Concavenator:

Grikaa was dense and grimy, its alleys steep and narrow, paved with sharp cobblestone that gripped boots and wheels even when frozen, and shadowed by overhangs and balconies that stole each other's sunlight. Creaking carriages filled the broader streets, drawn by grunting astrapotheres at the pace of glaciers, while trained bats flittered all around with their little parcels, and strings of branded penguins were driven from market to market. The great northern sea moaned in the distance, audible but invisible beyond the pall of darkness and smoke, though sometimes an iceberg cauht the low sun and flashed red. On the opposite side, smoking tenements covered the sky.

They walked on, the two of them, down a tilted alleyway almost crushed between parallel cliffs of sandstone and mortar. Giya walked grazing one of the walls, timidly glancing up at the bulk of the buildings, whose roofs almost rouched. “How will we find the chapterhouse, Kukri?” she asked, “All streets and all buildings look the same”.

pinkgothic:

Amusement tickled Kukri's air. “Ah, navigating in the city will be something you will build an intuition for quickly. The textures are never quite the same from place to place, and the pattern of the tallness of the buildings varies. The tallest, in turn, are useful markers. For example, if you look over there,” she said, gesturing toward an intimidatingly proud roof that was visible between the others largely by merit of her pointing it out, and only secondarily by the way it caught the sun. “That's a spire of the Parliament.”

Concavenator:

Giya craned her neck to see, with something like awe in the tilt of her head; the spire, too, caught the low red light, though it seemed to glow from its own Power. It would take a while for her to learn to navigate by herself, to be sure. She looked around, to see other reference points, but from the depths of that alley most were hidden. Perhaps more could be seen from the harbor or the market square. “Were you ever in there? Did you meet the Consuls?”

pinkgothic:

“Yes, and no,” Kukri answered the questions in turn. “My own guild's– our own guild's Archon is the one who would most regularly speak to the other members of Parliament, but personally, I've spoken to some of our Major Members - and once to the Archon herself - in those halls. It is where it's easiest to find them, after all.”

Concavenator:

To Giya, surely, even this was fantastically closer to the heart of the Republic than she'd ever dreamed of being. She had twitched, for the slightest fraction of a heartbeat, when Kukri had described the Archon of natural philosophers as theirs, as Giya's, as speaker for her before the other Archons and the Consuls and all the great and learned ladies. And she found herself already wondering, wondering, what she would do with her own scrap of a scrap of power. “I think… I think what I would say if I were with the Archons, if a Consul walked up to me”.

pinkgothic:

Kukri tilted her head with some curiosity. “And what are you coming up with?” she asked, encouraging Giya to imagine that future.