The city stretched beyond the horizon, stone covering hundreds of miles in every direction, spreading so far that it became genuinely difficult to say where the city actually began or where it finally gave way to open land.
The first thing anyone noticed, after the sheer scale of it settled in, was its character. Most cities were built for safety, for survival, for efficiency and a measure of comfort woven into the bones of daily life. This place had put all that behind in favor of defence and survival. It was, before it was anything else, a shelter.
Its design bore no resemblance to anything conventional. Layer upon layer of towering walls encircled its countless districts, each successive ring enclosing another labyrinth of stone and steel, and then another beyond that, until the whole thing resembled less a city and more of a fortress.
A fortress so immense that entire kingdoms could have vanished somewhere inside its boundaries without anyone noticing.
