crevices and sinkholes that pockmark the stygian landscape, and protected from the attentions of their surface-dwelling rivals through a curious state of mutual weakness.
The Underlords would appear at first to be as pressed for space as the Tenement Lords above, but clever tunneling and engineering has swiftly reduced that problem. Even the smallest station has halls carved into the rock around it, and the greatest of these old-world marvels have become small underground towns in their own right. The swarms of Grimm left many lines and stations empty of human habitation since the Fall, and as they were reclaimed rich veins of Dust were found in the tunnels. There is even access to water from the numerous underground tributaries of Vale's river, and fungi and similar flora and fauna can be harvested for nourishment. Though the insult "rat-eater" carries negative overtones, anyone who has spent any length of time among the Underlords will not deny that there is substantial truth to the statement.
Within the confines of their tunnels they prefer to fight with long pikes or halberds beaten out of ancient lengths of rail, and they also lack the Tenement Lords' reticence to use flamethrowers. Their primary combat techniques revolve around fighting Grimm, as that is where their main threats lie along with the other natural dangers of a life beneath the earth. Though not exactly common, tunnel collapses are far from remote risks, and the tunnels have also been known to flood during especially heavy rains. If there is one asset that epitomizes the Underlords in peace and war, it is tenacity in the pursuit of survival. Tunnel-Lords and the tight-knit communities that surround them, bound by mutual need for protection and resources, have weathered disasters that would have spelled the end of other kingdoms and counties through sheer bloody-minded persistence.
Their position leaves them easily able to tunnel into even the best-fortified tenement, and along with their role in keeping the hordes of underground Grimm at bay, this has kept them alive and free of the tyranny of the surface lords. They are, however, kept in check by the fact that sufficiently powerful foes on the surface have simply ordered efforts to flood the tunnels with water, or, if they are feeling particularly vindictive, flammable liquid that is then set alight. Thus, the Underlords seldom war with the people of the surface on their own territory, preferring to keep for themselves and simply barter for luxuries from their neighbors such as fruits, meat and fresh vegetables. The one surface area they will fiercely and aggressively occupy is the series of bridges that span the rivers of Vale and connect the tunnels in each district.
When left to their own devices they primarily occupy themselves with small-scale Dust-mining, cautiously expanding the tunnels around their settlements, hunting Grimm for sport and protection or rats for food, and in building temples and spending time at prayer, for as close to the earth as they are the Underlords feel a very definite connection to the Nameless One. Their piety also has the effect of drawing in much clout from the Children of Remnant's clergy, and a surprising number of the Children's holy warrior orders are made up primarily of pale tunnel-dwellers filled with righteous fury.
Unsurprisingly, the Underlords initially resisted the conquest of the First Queen of Vale, until she threatened to ignite a newly-discovered, truly vast vein of fire dust at a key juncture between the lines, collapsing the tunnel and its surroundings and likely flooding many of the remaining tunnels with water and Grimm. The vein remains today, untapped by royal decree as a constant lynchpin ensuring the loyalty of the Underlords, and the locals bitterly refer to it as the Yoke of Vale.
That being said, a few proud lords and ladies of the tunnels later refused to pay taxes or homage to the Queen of any sort, and although she threatened the ignition of the Dust veins, her skilled but arrogant marshal promised her a swift victory and marched into the tunnels with 10,000 men. No word was heard from a single one of them even after the Queen's threats to ignite the yoke forced the rebels' submission, and when it was requested that the bodies be returned all the Underlords could provide was bones, scarred and yellowed with age and wear.
When asked what became of the Marshal and his soldiers, the tunnel-dwellers grin slyly to themselves and repeat the words so often spoken in the fire and brimstone sermons of the Children of Remnant: "Only the greatest of fools dare defy the very earth beneath their feet."
The Rivermen
Among the numerous feuding lords of Vale, the Rivermen and Harbor Lords are by far the most prosperous. Holding as they do to the ancient docks, warehouses and shipyards that line Vale's riverside and port, they are likely the first of Vale's residents that a new arrival is likely to encounter, as most choose to enter the city via the Shallow Sea rather than contend with the suspicious and standoffish houses that hold the city's borders.
This easy access to water has granted the Harbor Lords tremendous wealth, as the Shallow Sea's relative safety from larger Grimm has made it one of Remnant's most profitable trading routes. Many are burgeoning merchant princes, as goods from all over Remnant arrive in their territories and from there are traded all across the city; honey and other foodstuffs, as well as lamp-oil and other light sources are sold at a fine price to the Underlords, ammunition and exotic weaponry and vehicles to the quarrelsome Tenement Lords, and other goods with similar attractions make their way into the hands of the other cultures that make up the Old City. Goods pass the other way, too; crops from the Walled Plains, mercenaries from the Tenements seeking passage to new lands, and all manner of salvage and technology from the Ironfarms. Other Harbor Lords supplement their income with raiding, fishing and piracy, leveraging their easy access to the ocean to its full advantage.
