Rines

Description

Nestled between the sapphire waters of the Sea of Four Cities and the wooded hills of the Athol Margos Peninsula sits the largest city in all of Beluaterra and eighth in all the world...Rines: the City of Moonlight. Despite constant foot and agricultural traffic from the surrounding rural areas, the bricked, well-planned thoroughfares of Rines are rarely clogged. The white-walled city is an affluent coastal trading center thanks to its commercial dominance of the Sea of Four Cities, attracting merchants, artisans, and wealth of all kinds from across the settled world. A deep-water port harbors everything from tiny fishing skiffs to great merchant galleys, unloading their cargo to be shipped by flat-bottomed barges through the city's man-made waterways. Southern waters and temperatures make for balmy days and temperate nights.

The Basilica, the grand palace at the heart of Rines, has served as the administrative and cultural center of the city for every realm that has ever laid claim to the region. Constructed with solid granite blocks and sheathed in fine white marble quarried from nearby foothills, it set the graceful aesthetic from which the rest of the expansive city draws influence. Designed to inspire awe, the Basilica's original architects built the soaring castle to be larger than life; everything from the doors to the windows to the halls themselves were scaled up as though meant for the titans of a forgotten age. Thankfully, the designers stopped before making stairs too big to be easily traversed! Yet what it has in grandeur, it wants in defenses, being one of the few "castles" in the world to lack a siege-worthy wall, relying instead and entirely upon the defenses of the city itself.

Visitors often notice that the people of Rines possess a special resilience and determination to carve out their place in the world.

October 15, 2018 by Rania Eastersand

Statues and Monuments

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