Night is when cities show you the truth about themselves. Valmark, under my dear friends Levak and Esriella, is as close to honest as any I have seen. With roughly two hundred thousand souls within its walls, its streets remain surprisingly safe after dark. There are patrols, of course, and the usual tavern brawls, but smuggling is low, open cruelty rarer still. Even the poorer districts keep their lamps lit late; people walk home from inns and temples with less fear than most capitals manage at noon. There are secret shrines here and there: little unauthorized altars Chaos, Strife, or even Darkness, but they are small, usually hidden in cellars, more whispers than threats.
Ætaine is another creature entirely. A city of over a million cannot be governed so neatly by anyone. The main avenues are patrolled, and the plazas are lively well into the night with licensed taverns and “sanctioned” entertainments. Yet there are quarters even I prefer not to walk during the hours of darkness: the dockside warrens, where cargo disappears and men with too many weapons ask too few questions; the crowded tenements and slums outside the walls, where neither city guard nor temple cares to go unless in force. Illegal duels flare in half-abandoned courtyards, fought over insults, debts, or pure boredom, while blackmarkets trade in contraband steel, illicit drugs, and stolen goods under the guise of night stalls. Though I must say the illegal slave-trade is harshly, and quite viciously, stamped out. Ætaine’s government is, by the standards of cities, “good”… but no city that size is free of rot. It merely pushes the decay into shadowed alleys and calls the rest civilized. Yet the people of this city, and their Elected Queen Mazræl, seem to prefer it that way, cleaning up the bad parts only when necessary to better the people in some manner I barely understand.
Drak’nir’s capital does not bother with such pretenses. Curfew falls at sunset. Anyone found in the streets and alleys without explicit writ are arrested; many are never seen again. Its half-million inhabitants, a full third of them slaves, learn quickly to fear the sound of boots after dusk. Yet for all the iron discipline, illicit trade thrives beneath it: hidden cellars where nobles gamble on blood-sports, back-room markets for slaves (despite having a legalized slave trade) and stolen goods, then secret temples not to Light but to Darkness, Chaos, false deities and much worse. When law is a cudgel instead of a shield, vice simply digs itself deeper. Of all the streets I have walked, those of Drak’nir after sunset are the ones I will not set foot on again without extreme necessity, and much younger legs at my side.