The Harbor Lords, being a mercantile people, are fiercely protective of their merchandise and profits. Many dwell within the warehouses where they keep their goods, or live within the ancient, rusting hulks of cargo ships run aground since the Fall. Their docks and shipyards are tightly guarded and well-taxed, and they police the coastline constantly for smugglers, whom they despise with a passion. Yet they are perhaps some of the least-militant of Vale's cultures, their economic worth meaning sellswords are easy to come by and few dare to invade their lands for fear of disrupting the trade that feeds and sustains the city.
This more peaceful life has contributed to a flourishing culture of arts and letters among the Harbor Lords, with most of Vale's scholars or painters flocking to the riverside to find patronage. Their markets are also highly multicultural, a hubbub of voices amidst a jumble of colorful products and peoples as traders come to bargain from as far away as Menagerie and pilgrims of the Progenitorists travel to seek enlightenment at their holy places.
The military weakness of the Harbor Lords has caused them anguish at times, however. Their primarily mercenary forces met defeat at the hands of Lady Talia of Gloomeside Station and her allies when the Harbor Lords sought, in their greed, to monopolize the bridges that link the tunnel lords across the two forks of Vale's tributary rivers, and before his capitulation King Artemis Gatelyn had been making plans to cut a swathe through the Riverlords and seize territory on the coasts. The First Queen of Vale took the Harbor Lands with ease when her army decisively crushed the Harbor Lords at the Battle of the Western Docks, and has since made her capital there, a reminder to all who would dare trifle with the kingdom's might.
The Harbor Lords are perhaps more prone than most to avarice and envy, their culture as full as it is of lavish displays and comparisons of wealth. Lien makes it far easier for these Carrion Lords and Ladies to keep score of their status, and this lust for coin has led them down bad roads and driven more than one Deacon or even Blessed Huntsman to despair for their souls. Their neighbors in the Tenements, Walled Plains and Steelfarms point to their immediate capitulation after First Queen offered to subsidize their trade as an example of how they will do anything for money, and scoff at their willingness to sell their freedom.
But the Harbor Lords merely smile and shrug. Their realms remain the most peaceful and happy of any in the city, and they will tell you, with a merchant's winning smile and breezy confidence, that in their experience there is nothing their lien can't buy them.
The Walled Plains:
In the days just after the Fall, when the cold alleyways provided no protection from the Grimm that ravaged the streets, humanity was driven out of the Old City, save for one place; the vast, fertile fields of the Walled Plains, so named for the great barrier that surrounds them. As the city fell to ruin, the farmers of the Plains remained; eternal and unchanging as the land itself, feasting on the bounty of the earth and carefully tending their lands as the oldest, truest stewards of Vale.
Or so claim those who rule over that wide open expanse today, though their claim is impossible to verify given that each of the city's cultures has their own myth of descent from the original inhabitants and scorn their neighbors as pretenders and latecomers. But the tale is at least accurate in its assertion that, for the most part, life within the Walled Plains changes very little.
Ringed by a great stone barrier that protects them from the outside world, the Lords of the Walled Plains hold sway over siegneuries made up of vast farming estates from the comfort of their motte-and-bailey castles, relying on ancient irrigation systems to water their crops. The population of Vale is far less than it was in the Old Time, and great swathes of the territory have gone un-tilled for centuries, leaving vast, fallow plains with their irrigation canals blocked that divide the Farmer Lords.
This territory is the breadbasket of Vale, the origin of most of the grain, vegetables and livestock that enter the city proper. This trade with outsiders has also made the Walled Plains rich, though rather than lien arable land is the primary measurement of wealth. The Farmer Lords cling jealously to their hectares and acres, using their stores of food to field vast, though poorly-equipped levies generally equipped with retooled farming equipment. Many soldiers are expected to bring their own equipment, save for the Lord or Lady's personal levies, and most all of them are payed in "measures" or rations rather than lien, with one measure being the amount of grain needed to feed a man for one year. They also pasture cattle and horses on the great open plains, and Farmer Lords and their retinues generally fight mounted on destriers who have carefully had their auras unlocked through difficult and stressful training.
Battle is more often than not between Farmer Lords rather than outsiders, and their ability to field such vast levies mean battles are generally very spread out and rely more on maneuver and positioning of units rather than technological or numerical strength. Against outsiders, however, Farmer Lords generally rely on their supreme advantage in numbers to win the day. Carrion Lords and their mounted retainers usually stick to skirmishing on the flanks until an opening is created or the enemy routs, whereupon they charge into the enemy's flanks or ride down and slaughter the fleeing rabble. Whenever possible, the Lords of the Walled Plains will attempt to start and end wars at appointed times before the harvesting and planting seasons, as most of their peasant armies will desert to tend their land during such times.
