Baldant

Baldant is the capital city of Deal. Situated on the northern coast of the southern continent of Kealia, Baldant is a major shipping and industrial hub, and the largest city on the continent. The city is known for its tiered construction and use of hydro energy to power its industrial features, and for its thriving social, industrial, and economic scene.

Baldant is one of the most densely packed settlements on the planet, with six tiers of construction piled on top of each other. Built during the peak of the elven Dailem Empire’s wealth and power, it was designed and mostly constructed by dwarves hailing from western Arban. During the time of its construction, it was lit by a series of massive, enchanted quarts crystals that shone with a mimicry of sunlight. Since the city’s abandonment by the elves and subsequent habitation by humans, these crystals have been gradually replaced by more mundane lighting sources, though many enchanted light sources have been maintained, especially on the upper tiers. The city is split southwest to northeast by the Boulevard of Stars, which runs the length of the city and splits each tier, except for the surface, into a northern and southern segment.

Origins
The current iteration of the city of Baldant was constructed by a large contingent of Dwarves hailing from the now destroyed kingdom of Lindvith. Lindvithian dwarves constructed their cities at the base of steep valleys within the mountain range of Althanor’s Wrath. Each city would be constructed to a certain height, and once further land was needed, rather than expanding outwards the Dwarves would join the upper levels of all the buildings into a single flat surface, before expanding upwards, creeping up the sides of the valley. Rivers flowing down the valley would be dammed further upstream, and then threaded through the city to power its machinery.

The geography of Baldant made it uniquely suited to a coastal version of this process. The plateau of the Dealian heartland with a steep cliff drop to the water allowing for the damming process to function. The elven settlement that preceded it was a large coastal town that had been the key trading port for the Dailem Elves. The settlement had been devastated in a series of cases of spontaneous mass hysteria and violence, resulting it being largely abandoned by the elves. After a century of no further such events, the city began to be reinhabited, though much of the city had degraded. Coinciding with this period was the end of the Morgrin Fratricides. The Dailem Elves had sent significant aid to the reinstalled King Mirthris of Lindvith, and in return the grateful king sent a large contingent of engineers and craftsmen to aid in the reconstruction of Baldant, the city where the initial alliance between the Dailem and Lindvith had been signed, and where a significant diaspora of Lindvith dwarves had resided, the city being the principle trade port between the two nations.

Baldant was reconstructed in the dwarven manner, with adjustments made for elven taste. Principally constructed over two centuries, the process involved creating an artificial lake shortly inland and six great tiers, the surface of which was dedicated to parklands and forests more traditionally enjoyed by elven architects. The use of the quartz stars allowed for the lower levels to feature twilight biomes, while the port district – traditionally operated by humans and dwarves more than elves – had a far greater capacity than the traditional port wharfs of the previous settlement.

Barely three centuries after the cities completion, the Dailem Empire would be plunged into the crisis of the Dracolich Schism in 1496LA. The Human Selunite vassal nations of the Dailem broke faith, refusing to send aid to the elves against Urastaragon. Even as the Dracolich was sealed in 1509LA after over a decade of warfare, the Selunites launched an attack on their erstwhile lords, the Lancan and Wesmen forces supporting human revolts in the south of the continent, breaking into open conflict in 1508LA. Crisis beget crisis, and when the Elves recovered from the disaster of Urastaragon’s madness and fought a bitter war against the humans, warborn in the Middenmons and Pikes were able to recover great numbers and push the elves first from those mountains, and then push into the lowlands over the course of the early 1510’s. The Elves were forced to sue for a humiliating peace, ceding independence to the Avonian humans in the south in 1517LA to focus on the warborn, but by this point, weakened by two decades of constant fighting, the Elves were forced to seek aid elsewhere. Baldant largely escaped the direct consequences of these conflicts, but its economic prosperity suffered as trade decreased.

Human raiders from North West and Eastern Arban had long proved a problematic issue for the Dailem, but as the great purges began in earnest on the global scale, these raiders were invited to act as mercenaries by the elves to fend off the warborn, beginning in 1515LA. This proved successful, but vastly expensive for the already strained Dailem treasury. The empire was forced to pay the raiders turned mercenary with huge amounts of land. One part of these concessions included the city port of Baldant.

Baldant would become a city of primarily human over the next few centuries, as elves migrated in great numbers to their interior heartlands and humans migrated to the region, driving by the conflicts of the Great Purges occurring across the world. Though this new wave of immigrants had many origins, the collective was named for the continent where most had come from – Arban. The Arbanites remained loosely unified under the proto-nation of Adurn, before splitting to form Adecilia and Deal in the Adurnian Schism of 1698LA. Baldant would be the capital of Deal, and has remained so ever since.

Human rule
Baldant has now been human longer than it has been elven. It’s interior parks have largely been replaced with housing and, in recent decades, industry. While commerce remains Baldant’s chief economic activity, there has been increasing use of the cities infrastructure to power its industrial output. With the construction of various canals and waterways within the Dealian heartlands, the Baldant has become a major producer of refined metals, including rarer metals brought up from the planets mantel by the cataclysmic rifts opened in the landscape during the godswar.

It now boasts a thriving industry, along with a rapid growth in wealth for the entrepreneurs and industrialists, and has been a driving force behind a reduction in the powers of the conventional landed aristocracy in favour of the new urban elite. The city has seen in increase in squalor for the poorer residents, and critics have pointed out that the tiered construction has come to represent a metaphorical and literal social hierarchy, with the lower tiers being abandoned to semi-lawlessness while the upper tiers exist in luxury.

As the capital of Deal, the city boasts many major national institutions, including the Royal Palace of the Gate, the Hall of the Arcane, the Academy of Unnatural Sciences, the Royal Institute of the Physical, the National Hall, along with several major educational institutions.

It remains a cosmopolitan city, and is a melting pot for various cultures and races. This included the largest population of Tieflings upon Kealia until the Grand Reopening of 245AT, where a terror attack would see an etchbomb detonated close to the Tiefling quarter, wiping out most of the tieflings and killing and wounding hundreds of thousands of citizens in a horrific attack, the effects of the blast made all the worse by the dense conditions of the tier system, which amplified the destructive potential. This attack, attributed to a Tiefling plot gone wrong, led to a huge spike in anti-tiefling sentiment, and has resulted in many pogroms within Baldant, across Kealia, and further abroad. While the physical damage has been mitigated and made safe, the loss of so many people has left a huge scar on the fabric of Baldant society.