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Former Staff
Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: The entire Empire
Posts: 3,536
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OOC:Written by GM Wynd
A city is more than just the buildings and the streets and the numbers that comprise it. A city is more than just a point on a map, or its physical setting in the world. A city is its inhabitants, the people who live in that artificial environment. The people are the cause for the structures and the buildings, for the language heard filtering up from the streets and marketplaces scattered throughout the city, for the customs and culture practiced in the city, for the numbers and demographics and economy of the city. A city does not exist because of natural resources nearby, or because it was constructed by an emperor. A city exists because of the people that dwell in it. The city is the people that live, work, and die within its buildings and on its streets. A city is the synthesis of its people and its physical existence, the result of all the abstract things that the people create, like language and culture, and the concrete things that the people create, the structures and monuments and cityscapes.
With that in mind, Jaedaxia was both changed and unchanged.
The physical setting, the buildings, the streets, the geography were all unchanged. They stood as they had for centuries, some more centuries than others. A few were only decades or eras old, while others were rumoured to have been there before the city was founded, such as Château Mavloix. Nothing had changed about these buildings in the past era, the past tumultuous era in which the Kingdom of Jaedaxia collapsed, the city surrendered, and the Second Imperial Legion commenced its occupation. The spires, towers, and castles still pierced the firmament, dominating the skyline, breaking out from the seas of uniform blocks of apartment complexes and rows upon rows of houses, all of it stone. Tree-lined, cobbled thoroughfares were laid straight through the wending, twisting, narrow avenues that formed circles and odd angles with other streets and alleys. Druidism kept the trees that lined these beautiful causeways and pulchritudinous roads verdant, their leafy green tops breaking the monotony of the relentless Everwinter’s ivory snow. There was the vast, spacious green forest in the midst of la Quartier du Sud as well. Breaking the lush canopy was the grandiloquent gilded dome of the Cathedral of Carmelya. Other grandiose structures as well brought vibrancy and majesty to the city, such as the three theatres in Theatre Square, the three castles, Mavloix, Valerian, and Imperiale throughout the southern quarter, the many green parks, the abandoned Richelieu de Mer palace, and the brobdingnagian campus and buildings of the Socrates de Ambergois University.
Jaedaxia was a city of green, gold, grey, and white. Its tree-lined boulevards and druidic-ensorcelled forests brought emerald to the city, and the gilt of the Cathedral’s dome and crowning the spires of towers, churches, and castles brought gold to the city. The stones that comprised the houses, shops, and manors were all of grey and black, the quarried flesh of Telath crafted into structures utilized by the people. Most ubiquitous in Jaedaxia, though, was white. Still captured in the arcane Everwinter, snow blanketed the city permanently, cloaking it in pristine ivory and alabaster, disguising the blemishes of war, coating the scarlet blood stains that ran from the guillotine and dripped off of blades every brightening. With the snow, winter’s cold was likewise maintained, biting the skin of the Jaedaxians all era long.
A more dreadful, depressing thing plagued the Jaedaxian people than the Everwinter, though. The first anniversary of the Kingdom of Jaedaxia’s cessation was approaching, and the people were only more miserable for it. They remained beset by poverty, starvation, and disease. The Feeble Pox cure had not yet been delivered to Jaedaxia, and thus it still broke out sporadically, devastating families and hammering already broken hearts with the suffering deaths of loved ones.
Trade had not yet resumed in earnest, either. After an era with both of the freeport’s harbours blockaded by the Trillian and Imperial Navies, the many ships that had once stopped over in Jaedaxia while going from the north coast to the east or vice versa, and the companies that had utilized the city as a trade depot, had all gone to Tirisfal and Archadoon. They were now reluctant to return to their harbours. Only a few had, and it was scant enough to revitalize the failing Jaedaxian economy.