This reliance on the land extends beyond mere military matters and enter into the relationship between lords and vassals. Although for the most part peasant levies will remain in service to their liege, acts of particular bravery, loyalty or cleverness are generally rewarded with lands gifted to the deserving soldier. War is the primary method for social advancement of any sort, as the reliance on irrigation and having land to farm leaves peasants hostage to the whims of their lords moreso than almost anywhere else in Remnant.
If the Lords and Ladies of the Walled Plains have a key flaw, it is stubborn refusal to change. They greatly resent any imposition upon their way of life and are slow to adopt new technology and tactics as a result, but on the flip side they are generally easily contented to remain where they are in terms of power and status. Few leaders of the plains have held any territorial ambitions greater than another few hectares. For this reason, the rule of the Kingdo of Vale has not greatly disturbed them.
The wall means that they have seldom been conquered by outside forces, primarily because the city lords would find their typical experiences of urban warfare next to useless on the endless plains and partly because the Plains are generally seen as not worth conquering so long as they remain compliant when trading their food. The Queen of Vale never actually marched against them, simply forcing them to submit through the threat of bringing her considerable resources to bear against them. The lords of the prairies may grumble from time to time about being ruled by outsiders, but for the most part they simply continue as they always have. The land remains, and so will they.
The Ironfarms:
Scholars remain divided on the nature of the impossibly tall towers that clustered in Vale's commercial district. What is certain, from the given records, is that they provided a variety of societal functions, most of them centered around work, and that in times past the area they occupied was the hub of Vale's economic life. Today, it is a tumult of rubble, a sea of broken stone and ancient glass from the lands of the Tenement Lords to the gates of Beacon. The less heavily fortified buildings used as marketplaces in times past did not survive the ravages of time, Grimm, and constant war, and now many of those great towers have crumbled to the ground. Some few still stand, however, their naked, rusting steel frames standing defiant, and it is to these Beacons that the first scavenger gangs flocked and later settled, in the place that would one day be known as the Ironfarms.
The Iron Lords would raise their own ramshackle castles from the rubble amid the great bones of the buildings of their ancestors. They spend their days scavenging the wreckage for stone to build with and most importantly, steel, for the Ironfarms are so named because the harsh, jagged landscape fairly glitters with the stuff. The metal collected in this way is reshaped by the Iron Lords' talented smiths to create weapons, ammunition, and all sorts of tools and crafts.
The primary effect of life in what is essentially a giant salvage yard is that weapons are as abundant as food and water are scarce. The Iron Lords are a people of war, even moreso than the Tenement Lords, fighting endless battles for supplies across the shifting landscape and frequently launching raids against their foes. Propelled by desperation, no enemy is beyond their reach; they have an ancient rivalry with the Tenement Lords born from long centuries of skirmishing, and have a bitter rivalry with the Rivermen dating back to ancient days when sacking their fortified ports and warehouses was practically a national sport. Even the Tunnel Lords have faced them in combat, though these wars are seldom successful for the scavengers and are therefore rare.
The most prosperous territory of the Ironfarms borders the Jagged Sea, the titanic jumble of steel, glass and stone from when the great towers crumbled after the Fall, a few remaining standing near the center. The salvage is plentiful here, and the din of hammers against anvils rings out throughout the night as the smiths work to create new tools and weapons. Blades handcrafted with steel from the Jagged Sea can be seen in use by lords and wealthy mercenaries all across Remnant, and a constant stream of guns likewise flow into the hands of soldiers the world over.
These weapons are well-used by those who forge them, as even after the Kingdom of Vale forced them to yield after an exhausting campaign the Iron Lords continue to discretely war against each other with the mutual understanding that word of such conflicts will never reach the throne. They also make up the bulk of the City of Vale's contribution to the Kingdom's armies, and their willingness to sell their swords abroad surpasses even the Tenement Lords. Their mercenary companies are feared across Sanas for their brutality and substantial armament.
On the rare occasions when they are not fighting, the people of the Ironfarms make their living through trading arms, armor and metalwork to merchants from the Riverside. They are also fascinated by the landscape around them, ruled over as it is by the ancient, brooding mystery of the towers, and for this reason they are more hospitable to historians and archaeologists than one might expect. They are not particularly pious, as a rule, with the Towers occupying such a significant amount of respect in their minds that numerous Deacons have complained that it borders on heresy against the Children of Remnant. Condemned criminals seeking to prove their innocence and young people seeking to prove their strength have attempted to do so by climbing one of the ancient buildings and lighting the great beacons affixed to the top by their ancestors, though few survive the ordeal, most swept away by the high winds or losing their footing on the dilapidated steel frameworks that keep the buildings standing.
