Caer Vaneth

The high kingdom was the treaty's first child: when the dragonkin onslaught burned Vashen and broke the old realm, the survivors who inherited roads instead of a kingdom needed a capital that could not burn, and they built it on terraced rock where the northern range meets the heartland, wall above wall, hall above hall. Caer Vaneth was raised as an argument in stone: that something could be built after the burning that the burning could not reach.

Three centuries on, the argument holds. The crown of Caer Vaneth keeps the treaty's original parchment-copy, chairs the four crowns' councils, and garrisons the heartland's chain of keeps, and its streets carry the settled confidence of a city that has never seen an enemy at its gates. Its critics, mostly in Karan, say that is exactly the problem: the high kingdom administers a war it never fought, from a rock the war never touched. Its friends answer that somebody had to keep the books while everyone else kept the grudges, and the books, at Caer Vaneth, are immaculate.