Half of the potential workforce of the city remained unemployed. This was a great improvement from the two-thirds that had been without jobs at the peak of the depression, immediately following the surrender of the kingdom and the beginning of the occupation. Nevertheless, it still left the city reeling in poverty. The blockade had effectively destroyed the export industries, such as the vodka and wine, ambergris and perfume, goat meat, and peat industries, and with them a quarter of the city’s jobs. They were slow to recover. The economy was severely depressed. Wages were terribly deflated, with most people still with jobs earning five times less than they had during the city’s peak in prosperity, during which it had enjoyed salaries far above the Aelyrian average. Now it had possibly the cheapest labour in the Empire. Local goods and products were priced accordingly, yet imports remained exorbitant. Their prices retained what they had been purchased at from the rest of the Empire, and most was far beyond the means of the Jaedaxians – and this included food, even the most basic of staples such as bread.
Thus the rampant starvation that beset the people. Each brightening a few more died due to malnutrition. About half of all the city’s food came from the Church of the Faith. Carmelyn was rich in food, and Diana and the Church of the Faith wealthy in gold, and in an effort to contend with the spread of Borthanism and out of religious compassion, it sent frequent deliveries of food to feed the people of the city, and as well a handful of healers to bring basic healthcare to the people who could not afford it – which was most. These deliveries were frequently late and not always adequate, but they came nonetheless, and the people relied on them. The rest of the food was purchased by the slim margin of people that were able to afford it, and from the northern peninsula, where rice and potatoes were grown, and the Trident Isle, were grain and some vegetables were also grown at prices that matched the deflated Jaedaxia economy.
The city was palpable with an atmosphere of grim depression, of shared melancholy and grief, of mourning over the dead and the loss of their sovereignty, and of resentment toward the occupying Imperial Legion and the Aelyrian Empire as a whole.
Yet the Jaedaxian people were a persevering race. They survived the harsh bitter cold that ravaged the northlands much of the era naturally, and now the Everwinter. They had prospered in the barbaric northlands, they had lived through the reign of MGanzi Hal and the siege of Port Defiance, and they had endured through the five centuries of civil, urban strife that had followed and caused the city’s quarantine. Now they would survive the occupation, the poverty, and the plague.
There was an invisible movement in the city, a movement amongst the minds and the hearts of the people. It was a defiant pride in their culture and customs, epitomized by their unique language. A cultural resurgence was blossoming in the city, despite the poverty, the grief, and the misery, a rejection of Aelyrian and Imperial culture, resisting the ominous Empire in whatever means still at their disposal. They perceived that their sovereignty could still be theirs through their culture, if nothing else. Although the peasants were indebted and many penniless and unemployed, the bourgeoisie bankrupt and clinging to their status, and the aristocracy (with only a few exceptions, such as the house of the Count de Bourbauge) was likewise reeling from exhausted coffers, the arts and culture still flourished in the city. The people were willing to sacrifice for the survival of Jaedaxian culture.
Actors put on free, public plays, while the theatres slashed regular seat prices. Minstrels and bards frequented more pubs and cafés to play for meals and drinks, while others merely loitered in the chilly streets and played for whatever coins were to be spared, which were few, yet they did not complain even if they received none. Poets were become pervasive, ever seen roaming the parks or sitting admiring streets and cityscapes. The poets and the authors still wrote prolifically, and the scribes and the publishers printed and copied their works in abundance for mere pittances. Playwrights worked by candlelight in taverns and pubs, for candles were beyond their means, but they continued to write regardless. The bookshops and libraries of the cities overflowed with new works, with poems, essays, and fictions. Oral storytellers wove tales of Jaedaxian folklore, such as the Lirana de Fol and the legendary early histories of the peninsula from before the founding of Jaedaxia to children and interested audiences in pubs. Painters and sculptors still found inspiration in their environs and in their dreams, and they still poured that inspiration onto their canvases, or into the clay, or stone, or ivory, or ice they worked with, and their pieces were displayed for all to see in Château Mavloix. The museum and art gallery, most prestigious and most expansive in all the empire, had dropped its admittance charge, permitting anyone in for free.
The Jaedaxian people cared more for the prospering of their culture than for their own pockets. Greed and corruption ran rife through the population, and in poverty the want for money was never greater. Nevertheless, they gave, without thought or reluctance, whatever it was necessary to help their culture survive through these disparaging times.
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Jaedaxia Link Map & Information
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