The people of the Ironfarms, like the people of the Tunnels, are survivors, and they are determined to feed themselves and their families at any cost. When the Queen of Vale conquered them their soldiers fought with a suicidal desperation, refusing to yield until they had been utterly crushed. Still they chafe beneath the Kingdom's grip, docile now that water and food flow to them through trade, but ever ready to take up their weapons and once more be a scourge against their foes should they return to their natural state of deprivation.
The Marcher Lords:
Though the cultures enumerated here are as eclectic as one could find in any Kingdom, there exists still more differences and parallels between each culture's Marcher Lords: the ones who hold the borders of Vale against all foes, Grimm, human and faunus alike. Each culture's Marcher Lords are their own subgroup, with their own ways of looking at and interacting with the world beyond them and behind them.
All Marcher Lords, as a rule, tend to look outwards rather than inwards; Vale is a substantial prize for those outside the city, and before the rise of the Kingdom of Vale the Marcher Lords came under constant attack as they sought to defend their homes from Carrion Lords seeking a foothold in the city. Rarely have they ruled their own counties and kingdoms or become embroiled in internal struggles, and for this reason receive much military and financial support from their neighbors. They are universally well-armed and extraordinarily resolute, and they share a certain camaraderie across cultural boundaries. There, however, the similarities end.
The Lords of the Beacon Marches are primarily of the Tenements, though they also include a smaller section of Ironfarm Lords. They are concerned with the endless tide of Grimm pouring out of the ancient academy, and each Lord has fortified every inch of their territory for such purposes. The Tenement Lords of the Beacon Marches make use of thick cables of barbed wire, machine-gun nests, artillery and other fortifications to wear down the hordes of Grimm, chipping away at them until they turn to a trickle easily dealt with by the inner-city lords. The Iron Marcher Lords rely on heavy weapons, cannons and vehicles lovingly preserved from the Time Before to scythe the creatures down in great blasts of fire. Huntsmen and Huntress Lords and Ladies have risen more commonly in the Marches than anywhere else in the city, drawn to the lure of the ancient Academy. Several of these rulers have, in their hubris, declared great crusades to liberate the Academy. All have failed, with substantial loss of life, save for one effort which briefly held the central courtyard and recovered several ancient texts and weapons from the dormitories, now jealously stored within the vaults of Marcher fortresses.
The bulk of the Iron Marcher Lords guard against attackers from the Forest of Forever Fall, holding a commanding view of the woods from atop fortress-mountains of assembled rubble. It is routine for Iron Marcher Lords to venture into Forever Fall and set fire to great swathes of the treeline in order to leave an unobstructed view of the approaches, although the Kingdom of Vale has put a stop to this to appease irritated vassal Lords who hold the forest. They will frequently raid attackers from the forests in kind, seizing enough provisions that they needn't become embroiled in the free-for-all of the Jagged Sea.
Lastly, the Marcher Lords of the Walled Plains have maintained the great barrier that gives the area its name, and serve as the Farmer Lords' best defense against attackers both within the city and without. Though often mocked by their more rural cousins for their comparatively cold and grim demeanor, they are ultimately respected as guardians of the Great Wall and the key link between the Farmer Lords and the outsiders they trade with.
Epilogue:
Despite its comparatively small size, making up but a fraction of the territory of Sanas, Vale retains a certain uniqueness in Remnant. It plays home to a variety of cultures who could each be a Kingdom in their own right, from the brooding Tenement Lords to the pale and furtive masters of the Tunnels. It is the most boisterous marketplace in the known world, full of art, music and scholarly works, and a center of the faith for Progenitors and Children alike, with Scions also drawn to it through the Forest of Forever Fall. It was, and remains in every sense of the word, a true capital city.
Vale is also the only one of the four great cities to be reclaimed. As such, it is dominated by its history; the stark, lonely towers of the Jagged Sea, the winding, perfectly smoothed caverns of the Underground, and of course, Beacon, source of rumors of both unimaginable horrors and unknown artifacts of immense power lying within its Grimm-choked walls. In the pomp and ceremony of Artemis Gatelyn and his titles, the unchanging lifestyle and traditions of the Plains Lords, and the incredible fortitude of the people of the Ironfarms, one may yet see the old grandeur of the city is still aspired to by its inhabitants; to the point of delusion at times, yet it remains, inspiring them to great deeds and a fame that echoes across the world. Now Vale is the seat of a kingdom that stretches almost across the continent, seeking to once more reclaim its old power.
Vale. for all the allure of its history, has never been taken by outside forces, though not for lack of trying. The people of the city have forever held resolutely against outside forces, for often has it been said by the inhabitants that no outsider could ever claim the city. In their eyes, and in the eyes of history, only those steeped in the culture of this place, born in the shadow of Beacon and the Towers, could ever hope to rule the place simply and reverently referred to as the Old City.
